Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Art Theft

  • Did you know that Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 terrorists, tried to sell looted Afghani artifacts to buy an airplane?
  • That some 20,000 to 30,000 works of art are stolen each year in Italy alone?
  • That art theft ranks after only drugs and arms as the third highest grossing illegal trade?

Noah Charney, right, the art historian who founded the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art, knows all that and more. Recently a talk he gave at a TED conference, badly titled noah_charney“How To Steal from the Louvre,” was posted on the ARCA blogsite.

I say it was badly titled because art mavens like you probably know that the man who stole the Mona Lisa a century ago was ill-informed about the painting’s provenance, and not your typical art thief. Is there a typical art thief? Charney says much art theft takes place because the perpetrator believes the fiction, film and media representations of the demand for stolen art — that there are a lot of Dr. No’s out there ready to buy that Picasso. Not so, Charney says — there are only abut two dozen of them around the world “that we know of.”

Rather, stolen art — even minimally valuable stolen art — finds its way into the barter/trade system of drugs and arms. That, he poses, is why it’s even more critical to stop than if there were more Dr. No types.

 

The NYTimes Looks For The Light

Before too much time passes, I want to call more attention to the feature published by The New York Times last Friday headlined Reflections. It was highlighted on Page One with a picture of Edward Hopper’s Rooms by the Sea that was captioned Seeking Out the Bright to Battle the Cold?

Brooklyn_Museum_-_Saint_Joseph_and_the_Christ_Child_-_overallIn it, the Times devoted considerable space to art works chosen by its four main art critics in which the artists captured light, which somehow was intended to help readers take their mind off the cold, dark winter days and the “indoor time still to come.”

I am of two minds. I thought the idea was rather contrived and the execution a tad spotty. Much as I enjoy reading Holland Cotter’s criticism, I found his choice of an Islamic plate, an example of lusterware, to be a stretch. It might brighten my day, but not because of the light. So, too, his selection of Saint Joseph and the Christ Child by an unknown Cuzco school artist, pictured at right — I love the painting but don’t see any reason to single it out for special lighting effects.

The other critics mainly took their assignment more literally, chosing paintings by the likes of Georges de la Tour, Vermeer, Seurat, Hammershoi and Dan Flavin. You can’t quarrel with those calls. Some were “predictable,” but only to people who spend a lot of time with art.

On the other hand, I applaud the Times for devising an article that focused attention on museums’ permanent collections or just on artworks, period, as part of the culture-pages mix. I wish they and other papers looked for more occasions to run art works. Back in 2009, I praised the Nelson-Atkins Museum here for this:

On Dec. 15 — enough time for planning — the PR department sent out an email with the subject line “Need Christmas Art?” and attaching a PDF listing of all the nativity scenes it holds in its collection for which it had high-res images: a dozen in all. 

All of this, of course, is about getting art into the world outside of museums in a way that will encourage people to go see for themselves.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum

 

 

 

The Tate Recommends Art For You And Me

Did you click on that link to the Tate in my recent post about Becoming van Gogh in Denver? I did. And I was surprised by two features of the Tate website. Aside from showing me a good reproduction of the drawing I wanted you to see, the museum supplied, beneath the van Gogh, “Other works of art you may be interested in.”

T00468_10Amazon and other commercial sites use this technology (and they don’t always get it right), but this was either the first time I noticed it on a museum website or a relatively new development. I was eager to see what other art the Tate thought I might like. Twenty-two other works, as it turned out.

They ranged in date from 1795 to 1982, versus the 1884 creation of Thatched Roofs. Only two were by van Gogh (The Oise at Auvers and Farms Near Auvers). Other artists included Natalya Goncharova (at right), Joan Gonzales, James Dickson Innes, Sir Ernest Albert Waterlow, Charles Condor and Eric Forbes-Robertson — as well as the naturals like Cezanne, Gauguin, Schuffenecker, and Seurat. The work of six of the artists in the lineup (not all mentioned here) was new to me — which means that the Tate is leading people to discoveries.

