Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Now At The Frick: A Show, At Last, For Piero

For a founder of the Italian Renaissance, it’s amazing that the exhibition opening tomorrow at the Frick Collection is “the first monographic exhibition in the United States on the artist.”

StAugustineThe artist is Piero della Francesca, born circa 1411 and dead the year Columbus set sail for America. Even more amazing perhaps is that the exhibit fits comfortably in the Frick’s small oval gallery — it’s just 7 works, and if memory serves four are from the Frick itself. Yet it’s an occasion, worth a visit by any serious art lover.  

Along one wall are four panels from the Sant’Agostino altarpiece; on the opposite wall is the Frick’s St. John the Evangelist and — surprise — a panel of St. Augustine borrowed from Lisbon’s Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga that has never been seen in the U.S. before.

It’s stunning. I’m posting a photo I took with my iPhone, but it doesn’t do the work justice. His staff, for example, is made of clear crystal, to perfect effect.

Clark_2000The Clark Art Institute then graciously lent its Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels, Piero’s only intact altarpiece in this country. It’s a good thing that the Frick’s semi-circular marble step beneath the work keeps people from getting too close — for they surely would. I’ve posted it here, too, at right — a much better image taken from the Frick itself.

I was at the opening reception for this exhibition tonight, and it was thrilling to see it. More details here, in the press release.  

As I’d remarked to a few others there, several years ago I was at a conference at the Clark when the late Anne D’Harnoncourt started talking about the altarpiece nearby. She referred to the artist as “Piero” and then stopped herself, in mid-sentence, and said she hoped we could call him just “Piero” now — he was THE Piero. Everyone agreed, and for the rest of the meeting that’s what everyone said.

My hope for this exhibition is that it makes the public know who is meant when they hear the name Piero, the artist.

Photo credits: Courtesy of the Frick (bottom)

 

The Hirshhorn’s Bloomberg Bubble: Updated And Deflated

When I last wrote about Richard Koshalek’s plans to build a seasonal blue bubble atop the Hirshhorn Museum — in fall, 2010 — he had disclosed to me a $1 million-plus naming gift from the Bloomberg Foundation as well as his goal of creating a “cultural think tank” that would combine elements of the World Economic Forum at Davos and TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conferences, and thereby insert art into to the national and international dialogue. I laid out those plans and more in a Cultural Conversation with him in the Wall Street Journal. At the time, he needed to raise about $5 million for the bubble, pretty small for a museum addition, despite the expansive if nebulous thinking behind it.

HirshhornBubbleMany people were negative about the idea, however. But Koshalek was sure, and he told me that programming would begin in late 2012, pending his fundraising success.

Fast forward to now: not much has happened. The new launch date is fall 2014, and according to recent press reports the go or no-go date will occur soon.

Worse, the Inflatable Seasonal Structure, AKA the Bloomberg Bubble, has caused division at the museum. A recent article in Washington City Paper says “Three trustees have left the Hirshhorn’s board of trustees, with rumors of divisions caused by the Bubble following them through the doors of the Gordon Bunshaft–designed concrete donut.”

Ever brash and ebulient, ever more interested in architecture than art, ever ambitious — and those aren’t necessarily critical descriptions — Koshalek is still determined, but the time gap and other considerations (earthquake-proofing, for example) have sent the price tag to something on the order of $11.5 million. It has $4 million, plus another $4 million from the Smithsonian itself for programming, which doesn’t count against the capital cost.

The City Paper article suggests that trustee are worried about the costs of staffing the Bubble, though Koshalek basically shoots that down. I’d guess they are more leary about the very concept of the museum-as-policy-think-tank. From the beginning, Koshalek has never been able to articulate why the dialogue he seeks to start there would matter. It might be educational, as he argues, but would it change anything or be another elitist boondoggle?

The Washington Post, cited by City Paper, has covered the Hirshhorn developments here,  here, and here. I remember the first, disclosing that board chair J. Tomilson Hill had resigned, but did not see the others, about the Bubble’s fate.

If I had to guess now, I’d say it’s over. It’s pretty hard to pull that much money out of a hat in a couple of months, especially when the structure has already been named.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Hirshhorn

 

An Imaginary, But Ferocious, Masterpiece

I’ve already told you that I visited the Bronze exhibition at the Royal Academy on my trip to London last fall, and loved it.

Chimera of ArezzoI didn’t mention at the time that one of my favorites, among many, was the Etruscan Chimera of Arezzo — because I was hoping to write about it for the Masterpiece column in the Saturday Wall Street Journal. And now I have. In tomorrow’s paper, you’ll see it under the headline The Imaginary Turned Nearly Real. The Chimera is frightening on many levels, an impossible fusion of three animals that is more than 2,400 years old.

It was, according to the Bronze catalogue, “an omen of disaster” in mythology, but eventually slayed by the hero Bellerophon. Later — in an aside I did not have room to say in my WSJ piece — that story (which I do tell) turns into the legend of St. George slaying the dragon.

And here’s another tidbit. According to The Guardian:

It was seeing a picture of the Chimera of Arezzo – the mythological lion and goat creature with a serpent’s tail – on the spine of a book that first got the six-year-old David Ekserdjian excited about bronze. The scholar and curator’s interest eventually resulted in what will be a landmark exhibition bringing together 150 works which span some 6,000 years.

So we can appreciate this sculpture for a couple of reasons.

Photo Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY, via the WSJ

 

Miscellaneous Art: One Man’s View Of What An Intellectual Should Know

I like to look at books like An Intellectual’s Visual Miscellany, by Daniel P. Murphy, Ph.D., which is subtitled An Illustrated Guide to Masterworks of Art, History, Literature and Science, because they are often accidental entry into the arts (or, in this case, those other disciplines). People might pick them up, see something, learn about it, and discover a deep like for something they never knew they had. Or at least enough interest to go look at, in person,what they’ve seen in a book. Besides, they can be fun.

