Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

The Getty Lands Another Masterpiece, Plus Potts Is Replaced In Cambridge

We can quarrel with MoMA’s video game escapade, but everyone’s got to agree that the illuminated manuscript acquired by the Getty museum today is a masterpiece and a beauty. And it makes perfect sense for the Getty’s collection.

The Roman de Gillion de Trazegnies, by Lieven van Lathem (1430–1493), was purchased at Sotheby’s today for nearly $6.2 million. Van Lathem is considered to be the most accomplished painter of secular scenes in the golden era of Flemish manuscript illumination, the museum said.

The manuscript consists of “eight brilliantly painted half-page miniatures and forty-four historiated initials” and, as the book was rarely copied. this “romance appears in only three other manuscripts.” The work had been lent to the Getty Museum for its beautiful 2003 exhibition titled Illuminating the Renaissance. 

According to the Getty’s press release:

The only documented manuscript by Lieven van Lathem, the Prayer Book of Charles the Bold, is already in the Getty Museum’s permanent collection, having been acquired in 1989. This primary work provides the basis for all other Van Lathem attributions. The Roman de Gillion de Trazegnies is regarded as the artist’s preeminent secular work, and this acquisition represents an unrivalled opportunity to unite masterpieces of both secular and devotional illumination by Van Lathem in a single collection.

While this announcement was being made by Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, late of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, his replacement was being announced there: it’s Timothy Knox (right), currently the director of Sir John Soane’s Museum* in London. I was just there, and Knox has done a wonderful job of restoring that gem — and I’m far from alone in thinking that.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Getty (top) and the Soane Museum (bottom)

*I consult to a Foundation that supports the Soane

Michael Govan And Affinity Groups: He’s Right to Raise Fees

Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has been taking heat in the last few days about his decision to increase the membership dues for various art groups at the museum. I think he’s right to do so…though I am not sure he and the museum have put forth their entire case.

The outcry began last week, when the museum hiked yearly dues for members of 10 support councils to $1,000, plus a $250–level museum membership they must now buy. In the past, the dues for these groups, organized around art categories, like photography, decorative arts, European art, etc., were as low as $400 a year. The new fee was long overdue, Govan told the Los Angeles Times, adding: “This change will bring us more in line with other museums nationally,” he said, citing higher dues at other museums in Los Angeles, Boston and New York. “To have an affinity group that has direct access to curators and artists, even at the new number, you could call it a bargain.”

Members begged to differ. One interpreted the increase as a play to only large donors on the part of the museum, whereas Govan reportedly said at a meeting that “the changes [are] part of a larger rethinking of the role of these groups. They were instrumental in fundraising in the museum’s early years before it even had a development office. Now, he said, it was important to make the system ‘simpler’ and ‘more professional.’ ” The article continued:

The plan includes dismantling the boards of the councils, leaving only a chairperson in place to help the department curator and development staff organize events. He also described a change in what the councils would do: organizing public events instead of private parties and focusing “more on education and the sharing of enthusiasm than acquisitions.”

The next day, the LATimes reported that “Diana Gutman, chairwoman of the Art Museum Council at LACMA, says the group’s 40-member board has voted unanimously to stop volunteering at the museum next year” because of the change. And, the story said:

Founded in 1952 before LACMA even had its Wilshire campus, the Art Museum Council is LACMA’s oldest support group. Early on it acquired major paintings by Josef Albers, Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian and Stuart Davis. It also commissioned an Alexander Calder mobile for the LACMA campus — called “Hello Girls” as a nod to the women on the council. One of its leading fundraisers was a yearly “Art and Architecture” tour taking visitors into collectors’ home.

Gutman ended her email by saying, “Our group is determined to stay together and to find another avenue that will allow us to continue to support emerging artists, beginning collectors and the art community at large. Our 60-year legacy of service to LACMA [can be] seen in the massive number of works we purchased that hang on the museum walls and the magnificent Calder mobile that cheerfully greets visitors.”

