Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Surprise At The Met: What Tom Campbell Said At TED

Looking for completely different information on the Metropolitan Museum’s website today, I stumbled upon a blog post of the TED talk given by Met director Thomas P. Campbell last spring — it was just posted as a video on Friday, though he mentioned last March that he had made the speech.

So I watched.

Campbell performed brilliantly, even though he repeated that hoary old line about people finding museums intimidating. (Ok, maybe a few do, but I’d wager that the more appropriate adjectives for describing what reluctant museum-goers feel about museums include “boring,” “bewildering,” and “confusing,” because there isn’t enough way-finding information.)

But this post isn’t about that — it’s about Campbell, who shows wonderful passion in this speech. He’s so intent on breaking through to the TED audience that he drops the F-word in his opener. Not exactly what you usually hear around the Met.* But it sure got my attention and put me on notice that this speech might be a little different than I expected.

You should listen to the opener, at least, for yourself (or try here). Even if you don’t like profanity, the anecdote is quite funny and self-deprecating. And it leads to his main point: that it’s a curator’s job to suppress some of their academic, jargony training, to stop classifying art and start getting people to look at it.

Campbell reveals why he chose to focus on tapestries, why he went to the Met (so he could do really big tapestry exhibits), and how his career-making 2002 tapestry exhibit was written off by one senior Met staffer as “this is going to be a bomb,” despite the “experience” he created. (Obviously, it was  not.)

He likes the word “unpack” — as in, curators have to maintain the integrity of the art but unpack it for a general audience — and he unpacks how the Met created the oh-so-popular Alexander McQueen exhibit from 2011.

Finally, he suggests that one goal of the museum — he watches visitors enter in the Great Hall at times — is to create a zone where their curiosity can expand. He looks like he is having a good time, and it’s catching.

Although not every commenter agrees, most loved his passion, as did I. He could take this show on the road.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Met

*I consult to a Foundation that supports the Met.

 

 

 

Brooklyn Does The Right Thing

No one wants to go now! Without it, we really don’t have a reason to go to the museum.

So said one Stephanie Morgan, a 30-year-0ld research epidemiologist and resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant, to a Wall Street Journal reporter the other day.

You may have guessed the sad truth in that statement: she was talking about the dance party that has been part of the Brooklyn Museum’s Target First Saturdays for years — the evenings that bulk up the museum’s somewhat erratic attendance. (Back in 2009, figures the museum gave me showed that nearly 20% of its full-year attendance came on the 11 First Saturdays sponsored by Target.) But a week or so ago, the Brooklyn Museum “pulled the plug” on the dancing in the galleries, citing overcrowding in the third floor galleries.

No specific damage was disclosed in the blog post that carried the announcement:

while the attendance is growing, our building is staying the same size, and we’ve run into some challenges with capacity crowds and traffic flow throughout the building….[so] we are going to put the dance party on hiatus for the time being. This was not a decision we made lightly. 

In its place:

You’ll see new things like artist-led participatory activities, site-specific performances, and intimate issue-driven discussions

The museum said it was being proactive, rather than “waiting for a problem to happen.”

Brooklyn has always maintained that there are plenty of art activities on First Saturdays — and there are — but the question has always really been why people come. Morgan told the WSJ that she and her friends have gone every month “for years” and now they won’t? I say good riddance — they can dance elsewhere; they can’t see Brooklyn’s art collections and exhibitions elsewhere.

Brooklyn says it’ll bring the dance parties back, but I actually hope it doesn’t — at least not for some time. Let things shake out. Let’s see who comes now and in what numbers.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Timeout New York

 

Reaching New Audiences With a Mold-Breaking Renaissance Show

Just when you think that museums have plumbed the depths (or rather, heights) of the Renaissance — leaving few fresh ideas — along comes an exhibition that surprises.   This one, Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, opens next Friday, Oct. 14, at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The Walters says:

Aspects of this material have been studied by scholars, but this is the first time the subject has been presented to a wider American public.

The exhibit — which I have obviously not seen — features 73 paintings, sculptures, prints, manuscripts and printed books by artists including Rubens, Pontormo, Dürer, Veronese and Bronzino, according to the press release. The time frame is late 1400s through the early 1600s. Though there’s been little discussion of the fact, apparently many Africans and their descendants worked in Europe as artists and diplomats, as well as slaves –plus, says the Walters, aristocrats and saints.  That’s quite a range, and all covered in the show.

Judging by the pictures the museum has posted on its website in the press room, this is going to be a good show. At right above is The Adoration of the Kings from the workshop of Gerard David, a fairly traditional picture. At left is Portrait of Don Francisco de Arabe and Sons Pedro and Domingo by Andrés Sánchez Galque, 1599, lent by the Prado.

The Walters, which says “the exhibition…poses questions about the challenges of color, class and stereotypes that a new diversity brought to Europe,” obviously sees it as a way to bring in a more diversified audience. Last spring, its educators described the exhibition to students at five Baltimore middle schools. They, in turn, were invited to make art in response, and the Walters is also showing their work during the main show’s run. That’s great, but I hope they are in the education galleries, not side by side.

