Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Leonard Lauder’s Semi-Secret Obsession

You know Leonard Lauder as an unsurpassed collector of Cubism, but what turned him into a collector was something completely different. He actually began collecting as a boy of five or six, or maybe seven. As he tells the story, his father gave him five cents as an allowance, and he spent the whole thing buying five postcards of the Empire State Building — all the exact same image. “Five,” he told me, “is a collection.”

I tell this story, in slightly different form, in an article headlined The Pleasures of Postcards for The New Yorker.com, published as to coincide with the opening this past Wednesday of The Postcard Age: Selections from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection at  the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Billed as “the first general exploration of the postcard as an artistic medium at a major museum,” the show contains about 700 postcards (all a promised gift to the MFA).

Last month, I visited Lauder in his office at Estee Lauder Cos., and paged through the catalogue with him — trying to get him to pick out favorites so that we could do a slide show for The New Yorker. Hah! I came home with at least 100 bright yellow post-it notes hanging out of the catalogue — that’s how he marked them. We actually ran through a pad of them, and had to ask for more.

Courtly and ever genial, Lauder protested “I love them all!” And when I urged him to be more selective, he countered, “Why should I do your job? I’m not even getting paid for this. Everything in here is my favorite.”

It seems the curators, Lynda Klich and Benjamin Weiss, had the same experience: the exhibit started out as 400 postcards, was quoted as 450 in the summer, and is now 700. Lauder certainly helped select and chose the cover card, a flirtatious blue-eyed redhead, swathed in black fur and fancy hat, that was the public face of Italys’s Mele department store chain circa 1920. “I got it from an Italian auction run by a dealer in Milano, about seven or eight years ago,” Lauder says. “I paid about $50.”

Lauder’s interests in postcards sometimes shift from theme to theme, with the most recent being Wiener Werkstatte post cards. That, he says, “has been for a long time now, and there’s nothing behind it yet.”

Still, you can see he loves these postcards — if you go to the slide show on The New Yorker site, you’ll find his comments on 14 of the ones we ended up choosing as representative of his favorites. (You can see them all on one PDF that the MFA made for me after Lauder and I spoke  [Lauder_The_Postcard_Age-Selections], but not the captions — maybe it will whet your appetite.)

Now why would Lauder, worth billions, keep buying postcards when he can afford Picassos?

When I asked him that, a trace of incredulity passed over his face. “I like beauty, and you can never surround yourself with enough beauty,” he said. Plus, postcards connect him to history, another of his interests. Lauder admits to being an incurable collector, and says he gets as much pleasure from postcards as he does from his paintings. “The paintings I buy relate to one another, and the postcards do, too,” he says. No matter what he’s buying, “the thrill for me is the hunt.”

Then, he added, “Many people collect to possess. I collect to preserve, and no sooner do I have a collection put together than I am looking for a home for it in a public institution.” As usual, he declined to say anything about where his magnificent collection of paintings will go.

I’ve posted the beautiful cover card and a funny one, that made Lauder laugh, here.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the MFA

 

Meet The Chosen Curators: New Fellows Of Leadership Center

The Center for Curatorial Leadership has chosen its new fellows, 11 lucky winners in this sixth class, which begins training in New York in January.

This year, the CCL included international applications, and two of the 11 are from abroad. Here’s the whole list, with bios. Among the well-known names are Rebecca Rabinow, Modern and contemporary paintings curator from the Metropolitan Museum; Judith Dolkart, deputy director of the Barnes Foundation, and Emily Neff, American art curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Elizabeth Easton and Aggie Gund founded the program in 2007, to train curators for moving onward and upward, either as museum directors or in curatorial leadership  positions.

 

 

Discovering An Ancient Civilization In Cleveland — UPDATED

Last spring, when I was reporting an article about acquisitions endowments, I was seduced by a little guy who had been purchased not too long before by the Cleveland Museum of Art (which has one of the biggest purchase funds among U.S. museums).  Made sometime between 600 and 1000 AD, and pictured at left, he came from a culture — the Wari of Peru — that I knew nothing about. And I knew I was not alone.

Although I didn’t mention it at the time, I also knew that this painted lifelike human face on a hide bag, used to stash coca leaves, was to be featured in an exhibition this fall. And I watched for it. That 150-object show, Wari: Lords of the Ancient Andes, curated by Susan E. Bergh, will open on Sunday at the Cleveland museum. It’s the first exhibition devoted to the Wari in the U.S., and so will introduce many of us to this culture (after Cleveland, it will travel to the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum).

We don’t know much about the Wari. That’s because, as I write in an article to be published in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, the Wari had no written language (of course, neither did the Inca) and because they were almost entirely left out of colonial accounts (which the Inca were not).

But the Wari aesthetic is warmer, more human, it seemed to me when I looked at the beautiful catalogue published for the show. Bergh feels similarly: Inca material is more geometric, abstract, muted and simple, compared to the warmer colors and figurative nature of the Wari works. You can’t take that too far — as I learned from her — the Wari believed in human sacrifice, as did many other early cultures. (But less so, perhaps, than the Aztecs and the Incas.) Still, one of the Wari characters is called the sacrificer.

This is the kind of exhibition that I believe can attract those often-elusive wider audiences everyone wants — they don’t have to be like the Princess Diana thing I mentioned yesterday. In fact, as I usually do when I arrive somewhere to report an article, I started talking about the museum on my way in from the airport last week: my driver hadn’t been to it in years. He didn’t know it was free, and had not even heard of the museum’s ongoing expansion, whose new atrium opened this fall to wide publicity. But when I told him about the Wari, he said he wanted to go (and, btw, that that plan would please his wife!). I do not think he was mollifying me — when I got out of his car, he asked me again when the exhibition opened.