Govan has a PR problem on his hands, and he needs to take care of it. I think he may need to expand on his reasons — the idea of professionalizing development (Arnold Lehman at the Brooklyn Museum did something similar, you’ll recall) — may be true, but there’s a more compelling rationale, I am guessing.

My discussions with other museum directors suggests that these affinity groups — with internal parties and behind-the-scenes events, among other things — cost the museum more than they bring in. They require the time of curators. In the end, the museum ends up subsidizing them, rather than the other way around. Yet these members are better-heeled than the general public; they shouldn’t be getting the subsidy.

Govan may have to share more numbers with the public to make that case convincingly, and he may be reluctant to do it. Too bad.

 

 

 

Albright-Knox’s 150th Anniversary Year Ends With A Bang And A Question

2012 has been something of a momentous year for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo — and well it should have been, as its 150th anniversary. Tomorrow the museum tops the whole thing off with the opening of Universals Albright-Knox 150 (UN.0201–UN.0350), created by the artists Eric and Heather ChanSchatz with the participation of 150 Western New Yorkers. It was commissioned by the Albright-Knox for the occasion (Dec. 4 is the date of its founding 150 years ago) and the gallery is offering free admission and extended hours from Dec. 4 through Dec. 7. There’s a talk by the artists with Albright-Knox Curator for the Collection Holly E. Hughes on Friday evening.

Universals Albright-Knox 150 (shown, in part, at left) was a good idea — I haven’t see the piece — for a couple of reasons. For one, it “explores the future of abstraction and the gallery’s role within this important facet of art history,” the museum says, without exaggeration, I think.

Second, it involves the Western New York community: Last April, the Albright-Knox invited people to participate in the artwork — those who wanted to participate put their names into a lottery, from which 150 were chosen (plus 50 alternates –smartly). Those people filled out a questionaire and had one-on-one conversations with the artists, thus becoming part of the work, “which is conceived to embody the role an organization like the Albright-Knox seeks to fulfill in society and contemporary culture.”

Hughes has said, “Inviting Eric and Heather ChanSchatz to create this work of art has been an extraordinary experience for the museum, its staff, and, ideally, the project participants.” But she would, wouldn’t she? We’re left to her comments until the work is unveiled and reviewed by local critics.

According to the Albright-Knox, Universals Albright-Knox 150 consists of 150 unique, hand-painted works—one to represent each participant. It will be accompanied by a video installation, also made by ChanSchatz, incorporating footage of their meetings with the 150. And in 2014, the Gallery will finish off the commission with the unveiling of a large-scale sculpture by the artists, based on the imagery developed through the project.

Over the past several months, the Albright-Knox has presented several admirable exhibitions highlighting its past — The Long Curve: 150 Years of Visionary Collecting at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Living Art: A. Conger Goodyear and Sculpture; Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-garde in the 1970s; and DECADE: Contemporary Collecting 2002–2012. I’ve heard good things about all of them, though I’ve not been to Buffalo myself.

That said, Louis Grachos, who recently departed after ten years as director, left a mixed legacy. It is true, as Colin Dabkowski recently wrote in the Buffalo News, that in 2002, the gallery “seemed, after nearly 150 years, to be growing stale. During the previous decade, the gallery’s once-ravenous appetite for bold new work from the outer limits of the art world been reduced to the occasional nibble at the heels of more ambitious collectors and institutions.”

The article also hit the problem:

During his 10 years at the gallery, Grachos lit a fire under its collecting program, and integrated the gallery into the community through ambitious collaborations with rock bands, dance companies, poets and other museums and galleries.
But his tenure here will likely be defined by one thing: Grachos’ fostered the board’s decision in 2007 to sell more than 200 pieces of valuable pre-Modern art from the collection.

Dabkowski recounts several of Grachos’s achievements. The question to me, and to others who opposed the deaccessions, is whether he could have achieved as much, or more, without the divisive sales. True, he raised a lot of money, milions — it’s unclear if he spent it wisely on new art.

