Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Corcoran Board Makes A Decision — UPDATE TWO

It’s happening as previously suggested in many places: The Corcoran’s board plans to merge its art school with the University of Maryland — or, “join forces,” as people in the know appear to prefer.

Trustees are apparently meeting this very afternoon to approve the deal, and the announcement is expected around 4 p.m., following the board meeting. Here’s the item in Washingtonian.

Further evidence, “the Corcoran community” will “will have an opportunity to meet with Mary Ann Rankin, Senior Vice President and Provost of the University of Maryland” on Monday. She’ll be at the downtown campus to meet with students, “learn more about you and the Corcoran, answer your questions, and have a discussion about the process of developing an academic partnership.” That was the message this noontime from Catherine Armour, the Corcoran’s Provost and Chief Academic Officer.

Trouble is, the whole thing on Monday lasts just 45 minutes — from 1 to 1:45 p.m. And it’s mediated — questions are to be sent in advance via email. Not a way to start establishing trust — it should go on as long as there’s a single (good) question in the room.

I guess one can’t have everything. Now to the future of the Gallery.

UPDATE: Looks as if the students are having none of this. They protesting, set to gather at 2 p.m. today, outside the trustees meeting, at Paul Hastings law offices on 15th Street NW in the District. They have three demands:

1 – Implement structural changes with the goal of creating transparent and democratic decision-making process.

2 – Demand the immediate resignation of Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Harry F. Hopper III and Director Fred Bollerer.

3 – Appoint Wayne Reynolds as Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

I think they are misguided on No. 3.

UPDATE 2: Here’s the official Washington Post story on the matter. The nut grafs:

The Corcoran’s board of trustees voted 13-to-0 Wednesday afternoon to sign a preliminary agreement to explore a long-term partnership with Maryland that could include shared faculty; joint student degrees; cooperation on developing new courses; pairing interdisciplinary teams of artists, engineers and computer scientists on projects;  and expansion of the Corcoran College of Art and Design by several hundred students, Corcoran and Maryland officials said….

…A Maryland official said that the university would be willing to commit unspecified resources to the partnership. But before the partnership takes effect, the parties must hammer out a more detailed legal agreement, which could be signed this summer.

…Under the agreement, Maryland would also be able to nominate trustees and thus influence the direction of the Corcoran. The Corcoran board has 13 voting members and four unfilled openings.

…At the same time, the Corcoran made three other significant announcements:

It will exhibit a number of the paintings from the National Gallery of Art during the three-year period, beginning in January, when the East Wing is closed for renovation. Hopper said the Corcoran has room in the upstairs galleries where traveling exhibits normally are displayed because there are gaps in the traveling exhibit schedule. Corcoran curators would curate the works, which would probably be from the post-World War II period, in keeping with the Corcoran’s modern-contemporary focus, Hopper said…

…Corcoran also announced the appointment of a new, temporary director to replace the retiring Fred Bollerer. She is Peggy Loar, who until recently was director of the National Museum of Qatar. Loar will serve at the Corcoran for at least several months as the partnership with Maryland is established, Hopper said. A permanent director will be named later.

Finally, the Corcoran released a “Strategic Framework for a New Corcoran,” an approximately 10-page document (also to be posted online Wednesday evening) that is the distilled fruit of two years of research and some $1.5 million in consultant fees. It is the long-awaited new roadmap for an institution that has been casting about for an updated vision for decades, as it lagged behind publicly funded museum rivals in Washington.

The framework, in full, is here. Read for yourself, but on first glance it seems to general to mean much, at least to me.

 

Not A Skeleton: Another Museum Discovery In Storage

CanalettoI wish I had closets like this. The news recently emerged from Denver that Timothy Standring, the curator who organized Becoming van Gogh, was rummaging around in the museum’s storage bins a while ago and pulled out not a plum but a Canaletto. As related last week in the Los Angeles Times:

It all started in 2000 (actually a couple centuries earlier, but that’s getting ahead of the story) when a canvas in dreadful condition called “Venice: The Molo from the Bacino di S. Marco” was bequeathed to the Denver Art Museum from a deceased local collector’s foundation.

The accompanying paperwork was vague and referred to it as “from the studio” of Giovanni Antonio Canal — known as Canaletto — an important Italian painter in the mid-1700s.

Because it was assumed to be a student rendering, the painting was relegated to storage. And obscurity.

Seven years later, Timothy Standring, curator of painting and sculpture at the Denver museum, ran across the piece while doing routine inventory. It was so discolored and coated in grime, he later joked, it looked as if it had been “in someone’s home who smoked Marlboros for 50 years.”

Still, he saw something in it, that prompted an investigation — though there was no record of this painting. He showed it to “Charles Beddington, one of the world’s foremost Canaletto scholars,” who authenticated it — pronouncing it “one of the artist’s earliest undocumented works,” from 1724. Now cleaned and conserved, it’s on view at the museum.

In July, 2010, I wrote here about the Yale Art Gallery, where former curator John Marciari, had discovered a painting by Velasquez, named The Education of the Virgin, in a closet. It has been given to the museum in 1925, but being poor condition and damaged by water, it was sent to storage, and remained undisplayed until Marciari, as part of a review of the collection in 2004, discovered it — he studied it, identified it, and published it as a Velasquez.