If you click on any the pictures, you are referred to another selection of “other works of art you may be interested in.” There’s overlap between the selections, but it’s not complete — perhaps half of the artworks are the same, the rest different. Exploring art this way could be endless, but you can quit at any time.

Or you could ignore the whole offer, and just look at the van Gogh drawing.

This seems like a good feature. The Metropolitan Museum’s website offers “related content” for various artworks in its collection — but the suggested works are by the same artist. MoMA doesn’t have this feature either, nor does the National Gallery of Art in Washington. If others so, please let me know. It should spread.

Whether or not it’s a good thing that the website doesn’t explain why the pictures are related — that van Gogh with this Goncharova — is up to you.

Back at the Tate, website visitors can also “find similar artworks” on their own because below each work in its collection, there are links to artworks by the same artist, by category, decade, style, and subject — in many variations. For Thatched Roofs, for example, there are seasons, trees, places, architecture, towns-scapes, etc. etc. Finally, there’s a link to Context — gifts and bequests. That one seemed too formidable for me to explore right now.

I wonder how people are using this information and this site. Not to worry. The Tate does too. In fact, before exploring any of this, I was presented with one question asking me why I came to the site, so that the Tate could improve it. My choices, abbreviated, were: to plan a visit; to find specific information for research or professional reasons; to find information for personal reasons; for casual browsing; or to book a place at an event/program.

It’s simple: Do I need to say that both feature are good ideas? Go explore.

Photo Credit: Gardening, Natalya Goncharova, 1908, Courtesy of the Tate

 

On-Site Visit: Does The Clyfford Still Museum Deserve Its Raves?

Although I’ve twice interviewed Dean Sobel, the director of the 14-month-old Clyfford Stil Museum, I saw him in Maryland, at the storage facility where Still’s paintings were kept before the museum opened. My article about his goals for the museum ran in the Wall Street Journal in October, 2011, before the museum opened.

CStill1It wasn’t until last Friday, when I was in Denver, that was able to see the museum and the works (some of which I saw in storage) fully stretched and hung properly in a building designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture. The building deserves the raves it received, some of which I’ve quoted below (in agreement).

One attribute I particularly fancied: the sight lines between galleries. Take a look at a couple of my pictures. Above left, you can see Still’s self-portrait between two of his loveliest paintings.

Below  right, there’s an example of compare-and-contrast views. Finally, below left, you’ll see how visitors may view a painting from the drawings gallery. (Still’s drawings, btw, turned out to be far more interesting than I expected them to be.)

I also loved parts of the first floor of the museum, where Still’s large canvases are stored (some in open view), where his paintings are conserved, and where his many drawings not on display are stored, accessible to scholars, along with his archives. Vitrines on this floor display some items drawn from those archives — as I described in my WSJ piece. (Here’s a tidbit: Still wrote to Clement Greenberg as “Dear Greenberg.” Was there an edge in that? Sobel didn’t know, nor do I, but maybe a reader will.) His letter to Betty Parsons, in which he quits the art world, is there too.

There’s also an excellent interactive feature with, among its offering, a sampling of what was going in art history and in the world as Still painted.

CSdrawingsNow for those promised excerpts.

Here’s Karen Wilkin in the WSJ: “The handsome, earthy building is superb, with glorious, changing, aqueous light diffused through a continuous concrete “web” in most of the second floor exhibition spaces….The galleries, varied in ways sympathetic to the collection and flexible enough for rotating selections, are all wonderfully proportioned; even the most splendid of them—a light-washed, symmetrical central space—remains intimate while accommodating five monumental canvases. Views through doorways, echoing traditional enfilade arrangements, permit comparisons. It’s all logical, articulate, and makes Still look his absolute best.”

