Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Critcial Orthodoxy And Roy Lichtenstein

In addition to going to the Per Kirkeby exhibit at the Phillips Collection on my trip to Washington a week ago Saturday, I also stopped in to see several shows at the National Gallery. The Roy Lichtenstein retrospective, officially opened last Sunday, was available to families and members that day — in preview – and I was kindly allowed in, too. I wasn’t going to write about it, though, because — frankly — while I am no expert on him, I have only slight appreciation for the artist, and this show didn’t raise the level. I find his work, in total, to be shallow and at times even hollow — even though I think some of the paintings are pleasing to look at (especially his late works, Landscapes in the Chinese Style).

Then I read Holland Cotter’s review in Friday’s New York Times, and it made me think about Nicholas Penny’s comments on contemporary art posted here last week, particularly the line about a “lamentable lack of critical debate about contemporary art.”

Cotter didn’t pan Lichtenstein, but readers should notice that he employed several words and phrases that betray at least a mildly negative view: “virtually foolproof art style,” “narrow in range,” “ergonomically comfortable to the eye,” “clever, if slight,” “diverse but unrevealing,” etc. The headline went a step further: “Cool. Commercial. Unmistakable.”

Cotter’s ending:

Lichtenstein changed art to some extent, but nothing else. …his work looks like no one else’s, and some of it still feels fresh and audacious. He encapsulates, at least in his early work, the spirit of an era. He is embedded in the culture now, and unlikely to be dislodged.

Let’s call him an American classic, and leave it at that.

Damning with faint praise? It made me wonder whether anyone else even began to challenge the ordothoxy (a Lichtenstein painted fetched more than $43 million at auction recently, so vested interests are operating here). I looked up other reviews of the exhibit.

In the Washington Post, Anne Midgette, sounded a positive note:

…what animates [his work] is not solely its inherent social criticism, but the tension between the individuality of the painter’s hand and eye and the impersonality of what he uses them to illustrate. This tension runs through the whole show, and is what made it such a delight, even a revelation. …After [his]1993 retrospective, I came away feeling Lichtenstein had had a burst of fecundity in the 1960s and ended up repeating himself or looking in vain for a way to get back to that initial energy. The current show, by contrast, shows him dumping a huge bag of tricks out on the table in the ’60s and continuing to play with them, examine them, and follow them ever further to new solutions, for the rest of his life.

And in the Chicago Tribune, which published a review last May when the exhibit was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, Lori Waxman gushed:

[His appropriation of comic images and use of Ben-Day dots in Look, Mickey] was a great gambit, one of the finest of the 20th century, a period of art-making full of one gambit after another….By the mid-’60s he’d turned to landscape as a subject matter, depicting sunrises, seascapes and cloudy skies as amalgamations of colored dots, solid lines and blank spaces. The results, on view in a somewhat overhung gallery, are breathtaking. They’re also stunning in their efficiency and abstraction: Lichtenstein borrowed these images from comic books, keeping the background and leaving out all the extraneous details. The ensuing gorgeousness can be hard to believe.

I am sure that all three critics quoted here were sincere in their appraisals, and after all, their views are supposed to be subjective. But I think it’s time to have more debate about Lichtenstein. Of course, Peter Schjeldahl hasn’t yet weighed in, nor has Jed Perl. Maybe they will stir the pot.

This show travels next to the Tate Modern. It’s, no question, a crowd-pleaser: in Chicago, it was the Art Institute’s best-attended exhibition in ten years, drawing about 350,000 people.

And here’s the appropriate kicker: “The retail business was ’31/2 times what we projected,’ ” a spokeswoman told the Tribune.

 

 

 

New Round Of Awards For Women Artists

It’s Friday afternoon, so I will keep this short: In keeping with my longstanding interest in the Anonymous Was A Woman Foundation, which annually gives $25,000 grants to women artists “over 45 years of age and at a critical juncture in their lives or careers, to continue to grow and pursue their work,” I am listing the new awardees — announced today”

  • Ann Agee
  • Uta Barth (her photo, top right)
  • Andrea Fraser
  • Jane Hammond (her work, below right)
  • Mary Kelly
  • Jae Ko
  • Judy Pfaff
  • Betye Saar
  • Lorna Simpson
  • Jessica Stockholder

As you may not remember from last year, in 1997, when these awards were founded, I wrote a Page One story for the New York Times about them. The hope was that they would at some point no longer be needed to counter the bias toward male artists. But that still exists, so…

171 women have now received money from this foundation.  

On a related note, today the Dallas Museum of Art opened Difference? — an exhibition of works by female artists in its collection:

The exhibition draws attention to the fact that there is only one thing these artists have in common. In doing so, we pose the question, “What’s the difference, and does it matter?”

Probably not. I’m kind of against single-sex exhibitions, but I suppose they serve a purpose.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Artists

 

It’s Another Getty Coup: Big Acquisition

Buying an archive might not seem as sexy as buying a painting or a sculpture, but today the Getty Research Institute announced a wonderful acquisition: the archive of Knoedler & Company Gallery,  which is widely cited as New York’s oldest art gallery. It has operated here since the mid-19th century. The acquired records date from about 1850 to 1971 – comprising a “vast trove of diverse original research materials including letters, telegrams, albums, sales books, stock and consignment books, card files on clients and art works, rare photographs, reference photo archives, and rare books,” according to the press release.