Less than a year later, the Brooklyn Museum announced that a painting that had entered its collection as a bequest in 1932 as an early self-portrait by Gerrit Dou, which was later downgraded, had been rediscovered in storage and actually was a Dou. Richard Aste, the museum’s curator of European art, had also begun a review of his department’s holdings. Fascinated by the little portrait, Aste decided to investigate and his suspicions were confirmed by other experts.

I know it takes time and a lot of effort to review collections, and some museums are doing it (here’s one example). But stories like these always make me wonder what other gold is there in those storage bins?

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum

 

UK Museums Learn How To Ask For Money

British art groups are, like their counterparts here, experiencing economic difficulties, not least there because the government, including local councils, have slashed the amount of aid it provides.

imagesPartly in response to a comment made last year by culture secretary Maria Miller — that arts groups must “get better at asking, not just receiving,” 11 museums and theatres in Britain have developed a new smart phone app, designed to trigger on-site giving — while people are appreciative of what they are seeing. It’s a new National Funding Scheme, and it charges each participating institution 4% to be part of it. There are more details about the scheme in this press release.

According to a report in last Wednesday’s Independent, the day the app went live, the groups — which include the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum —

hope to play on “emotionally charged” culture lovers and persuade them to support exhibits and performances with a touch of a button on their mobile phone….

…In the participating venues will be a panel next to an exhibit, or in the auditorium explaining the cause highlighted. Each case has a unique code which can be texted in from any mobile phone, or scanned in using android or apple smartphones.

This is a six-month “trial run,” The Independent said. If you go here, you can see that the National Funding Scheme also suggests ways arts enthusiasts might be otherwise involved, doing simple things like spreading the word. (While I was on the site, I clicked on the “Culture Juice” link to see what that was all about — it has a few lessons in social marketing, the best one of which is about email marketing.)

I think this scheme has to be done with care. A really big “panel” asking for donations could be offputting. Putting one before and after might also be obtrusive.

Two years ago, though, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston put a collection box near Chihuly’s Lime Green Icicle Tower and activated its first mobile giving scheme, allowing people to give $10 with a text message. Many other causes now ask for donations by text.

So it can be done well. Also, I don’t see why museums can’t do this on their own, without a national scheme. Maybe some have already. I don’t think it’s that hard to set up.

 

 

 

A Renaissance Art Made Contemporary: Marquetry

ss_100519511We tend to think about marquetry as a Renaissance or Baroque art, but it’s not. Many contemporary artists and artisan practice the craft/art. I recently wrote about one, Silas Kopf, for Traditional Home magazine. Here’s a key paragraph:

If you think marquetry is a dead art, a relic of the Renaissance, you haven’t met Kopf. For more than 25 years, he has been turning out hand-cut marquetry marvels, some laced with humor, others as elegant as a classical commode, still others trompe l’oeil tableaus so realistic you do a double take. “I don’t think anyone else in marquetry has his accuracy or range of colors,” says Wendell Castle, the 80-year-old wood-master who is known as the father of the art furniture movement.

Amusingly, Kopf is a Princeton alum whose parents, he said, were originally “mortified” by his choice of career. They came around, though, as did the market. His Steinway piano with morning glories sold for more than $200,000.

ss_100519524Kopf’s work is shown at Gallery Henoch in New York. Last fall, George Henoch Shechtman told me that “We’ve represented him for more than 20 years – even longer. We had furniture show when the gallery was in Soho, and that’s when we found him. I think it was about 1985. We’re a realist gallery: it was his pictorial images and sense of humor that appealed to me, but most of all it was that he is a master of his craft. He is a master of marquetry. No one does it on such as large scale as he does.”

Schectman, who own three Kopf pieces, told me that he loves that the pieces are “totally functional.”

I like another thing about Kopf: he’s been sharing his tricks of the trade. Aside from teaching and publishing a book about marquetry — “A Marquetry Odyssey” – he has posted tutorials on YouTube (they start here).

 

 

 

 

…isms: A Throwback Little Publication

We still talk about Impressionism and Cubism, Modernism and Expressionism, but it has been a long while since we had a new ism.

51Rh-W18QDL._SY300_That’s may be a good thing, saying that art is so disparate and inventive today that it can’t be categorized into one school, or a bad thing, signifying that art today is a mess. Or it may mean that isms are truly only discernable after the fact. Whichever place you fall on those alternatives, they are use shorthand for communicating about art. I don’t have to explain any of those -isms listed above. You know what I’m talking about.

Such thoughts were provoked by a new little book that land in my hand called …isms: Understanding Modern Art and published by Universe Publications, a division of Rizzoli. It’s billed as “the perfect resource to explore the major and minor movements of modern art from the nineteenth century until today.” It’s by Sam Phillips, a British art critic whose introduction says that it’s not exhaustive and also that he coined two -isms: Installationism and Sensationalism. Not every category is an -ism, either. One of the last movements here is “Street Art,” to cite one example.

So I wonder, if I referred to the Chapmans, Chris Ofili or Tracey Emin as Sensationalists, would that pass muster with editors and readers?

How are Turrell and Beuys categorized? They are Installationists.

The book is handy: each entry gets a name, a short introduction, followed by key artists, key words, the main definition, key works, other works, a “see also” and a “don’t see” (for contradictions). There’s a glossary, a chronology, a list of museums to visit.

I can see how I would find this book useful, and how it would even more useful to people who’ve never studied art.

There’s one thing I should note, though: though the publicist sent this to me as a new book, published this month, a little research shows that it’s not. It’s a revised version of a 2004 book of the same name with a different author. She should have told me that…