Though Grachos says he left voluntarily, I suspect that new director will be necessary to move beyond that past. Fortunately, the next director may, according to Albright-Knox board president Leslie Zemsky, may be selected by Jan. 1 — which would be both welcome and a surprisingly short search. He or she will expand the gallery’s campus – in October, the gallery hired Snohetta to develop a master plan for its campus — and he or she will determine whether the Albright-Knox truely gets its game back, or not.

Photo Credit: Holly E. Hughes, Courtesy of the Albright-Knox

 

 

 

MoMA Enthusiastically Endorses Video Games As Art. Why?

When the Smithsonian American Art Museum presented a special exhibition The Art of Video Games earlier this year, I decided — after much consideration — to ignore it, rather in hopes that it would go away. Or fade from lack of buzz. Fat chance — it was a big draw for the museum.

Now, the Museum of Modern Art is making it impossible for me to ignore this development of calling video games art. Not only has MoMA acquired “a selection of 14 video games” but the museum says they are “the seedbed for an initial wish list of about 40 to be acquired in the near future, as well as for a new category of artworks in MoMA’s collection that we hope will grow in the future.”

Call me old-fashioned, while I recognized the creativity and craft involved in making video games, I don’t believe they, as a class, belong in the Modern. Yet, now, with the MoMA’s imprimateur, the floodgates will open. Get out your old video games and take them to your nearest dealer.

MoMA responded to the potential criticism in making the announcement on Friday — calling the games both art and design:

Are video games art? They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe. The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design—a field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity. Our criteria, therefore, emphasize not only the visual quality and aesthetic experience of each game, but also the many other aspects—from the elegance of the code to the design of the player’s behavior—that pertain to interaction design.

You can read more about MoMA’s criteria for acquisition here. While I am glad to have that explanation, it does underscore MoMA’s defensive position. They don’t explain why it needs to buy a new Rauschenberg.

By next March, the museums says, it will install its initial game purchases — they are listed at the link above — “for your delight in the Museum’s Philip Johnson Galleries.” Again, the language is notable in ebullience and thus in defensiveness.

MoMA’s enthusiasm for video games as art raises a question, in my mind — why is it so enthusiastic about a genre like that, but so unenthusiastic about new forms of it would label as craft? Where are, say, new quilts in its collection? (There is one or two, I know, but an organized campaign to collect them.) Where is fabric art in general? Or other kinds of contemporary folk art?

I am not advocating for MoMA to become a craft museum; I simply wonder if its enthusiasm for electronic games might just be a sign of pandering to the popular, rather than a judgment based on artistic merit.

Photo Credit: Tetris, Courtesy of MoMA   

Why The Smith College Museum of Art Is A Work of Art

Last week, I visited the Smith College Museum of Art for the first time — my loss — and it made me laugh as well as appreciate what I saw. The collection is fine — among college museums, it’s really quite good. But I came away with good feelings about it for a different reason: It’s the first museum I know that pushed the idea of art down to nitty-gritty details. And I mean nitty-gritty — those of you who have been there know what I’m talking about. The museum’s lower-level bathrooms were designed by artists, and I’ve never seen that before.

Ok, this isn’t new (except to me) — the museum opened in its current location in 2003. And maybe it received attention at the time. But the idea is clever and shows original thinking. Another example of that — Smith put 12 artist-designed, handcrafted benches in the galleries (sample below left). I love that. Last year, on another visit to New England, I discovered that the New Britain Museum of American Art also used hand-crafted seating in its galleries. The curious — some were truly lovely — could have obtained a list of those artists, as I recall (in case they’d like to purchase works from them? I’m not sure) from the receptionist/information desk.

At Smith, the benches merit labels just like the paintings and sculpture on view, except that they are outlined in yellow (which makes them easier to find).

At left, above, is a shot of the ladies’ room — the facilities were so beautiful that the pictures are not indelicate. At right is the men’s room — which I asked a staff member if I could visit, hardly an unusual request. (Still, I took the picture too quickly to focus properly!)

Ah, the artists’ names… I can’t find them at the moment.  If and when I do, I’ll update this.

But you get the point — what a fine idea to make visitors realize that art, real art, can be found throughout a museum.