Thomas Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute, called it an “invaluable American cultural resource” and that’s not hyperbole.

The press release does not mention the seller, but I believe it is Michael Hammer, chairman of the defunct gallery and son of legendary business man and somewhat controversial collector, Armand Hammer. Although Knoedler was shuttered earlier this year — in a move supposedly unrelated to the fraud cases pending against it and former director Ann Freedman, my understanding is that Hammer retained ownership of the archive separately. He has been trying to sell it for at least a few years — to places including the Archives of American Art, the Frick Art Reference Library and the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin.

The first two — at least — wanted it, but neither could afford the price Hamemr was asking, which was at one time said to be between $5 million and $10 million. No one was biting at that level, and I suspect the price has come down substantially. The Getty did not respond to that particular question asked by me.

Hammer was recently added to the suit filed against Knoedler by Domenico De Sole, chairman of Tom Ford International, and Eleanore De Sole, in an amended complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan. Knoedler closed in 2011.

Knoedler, of course, not only brokered the sale of many, many important European pictures to American collectors during the Gilded Age and since then, but also sold American art by the likes of Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Eva Hesse, to cite a few examples. Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, Robert Sterling Clark, and Catharine Lorillard Wolfe.

The Getty Museum has purchased more than a dozen paintings and drawings from Knoedler or which had passed through Knoedler’s hands at some point, including van Gogh’s Irises (right).

The Getty already owns archives of such galleries as Goupil & Cie, Boussod Valadon galleries, and the Duveen Brothers. Although Knoedler’s records are said to be in good order, the Getty must catalogue, process, and conserve them before making them available to researchers on site – and also digitizing them for online research. The latter is the only consolation to New Yorkers. The purchase is fantastic for the Getty, but not so good for New Yorkers.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Getty

Taubman Museum News: Another Lifeline, But No Stability

The Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, which started out in a shiny new building in late 2008, but was struggling for survival by fall 2010, is still clinging to life — by the threads. The other day, Nick Taubman, who just stepped up to become chairman of the board, promised he wouldn’t let the museum “…go broke,” according to the Roanoke Times.

That puts the Taubman family squarely back in the picture. In 2010, his wife Jenny had resigned from the board and (kind of) washed her hands of it.

 Taubman and other community leaders just made a cash infusion of $1.5million “to help it cover operating costs for the rest of the year” and he apparently told the paper that “the arrangement will continue as long as it needs to.” While the new move is admirable, it’s still not a way to run a museum, which has an annual budget of about $3.4 million and has been operating in the red.

Meanwhile, the museum needs a new director: CEO David Mickenberg just resigned. He had been leading the charge to change from a real museum to a community arts center, announced in fall 2010. Taubman says that drive will continue, and the search for a new director will soon commence.

But this art center is struggling, even after a raft of loans from benefactors were forgiven.

The Roanoke Times has more of the gory details — it’s just painful to watch any museum, or arts center, tread water publicly this way.

When will communities take seriously all these cautionary tales of overreaching?

Three Cheers For Nicholas Penny

In an interview given to The Art Newspaper for one of its Frieze editions last week, Nicholas Penny, director of London’s National Gallery, gave his view of a theme I’ve mentioned here once or twice — and went a step further. The topic? The similarity of contemporary art collections in U.S. museums.

Penny, lamenting the influence of the Museum of Modern Art, said:

… it has been hugely influential, so that almost all of the other museums in America have a modern wing attached to them. And frankly these wings impress me as deadly: the same white walls with the same loud, large, obvious, instantly recognisable products lined up on them. Nothing in the so-called academic institutions of the 19th century approach them in orthodoxy and predictability.

I agree, and have said so many times. He also took up another lament of mine — the lack of sharp criticism in the art world, saying:

There is a lamentable lack of critical debate about contemporary art. If you think about the way Modern and contemporary art was received in the 19th century, there was always a tremendous amount of critical defence and attack, far more than is the case today

And:

Exhibition in a museum—and, even more so, acquisition—is an endorsement which has become a substitute for critical appraisal. There seems to be a belief that the reputations of artists in museums will never be challenged. This is a valuable myth for the market. It may be that once a certain amount of public money has been invested in art it will be valued forever. But I doubt it.

So naturally, I want to highlight this interview — more of which will be published in the November Art Newspaper — as reinforcement.

Meantime, a hat tip to Charlotte Higgins, writing in the Guardian on Monday, for pointing me to the Penny interview. She focused more on what she called Penny’s “writing off” of performance, video and conceptual art — which is true. For example, he said:

The art form I don’t relate to – I’d put it more strongly actually – is video because it seems to me so often merely to be an incompetent form of film, made with the excuse that it is untainted by the professionalism associated with the entertainment industry. I’m not very impressed by conceptual art nor very often by performance art. I’m uneasy with some aspects of the legacy of Marcel Duchamp.

Agree or not, it’s the debate that’s important — it may well sharpen everyone’s perceptions.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the National Gallery