Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

While I’m Speaking of Old Masters, Here’s An Acquisition

The San Diego Museum of Art is well-known, deservedly, for its collection of  Spanish art — including work by such masters as El Greco, Zurbarán, Goya, and Sorolla. The other day, it announced an acquisition that complements those works: It’s a Spanish baroque sculpture, a polychromed wood piece by Pedro de Mena (1628–1688).

The museum calls Mena “among the greatest sculptors of the Spanish Baroque.” This work depicts San Diego de Alcalá and was created around 1665. Nice touch, buying a saint whose name is on the city!

SD-MenaJohn Marciari, Curator of European Art, said in the press release announcing the acquisition that “we have for several years sought a significant piece of Spanish Baroque sculpture to add to the collection. The San Diego is precisely the sort of work we had in mind. Pedro de Mena’s extraordinary realism is the counterpart to our still life by Sánchez Cotán, while the ecstatic expression of the saint reminds one of our great Saint Peter by El Greco.”

Luckily for the museum, it had received a $7.4 million bequest from the Estate of Donald W. Shira recently, and drew on those funds for this purchase. It did not disclose the price for the piece, which is more than two feet tall.

Roxana Velásquez, the museum’s director, made the most important point in the release, imho: “Since my arrival, one of my ambitions has been to build on the great collection of European art already in San Diego. The new work by Pedro de Mena strengthens our collection of Spanish art. Combined with the acquisition of the Portrait of Don Luis de Borbón by Anton Raphael Mengs that we acquired last year, we are expanding important holdings for San Diego.”

It’s important for directors to see their collections that way — creating distinguishing collection, not like everyone else’s — and equally important for them to articulate that to the world.

More details about the artist and the work here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the San Diego Art Museum

 

 

Le Brun Masterpiece Discovered At The Ritz

Here’s another one of those you-can’t-make-this-up stories, which I received in a press release this morning:

A previously unrecorded painting by Charles Le Brun (1619-1690), official painter to the ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV, has been discovered hanging in the Coco Chanel Suite at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris by the London-based fine art consultant Joseph Friedman. Formerly Curator of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s residence in Paris, Friedman was advising the hotel on its current €200 million renovation project when he came across the work. The painting, thought to depict The Sacrifice of Polyxena, will go on public view in New York at Christie’s from 26 to 29 January 2013 before being auctioned by Christie’s in Paris on 15 April 2013 (estimate €300,000-500,000).

LeBrunThe Ritz should be embarrassed, but it’s clearly not. Less than two  hours after I received that, Christie’s sent out its own release, noting “Occasionally, the biggest surprises are hiding in plain sight.” Then:

…it was not found in a dusty attic, but on prominent display in the heart of Paris, in the most opulent and celebrated hotel in the world, the legendary Hôtel Ritz.  The Ritz archives have not revealed how the painting came to the hotel or when it was first installed in the fabled ‘Coco Chanel Suite’, but it is possible that it was already in the townhouse (built 1705) when it was acquired by César Ritz in 1898.

The Sacrifice of Polyxena was painted soon after Le Brun returned to Paris from three years in Rome, where he studied the paintings of Raphael and came under the influence of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). This work clearly shows Poussin’s influence.

Sue Bond’s press release, the first quoted above, has more — she represents Friedman. At left is how the painting looked in the Chanel suite and what it really looks like.

 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Christie’s

Columbia University’s Big Mistake? Or Misconceptions About Deaccessioning?

Writing on The Nation‘s website, Jon Wiener outlines the tale of how Columbia University stupidly sold a Rembrandt in 1974 that’s now worth multiples of the price it got. Right from the start, though, he generalizes, saying the story “has many lessons, starting with the folly of universities selling art to make money.”

But hold on a minute.

RembrantManArmsAkimboThe painting in question is Man with Arms Akimbo, from 1658. at left. Columbia sold it for “more than” $1 million to a private collector, which in today’s dollar’s, Wiener says, would be a little over $4 million. Yet it carried a price tag of $47 million at Maastricht last year, and dealer Otto Naumann is currently offering it at his gallery. Go here to see the painting in higher-res than this website, as well as its provenance.

The painting was given to Columbia by George Huntington Hartford II in 1958. Columbia sold it to “Harold Diamond, Inc., New York, from whom [it was] acquired by John Seward Johnson (1895 – 1983).” It passed “By inheritance to his third wife, Barbara (“Basia”) Piasecka Johnson (b. 1937),” who consigned it to Christie’s where it sold in December, 2009. “A private collector in the United States” bought it there — said by Wiener to be Steven Wynn, who paid $33 million for it. Naumann bought it from him.

At Columbia, the painting hung in the president’s office, which was in the administration building, which was occupied in 1968 by students protesting the Vietnam War (and called barbarians). They,  however, protected the painting. So Wiener writes:

A painting that should have been on display disappeared from public view for the next forty years—in exchange for which the university got $1 million. So who were the real barbarians?

Universities selling art made headlines in 2009, when Brandeis announced it would sell off the paintings in the university’s Rose Art Museum, including works by de Kooning, Warhol and Lichtenstein, to make money for the school. Outraged protests from the university community and the art world led the trustees to back away from the decision. Columbia’s 1975 sale provides an early example of the practice.