The Cleveland museum has been thinking about marketing, of course. One tangible piece of evidence: when it announced the acquisition (two, really — there’s a ceramic piece bought at the same time), the exhibit was called Wari: Realm of the Condor. The current title has more allure, I agree.

Cleveland received money from the National Endowment for the Humanities to help fund this exhibition, which is also telling. It’s an endorsement of its scholarly nature.

And as I mention at the end of my article, Wari: Lords of the Ancient Andes is intended to provoke more research and study. Cleveland is not hosting a symposium during the show (its educators’ guide, posted on the museum’s website, is worth a look, though) — but maybe someone else will jump in.

Eric Lee, director at the Kimbell — could that be your museum?

Meantime, I’m going to post picture of a few objects you’ll see in the exhibit here as an enticement.

UPDATE: Eric Lee has written to me — the Kimbell will indeed host a symposium. Here’s what he said:

yes, the Kimbell is planing to host a half-day symposium on Saturday, June 15, 2013, during the exhibition’s opening weekend, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.  We are inviting three leading experts in the field to discuss current research and new discoveries.  The speakers have not yet been confirmed, but we hope to announce the topics and speakers early next year.

By the way, he added:

ten years ago the Kimbell acquired the Wari figure pendant (image attached) featured on the back cover of the exhibition catalogue.  It is only a couple of inches high, but has enormous presence and is a favorite of our visitors.

I agree. I saw the pendant in Cleveland, and now I have posted it here, at right. You can see why it’s a favorite.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Cleveland Art Museum

 

 

What Lesson Will Grand Rapids Draw From Princess Diana Show?

How does a museum define success? Too often, it’s by attendance — which brings me to the case of the Grand Rapids Museum of Art, which I chastised here about two years ago for presenting Diana: A Celebration, a display including her wedding gown, her tiaras, 28 designer dresses, personal momentos and “rare home movies.” GRAM charged $20 for adult admission.

Now we see the repercussions: Diana attracted “more than 97,600 visitors, helping attract over 318,000 visits and bringing the roster of museum members to 4,572 in the museum’s 2010-11 fiscal year,” according to MLive. That was up from 138,800 visitors and 3,196 memberships in 2009-10. This year’s total dropped to 265,000 visitors and 3,431 members. 

Individual exhibitions in the past year did not fare any where near as well as Diana. Warrington Colescott: Cabaret, Comedy, and Satire attracted about 11,300 visitors (Oct. 28, 2011 - Jan. 15, 2012) and an exhibit of works by Robert Rauchenberg borrowed from the Whitney Museum, the first in a series of loan shows, attracted 30,700 between Feb. 3 and May 20. A show called Cities in Transition got 24,000 between June 1 and Aug. 26. Those are small fractions.

The Grand Rapids Museum benefited most from ArtPrize, which brought  153,100 visitors this year.

Meantime, contributions to the annual fund dropped to $1.5 million in 2011-12, from $1.9 million a year earlier.

What does this tell us? Art, with the possible exception of a contest, couldn’t compete with Diana. Then again, it shouldn’t have to.

What the museum does now is key: does it look for other Dianas (a traveling exhibition that, elsewhere, was not staged at art museums but in other spaces) to fatten its stats and its coffers?  Or does it return to a past that included a world-class exhibition (many years ago) of Perugino? Me, I’d rather see things like Diebenkorn’s Ingleside, above, which is in the museum’s permanent collection.

In July, 2011, the museum got a new director, Dana Friis-Hansen, from the Austin Museum of Art. Maybe he wouldn’t have done the Diana show. Now he must resist the temptation those numbers no doubt present.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of GRAM 

 

 

Are All Museum Directors Alike? Playing Comparisons

Kudos to the Boston Globe for an interesting Q and A it published on Oct. 20, anchored by Geoff Edgers. Edgers went to six new, or newish, museum directors in the Boston area and asked them all the same seven questions.

The crew, all guys but one, were John Smith, director of the museum at the Rhode Island School of Design; Chris Bedford, director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis; Paul Ha, director of the List Visual Arts Center at MIT; Jonathan Fairbanks, director of the Fuller Craft Museum; Matthias Waschek, director of the Worcester Art Museum; and Wyona Lynch-McWhite, director of the Fruitlands Museum at Harvard.

They ranged in age from 35 (Bedford) to 79 (Fairbanks), and the softest question was “What’s your favorite museum in the Boston area (other that your own)?” Answers: Museum of Fine Arts (2 votes); Harvard; Isabella Stewart Gardner; De Cordova (1 vote each), and Ha declined to answer, saying “I would like to draw a Venn diagram because I think all of us do different things but cross over very little.” (Chicken!)

Ha also evaded the question “Is there one thing you wish people could see at your institution?” saying, “I would say the show-off piece for MIT is our public art collection. It’s all over campus. But it’s an open campus, so anybody just walking around, they can experience it.”

The others, in order, said: four Copley portraits, a terrific early David Smith, A cabinet that we bought at auction, Paul Gauguin’s “The Brooding Woman;” and the Alcott farmhouse.

I liked the question “What is the biggest challenge you face?” for the two answers that weren’t about outreach or profile. Rather, Waschek said:

We are an encyclopedic museum. We are covering all the centuries and all the cultures. How do you find a narrative that is interesting enough for people to come to us and see us a serious alternative to bigger museums with deeper collections like the MFA, which is just an hour from here?

And Bedford said:

One very interesting, compelling opportunity for us at the moment is a healthy untapped acquisitions fund. There was a period of time when obviously the museum was director-less. Those holding down the fort very generously and very sensitively decided to reserve the funds for the incoming director.

There’s much more. I hope that link works; the Globe is behind a paywall for some things now.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Boston GlobeÂ