Here’s Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times: “…the new Clyfford Still Museum…is nothing less than a marvelous model for what a single-artist museum can be. Virtually every aspect of it is designed to maximize a visitor’s encounter with Still’s often riveting art….The cantilevered second floor rests lightly on a non-structural glass wall. Exterior poured-concrete striations — echoed in wood-slat panels — create ethereal shadow-play in the clear daylight of the Mile High City. A visually unobtrusive perforated-concrete screen, which filters overhead natural gallery illumination from skylights, is surprisingly buoyant….paintings lead you through nine lovely galleries… Separations between rooms allow views across and down into other spaces, facilitating awareness of where you are in the building. The art experience is the program, first and last.

CSviewAnd here’s James Russell on Bloomberg: “…The boxy bunker designed by architect Brad Cloepfil bristles with ragged concrete fins, evoking Still’s intricate compositions. That roughened exterior radiates an elegant gravitas….Cloepfil, of the Portland, Oregon, firm Allied Works Architecture Inc., brings a Zen calm by framing the nine, squarish second-floor galleries in planes of concrete and painted drywall that alternately obscure and reveal, like Shoji screens. He mixes salon-style rooms with high galleries topped by a rippling scrim of concrete in which teardrop perforations delicately shower the space with shimmering daylight.”

Single-artist museums aren’t easy beasts to design, program and manage. This one has a great building and an excellent start.

Photo credits: © Judith H. Dobrzynski

 

Denver Museum Goes 24 Hours for van Gogh Exhibition

VG-In ChurchBecoming van Gogh is so popular in Denver that the Denver Art Museum is taking the big step of remaining open overnight on the exhibition’s final weekend: It will open at 8 a.m. on Jan. 19 and stay open until 11:59 p.m. on Jan. 20, when it closes for good. That announcement was made on Friday — after several previous extensions of the hours — and by this morning all the tickets were sold out except those between 1:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. on the 20th.

VGstilllife-almond blossomsThis exhibition, organized by the DAM’s paintings curator Timothy J. Standring, is only on view in Denver. Add to that the fact that Denver has never before had a van Gogh exhibition, and the the museum owns no van Gogh works of any sort. But still — this is a big victory for several reasons, not least the fact that Becoming van Gogh is not a retrospective, nor a highlights exhibit. It contains few of the paintings that the general public knows (no Sunflowers, no Irises, no Starry Night or Bedroom in Arles). It’s a teaching exhibition that breaks scholarly ground, demonstrating how van Gogh deliberately taught himself to draw and paint — or, as Standring said Friday when I was in Denver to see it for myself, to make marks (the fashionable lingo in art-history circles).

To recap briefly, the exhibition borrowed works from more than 60 public and private collections throughout Europe and North America to limn the key formative periods of van Gogh’s career – when he taught himself to draw, learned about the formal elements of art, explored color theory and painting techniques, and so on. Take a look at the museum’s website for the exhibit to get a taste of what I’m talking about, or read the article I wrote for the Wall Street Journal and my subsequent blog posts here and here.

While I had perused the catalogue avidly and spoken with Standring, I hadn’t seen the show until Friday — and I loved it. It’s debatable which is the “best” picture in Denver, but I can tell you several I loved: Thatched Roofs, a drawing owned by the Tate, is amazing. In Church (above) from the Kroller-Muller was new to me and touching. The little still life at left, from a private collection, is so vibrant it glows — as if it were radioactive. There were too many others to mention.

Denver extended hours earlier this year for the Yves St. Laurent exhibit, but not as much as this — and DAM director Christoph Heinrich told me that van Gogh will exceed YSL’s total by far. Although the museum’s King Tut exhibit, which ended last January, drew more people to DAM, it was on view for six months — whereas van Gogh started only on Oct. 21 — three months.

But there are other important markers for this show: for one, DAM reports that visitors are spending an average of 90 minutes viewing it — about 70 works by van Gogh himself about about 20 by others he “responded to.” That’s an astonishingly long visit. And the catalogue, 13,500 copies, is pretty much sold out.

All good news for the Denver museum and Denverites.