VisualMiscellanyThis one, by Murphy, the director of the Center for Free Inquiry at Hanover College, was published last November by Adams Media, but it was just sent to me for review last month.

My headline view: it’s inconsistent, both in choices and in the information it provides, and unfortunately the visual arts don’t seem to be Murphy’s strength.

His book’s chapters cover Painting and Sculpture, Architecture, Wonders, Music and Composers, Writing and the Book, History, Literature, Philosophy and Religion, Science and Mathematics, and Lifestyle. Each is split into subdivisions, like “The Heritage of Alexander” and “Medieval Painting” in visual arts, and “Musical Geniuses” and “Modern Music” in that category. In Modern Music, the reader gets “People of Note” (Claude Debussy, John Cage, Pierre Boulez, etc.), whereas in “Musical Geniuses,” the reader gets a “List of Works” (Armida by Salieri, Fidelio by Beethoven). Idiosyncratic? A bit.

But let’s just look at the visual arts. Some of the pictures are in black and white. And in, say, those Alexander pages, Murphy offers up the Venus de Milo, Winged Victory of Samothrace, and the Dying Gaul — good choices — but doesn’t tell readers where to find them. Or when they were made.

Who, and what, is in “The Northern Renaissance and Beyond”? Holbein’s Portrait of Henry VIII AND his Portrait of Catherine Parr. Why not The Ambassadors? Or the Darmstadt Madonna — for a little variety as well as because they are better works than Parr. For Durer, we get The Rhinoceros, not Melancholia or Knight, Death and the Devil, or (my favorite) his self-portrait, 1500.

And so it goes, to quote Vonnegut.

There’s  nothing wrong with idiosyncratic choices — the author is entitled to his views, whether or not they are yours or mine.

But here the book itself doesn’t live up to its promise. Aside from the black-and-white problem, many of the images are too small to provide a taste of what a work a work looks like (I know rights are expensive, but this is advertised as “illustrated.”)  And why do we get a list of works, with their locales, for “Rococo in France,” but not for “Ninteenth Century European Art”?

If the intent of this book was to send readers to their computers to look things up, it might be deemed a success. For me, that’s a bit too frustratingly incomplete to keep reading, no matter the author’s choices.

 

 

Things That Make Me Wince; Things That Make Me Applaud

The backlog in my email box is getting way too deep; I can’t keep them all. So, here’s a grouping of things that I might have written about at greater length, had I had the time to do more background work and think about them in depth.

Caulfield,_After_LunchIn the first category — the wince-inducing developments:

  • In late 2011 four British arts institutions renewed a sponsorship deal with BP despite protests from environmentalists — it’s worth £10 million through 2017, roughly divided equally among the four. Environmentalists had protested the deal, citing the oil company’s poor safety record and who-cares attitude toward damage to the earth. Both sides have their points. But did part of the pact with the Tate have to entail such pointed branding as calling an exhibition program “BP British Art Displays.”  That is the unfortunate description on the invitation I received the other day to preview BP British Art Displays: Looking at the View next Monday. The show, which opens to the public on Tuesday, “looks at continuities in the way artists have framed our vision of the landscape over the last 300 years.” Tacky. (That’s Patrick Caulfield’s After Lunch at left.)
  • A blog in Philadelphia is touting the position at #4 of the Philadelphia Museum of Art on a list put together by Complex called 100 Museums to See Before You Die, but it’s an odd honor. Take a look for yourself. What kind of a list would make the Hermitage #98, but the Hirshhorn #3? Or put as #1  the Simone Handbag Museum in Seoul…?  I’m not sure what Complex is, btw. But it compiles a lot of lists. A month ago, it had the 10 Most Googled Museums in 2012, drawn from Google’s annual Zeitgeist report. At the top the list: The Metropolitan, followed by the Philadelphia Museum, the National Gallery/Washington, the deYoung, and the Museum of Science in Boston, etc. That’s more like it.

Now some good things:

  • Many museum panels and programs seem bland to me, but here’s one that’s not: This coming Sunday, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts will offer a public forum on Gender and Race in Contemporary Art. A topic like that doesn’t usually interest me, but this one may be different — critic Ken Johnson is there to defend a position he took in The New York Times previewing PAFA’s exhibit The Female Gaze; it was published November 8, 2012, and said in part: “Sexism is probably a good enough explanation for inequities in the market. But might it also have something to do with the nature of the art that women tend to make?” That generated a huge blowback, and Johnson is man enough to take on the dissenters in public.
  • Mrs. William JamesTEFAF Maastricht continues to give money to American museums (it’s usually the other way around, with Americans giving heavily to European cultural institutions). TEFAF’s recently announced conservation grants, which it started last year for its 25th anniversary, this year went to the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts and to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.  Each gets €25,000. In Worcester, that will pay for the restoration of two pendant portraits by William Hogarth of William and Elizabeth James (at right) from 1774. They were acquired more than a century ago, but have never been technically assessed or comprehensively treated. Last year, the Denver Art Museum and the Rijksmuseum shared the prize.
  • RCA readers know I like single-picture exhibitions (see here, here and here, for example), and two great ones have recently been announced. For six weeks beginning Feb. 16, the Getty Museum will be showing Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, its only U.S. stop on its world tour. It’s a loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which has been under renovation for 10 years (that gets a wince, too). And on Feb. 19, van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles, on loan from the Musee d’Orsay, will go on view at the Detroit Institute of Arts. It stays, amidst three van Goghs owned by Detroit, until May 28.

That’s enough housecleaning for today.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Tate Britain (top) and the Worcester Museum of Art (bottom)Â