Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

It’s A Matter of Taste-And Touch And…

If three, as the old saying goes, makes a trend, the museum world is past that and into institutionalizing the idea of multi-sensory exhibitions. I still would call it a “mini-trend,” though–one that I wrote about for The New York Times in its annual Museums section, published in print today.

My article, headlined Drinking In the Art: Museums Offer a Growing Banquet for the Senses, includes these summary paragraphs:

Museums usually aim to offer a feast for the eyes, but [the Detroit Institute of Art] had much more in mind for “Bitter|Sweet: Coffee, Tea & Chocolate,” which just closed at the institute. Officials, who used art objects to illustrate how the introduction of those beverages to Europe in the 16th century from Africa, Asia and the Americas changed social and consumption patterns, wanted the exhibition to be a banquet for all five senses.

After giving a few more examples, I added the rationale:

“We’re interested in multisensory exhibitions because people come to a museum not just with their eyes but with their whole bodies,” said Swarupa Anila, head of interpretation at the Detroit Institute. She labeled them an “experiment.”

You can read the rest on the NYT site via the link above.

I could have added a few more examples: when the Musee d’Orsay exhibited Impressionism and Fashion a few years ago, I’m told it grouped all of the outdoor scenes in a large gallery at the end, with AstroTurf and chirping bird sounds. I don’t recall that when I saw it at the Metropolitan Museum. Also, I understand that the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, when presenting Luxury: Treasures of the Roman Empire last year, incorporated “a smelling station for visitors to sniff the different scents of Roman perfumes, and a digital interactive …allow[ing] visitors to virtually “try on” different hairstyles that were all the rage in ancient Rome.”

These ideas can be hokey, and too many of them would be awful. But every now and then, when the subject demands it, I think multi-sensory exhibitions, done properly, can be interesting. I agree with what Virginia Brilliant, curator at the Ringling Museum, told me: “There’s only so much a curator can say — sometimes you just have to experience an object.” A great example, at the Ringling, during “A Feast for the Senses: Art and Experience in Medieval Europe,” visitors can view medieval manuscripts and hear the very music being played as they do.

But I also agree with what Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, told me:

“Any human being can respond to great works of art,” said Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, speaking not about those specific exhibitions but the phenomenon in general. “We do not need intermediaries. We can augment the experience for children. For adults, I believe it isn’t necessary.”

I hope museums, with this trend, act judiciously. And since I cannot post a sound, smell, touch or taste opportunity, I will simply illustrate this with a few works of art from the Medieval show, which originated at the Walters Art Museum. They illustrate touch and taste, at least.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Walters and the Ringling Museums

At the Top of the Met, Salaries Rose During Buyouts & Layoffs

Consider the top two-thirds of this posts as akin to a re-tweet, because I have not confirmed the numbers. Yesterday, the New York Post published a story online headlined “Money-losing Met hands execs hefty raises.” In it, with numbers drawn from a new (or newish?) 2015 federal income tax filing, we learn that four current employees of the Metropolitan Museum*–director Thomas Campbell, president Daniel Weiss and the two top investment officers–all got substantial payouts in the last fiscal year.  According to the Post:

  • Weiss “got a $300,000 bonus for less than half a year on the job” and his “total compensation for six months of work came to $818,112, which included a salary of $327,931 and a housing allowance for his Park Avenue apartment.”
  • “Campbell’s total compensation was $1,428,935, including a salary of $942,287. His salary and “other compensation” of $127,622 was a 7 percent increase over the previous year.”
  • “Suzanne Brenner, the Met’s senior VP and chief investment officer….saw her bonus rise to $624,828 from $570,590. Her total compensation was $1,583,553.”
  • “The salary for chief investment officer Lauren Meserve jumped 14.7 percent and her bonus shot up to $548,723 from $466,847. Her total compensation was $1,451,775.”

OK, I have to ask, who is responsible for such ill-timed, less-than-sensible increases, coming when the Met has laid off and bought off about 85 people?

Well, I traced it back to Daniel Brodsky (at left), who not only is chairman of the Met’s board of Trustees, but also is chair of its Compensation Committee and, of course, of its Executive Committee.

Other members of the compensation committee are Candace K. Beinecke; Russell L. Carson; Richard L. Chilton, Jr.; Hamilton E. James and Lulu C. Wang, according to the Met’s most recent annual report.

As I have hinted here once before, the Met needs a new board chair as well as a new director. Apparently, it could also use some new trustees, some with more common sense and a concern, at bare minimum, about the optics of their decisions. Plus, as a confident of mine added, a sense of honor.

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met.

It’s A Rave: The Matisse/Diebenkorn Exhibition

San Francisco beckoned me because of the Matisse/Diebenkorn exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Both artists are nothing if not seductive and, as I wrote in my review of the exhibition for The Wall Street Journal, published in yesterday’s print edition, “Rarely—if ever—in the history of modern art has a renowned artist been as deeply and openly inspired by another artist as Richard Diebenkorn was by Henri Matisse.”

So this was a natural, and like so many other naturals, surprising in that it had never been done in depth before. I loved it, as you will read, and I found different elements to admire in both venues: I saw it late last year at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it was slightly smaller but just as great.