Later he says, as another lesson:

Also: selling old masters eventually makes the seller look foolish, because the prices always go up.

Actually, Wiener looks a bit foolish himself. Old Master prices, as you know, do not “always go up.”

He forgets, too, that Columbia doesn’t have an art museum — unlike Brandeis and his other generalized colleges. Perhaps that’s because it’s located in NYC, where art museums are plentiful and great and likely to outshine anything Columbia could have put together.

He forgets, too, where that painting was as a result — in the president’s office. Hardly on public view.

Did Columbia make a bad deal? Perhaps. But I’d have to see what other Rembrandts were selling for in 1974 — comparables are what counts, not current prices.

More important, as far as I can tell from his story, Columbia’s tale has little relevance to other colleges and universities, with art museums, and deaccessioning. Rather than shed light, Wiener has simply confused the issue. The issue needs light, not heat.

 

 

 

 

Side Benefit to Denver’s van Gogh Show: Instilling Local Pride

I had no intention of writing again about Becoming van Gogh, the homegrown exhibition at the Denver Art Museum that chronicles precisely how Vincent taught himself to draw and develop the style that has made him so beloved and appreciated. I wrote about it on this blog twice in October, laying out why it was both so special and difficult for Denver museum curator Timothy Standring to do (here) and also about how its teaching moments were exceptional (here).

More recently, I mentioned that the exhibit was so popular that the museum was staying open overnight — allowing visitors to van Gogh from 8 a.m. on Saturday through 11:59 on Sunday night. The tickets sold out quickly. And even before that I knew — from talking with DAM director Christoph Heinrich when I was in Denver two weeks ago — that it was going to be a record-setter for the museum.

But today’s report in the Denver Post  (which has some visitorship and new membership information) reminded me of something else I wanted to say about the show. Post reporter Ray Mark Rinaldi stopped in at 4 a.m. on Sunday, and caught the crowd “transitioning from the ‘stayed ups’ to the ‘got ups’ ” and noted the “durable energy” in the galleries. Then he quotes a woman, there with her nine-year-old daughter, saying:

We live in Denver. We don’t get a chance to see something like this often.

That is both heart-breaking and heart-warming to me. Of course, van Gogh is one of the most well-known artists — even people who know little about art know about him. And that’s why some come to an exhibition like this, even when, say, the Toledo Museum of Art did not quite make its target for its recent Manet show.

But Denverites also seemed to have appreciated the fact that the exhibition was “made in Denver.” It wasn’t a traveling show. Standring told me recently that he’s now recognized by people as he goes about their daily business. Denverites are taking pride in their museum, and that’s a level up from simply attending a blockbuster.

Heretofore, as Rinaldi pointed out, “The museum’s biggest hits tend to be traveling shows that make a stop here, such as 2010’s display of King Tut treasures and and last year’s Yves Saint Laurent fashion show.”

Listen to a few reader comments posted after that Post article:

I saw another major Van Gogh exhibit in LA a decade ago and this one was every bit its match, not only in the quality of the works, but in the telling of the narrative. This was a major exhibition that any museum would have been proud to assemble. Congratulations to the DAM and the curator. You brought an amazing experience to this former cow town.

And:
Mr. Standring- Well done. I learned a lot and enjoyed the whole thing. And now I know where DAM is. Wasn’t exactly a regular before.
It’s a wonderful thing to create a blockbuster that draws in new people to an art museum — it’s even greater to make the local community proud of an art museum they rarely visited before.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Denver Post

Austin Explores Creating A Folk Art Museum

Last summer, when I went briefly to Mexico City on vacation, I was totally bowled over by a collection of Latin American folk art I saw there. It was beautiful, it was different, it varied across regions and countries, it was sophisticated, and it was well-crafted.

affa-savethedate-followup4-webSo I was delighted to learn of an unrelated, but possibly similar, development in Austin: This Friday, a group of folk art collectors there who banded together in the late ’80s, will sponsor a public meeting to explore whether or not to start a folk art museum there. Austin Friends of Folk Art, a nonprofit, has brought experts to set the scene — two art people, two museum planning experts, and Ned Rifkin, whom you’ll remember as both a museum director and curator, now a professor at the University of Texas. (See invite at right.)

Folk art is a tricky thing. It’s not “hot” among collectors and some folk art museums — notably the one in New York — have had a hard time attracting sufficient audiences to meet their expectations. The Austin collectors seem to have a Latin bent. An article about the group’s hopes in the Austin American-Statesman mentions folk art from Mexico, plus grants to Latino organizations.

But the Friends group seems well aware of the potential pitfalls. The Statesman quotes Merry Wheaton, the current president of AFFA, saying:

Clearly there are a lot of (folk art) collections in town that will need to be housed and taken care of. We’re an all-volunteer organization, and we don’t have an endowment or maybe even the people who could lead the fundraising for a new building. But maybe we don’t need a building.

Instead, it might create displays at:

Hotel lobbies, the airport — any place people already gather. Art is already exhibited in such places.

And:

There are lots of possibilities. What we want is to put ideas out there, see what the community desires and see who else is out there and interested. If there’s energy out there for something, we can move forward.

Sensible, and perhaps enlightened. We shall see after Friday.