The Princeton University Art Museum has also signed up for the main show, Feb. 16–June 9, 2013.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Walters

What Do You Do As A “Mellon Curator-At-Large?”

It was in the spring of 2011, I believe, when the Indianapolis Museum of Art announced that it had appointed two “curators-at-large” funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. The museum selected James Watt, who had stepped down from his position as Senior Curator in the Metropolitan’s Department of Asian Art, and Mahrukh Tarapor as the first two.

Now it has announced another: Amy Poster (below), Curator Emerita of Asian Art at the Brooklyn Museum as well as an independent curator and consultant specializing in South and East Asian art.

For some strange reason, the museum is a little secretive about these posts. The press release announcing Poster says she began her work in July, 2012 — but it’s just announcing the appointment now. And it never mentioned Tarapor, who delayed her arrival in Indianapolis and then, last April, gave it up when the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, appointed her senior advisor for international initiatives there.

If Indy is embarrassed, it shouldn’t be — these things happen and it’s no reflection on the museum, in my mind.

The question is, what are they doing?

Watt, who began his one-year term in November, 2011, has been quite busy on his visits. According to the press release, he

has analyzed the IMA’s Chinese ceramics, jade and most of the bronzes in storage and currently on display. As part of his work, Watt certified the dates and periods on several works of art, and in some cases corrected dates of the objects. Through additional research in Hong Kong, Watt hopes to concretely authenticate some works from the IMA’s ceramics collection that may prove to be older and more precious than previously believed. Additionally, Watt is assisting Teramoto in planning for the reinstallation of the IMA’s permanent Asian galleries, opening in 2014.

Kathryn Haigh, the museum’s deputy director for collections and exhibitions, also said that he plans to reinstall the Chinese objects thematically, thus highlighting “the history of porcelain making in China among other things.” And “James is currently researching a pair of chicken cups that may rival similar objects in the imperial collection, which is very exciting.”

For her part, Poster will help develop a long-term collecting strategy for Indian and Southeast Asian art. She is also

studying the history of the IMA’s Lockwood de Forest wall. De Forest (1850-1932) was a partner of Louis Comfort Tiffany and was well known for establishing an Indian wood-working studio in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, which produced items for the American market from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. One of the earliest Asian artworks acquired by Museum, the wall was purchased by the Art Association of Indianapolis in 1915 (a precursor to the IMA) from Lockwood de Forest. The wall has been shown in multiple manifestations over the last century.

If this was a trial for Mellon, testing the idea for possible use elsewhere, it seems to me to be a good one. With budgets stretched, some museums can’t afford full time curators in each department they have — sharing curators, using independent curators, and tapping into year-long scholars, like these, will probably spread. Kudos to Mellon for this experiment.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Indianapolis Art Museum 

Bernini: Sculpting In Clay — So Good I Want More, And Different

First, the good part: Bernini: Sculpting in Clay, which opens officially tomorrow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,* is a beautiful and very satisfying exhibition. It helps answer the question that comes naturally about masters and masterpieces: how did the artist do that? By bringing together about 40 of Bernini’s “clay sketches” and about 30 of the drawings Bernini made for some of his most famous works — the Four Rivers Fountain in the Piazza Navonna in Rome, the angels on the Ponte Sant’ Angelo there, among others – visitors will gain a window on how this genious transformed his ideas into reality.

These terracotta models have never been shown, the Met says in its press release, which is a mystery. They are wonderfully expressive; it’s a good thing they are in vitrines, because they cry out to be touched. They deserve to be seen.

Here’s another mystery: some 15 of them, if my memory serves, were borrowed from the Harvard Art Museums — all acquired in 1937. The Harvard museum’s online collections database lists 25 of the 28 Bernini pieces in its collection as being acquired that same year — with the notation “Alpheus Hyatt Purchasing and Friends of the Fogg Art Museum Funds.” Hyatt, a paleontology professor at Harvard, died in 1902; he must have left a bequest. That’s a guess.

I asked a couple people at the opening reception, and a few guessed that the legendary Paul Sachs was behind the purchase; he was, a search discovered, the associate director of the Fogg at the time. It could have been. Whoever it was made a great decision.

The Met, which installed this Bernini exhibition in the Lehman wing, also created exemplary educational materials to accompany the show. One large wall is covered with an explanation of using clay and modeling — it even tells us that terracotta clay is 14% water, but it never dumbs down; the text is illustrated with several photos, showing the tools Bernini would have used, the marking he made and how he used those points to create the correct dimensions for his sculptures, and so on.

Which brings me to my criticism: it’s hard to take in all the works and the information (especially when a reception in the Petrie Court upstairs is beckoning), and so today I went online hoping to review some of the didactic material from the show. But — so far at least — there’s nothing on the Met website from that great explanatory wall.

The website does offer the show’s video, “Bernini’s Transformation of Rome,” but it seems to me that the Met has missed an opportunity here. How much effort would it be to take the same info that’s on the walls and put it up on the web? Today, I couldn’t even check whether that 14% figure is correct, let alone spend more time digesting all one could learn about terracotta sculptures.

Maybe that’s coming.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Met

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met