The curators, Katy Rothkopf in Baltimore and Janet Bishop in San Francisco, made different juxtapositions and were working with a different suite of galleries; each installation has its merits. For example, in Baltimore, the show seemed to build to a climax with Diebenkorn’s “Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad”–which visitors saw on its own large wall as they rounded a corner (though they likely stopped before getting to it to see other works on the way). The Baltimore wall label, as I recall, said “Recollections” was a summation of all Diebenkorn had learned from Matisse. Then they moved on to a large gallery that showed off all the Ocean Park series along with the Matisse paintings that helped inspire them. It practically glowed.

In San Francisco,  the hang seemed more evenly paced. But, in a brilliant move, Bishop hung Matisse’s “Goldfish and Palette” nearer the start, alongside “Urbana #6.” The pairing stopped me in my tracks from the get-go. Have a look:

But in SF, I think, “Recollections” was less prominent, just one painting in a gallery of several, and the space there required the splitting of the Ocean Park series into two galleries. Still, Bishop made this revealing sequence (maybe Baltimore did too, I do not recall).

Both installations encouraged the close looking that affords real insight into both artists’ minds.

Diebenkorn seemed destined for a great career in art–at 26, he had already won a solo exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. He was making abstract works then, and he continued to so do for years. But, as this show, which illustrates his evolution over the decades, he owes his greatness to his early exposure to Matisse. The works are accompanied by archival materials. Diebenkorn collected a vast library of publications about him, and he often later glued in color versions of the books’ black-and-white images. He would make notes, like the dimensions or the dates.

In fact, I came to the conclusion that a solo exhibition of Diebenkorn’s work would have been far less interesting than this dual show. (Not so for Matisse, obviously–he always looks great, to me.)

Here are a few more installation shots that I took at the SF exhibition–some, to my mind, more interesting than others.

UPDATE, 3/14: I just discovered this article written for SF MoMA that explains more about this exhibition and collaboration between Bishop and Rothkopf, which you can read here.

SF MoMA, Snohetta and the Fisher Deal

I was just in San Francisco, and finally able to make my first visit to the new, expanded version of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It didn’t change my view of the outside of the new Snohetta-designed addition, but I came away very impressed with the galleries created inside. And my first full view of the Fisher Collection the wing houses confirms, with only a little moderation, what I have written here before about the deal the Fishers cut with the museum.

First, that exterior. I still don’t like it. In person, it looks a little less than I had imagined like “a building equivalent of The English Patient,” which I called it last May.  The folds are more graceful in person than they are in photographs.

But it hardly matters, because you don’t really see that part of the museum’s facade unless you go to the trouble of walking a couple of blocks and glimpsing through other buildings.

Besides, for art museum, it’s what’s inside that counts–and the galleries in the Snohetta building seem to be excellent for showing off art. So, as with my thoughts about the downtown Whitney museum–not crazy about the exterior, but the interior work well–I will henceforth minimize my criticism about the addition’s architecture. With one last exception, namely that I wish the addition fit better with the “old” SF MoMA. From the outside, the two don’t go well together at all. Inside, the seams are better.

I came up the external stairs, entering the museum from Howard Street, and the first view is of the Serra works at right above and then of the grand Helen and Charles Schwab Hall, at left above.

Similarly, seeing the Fisher collection at SF MoMA explains precisely why the museum bowed to the Fisher family’s demands for provisions in the loan agreement that I hope will never be copied. It’s a collection the likes of which could not be assembled today, even with boatloads of money. It would have taken SF MoMA or any museum decades to come close to assembling even a smaller collection of such quality.

Yes, in the 260 works in view (of 1,100 in the collection), there are too many Chuck Closes for my taste, for example. I cannot say that every work there will be viewed with awe 100 years from now. It’s still wrong for the Fishers to claim such a large portion of the building for their collection at all times. They should have been more flexible in the way their collection was to be displayed. All that is still true.

But any modern museum would have cut a deal to get this collection–as you’ll see for yourself in the photos I’ve  posted below. I wish SF MoMA had negotiated a better deal, and I wish it would disclose the complete agreement so the public can see for itself what was given away. But we’ll never know if laxer terms would have worked and still won the collection.

Here are just a few views:

The Met: What Happens Next, Part Two

As I indicated in yesterday’s post, the Metropolitan Museum of Art* is in for a bit of a rough patch–but let’s not overdo it (as some people have). The Met’s exhibitions program–its core–is still packed with excellent offerings. Great curators still want to work for the Met–or will, once things settle down. It goes without saying that its collections are the best in the land.

But the Met has gone wrong in not playing to its strengths. Supposedly pulled by moneyed trustees who collect contemporary art and–this must be said–definitely by many critics and others in the media pushing in the same direction, Tom Campbell has tried to make the Met more contemporary.

Let me say right here that I have nothing against contemporary art: I like a lot of it.

But no one complains that the Louvre has missed the boat on contemporary art; no one says the Louvre can’t expect to draw crowds unless it updates its offerings. In 2015, 8.6 million people visited the Louvre, even though there they don’t even see Impressionism or other 19th century art (according to statistics compiled by The Art Newspaper). That is the province of the Musee d’Orsay. And if in Paris you want to see contemporary art, you go to the Pompidou Center. It had 3 million visitors in 2015. The Orsay, by the way, had 3.4 million.

Likewise, no one says the National Gallery in London or the British Museum must move foursquare into contemporary. The National Gallery attracted 5.9 million people in 2015, and the British Museum 6.8 million. Both outdrew the Tate, with 4.7 million, just as here the Met (6.5 million) outdraws the Museum of Modern Art (3 million).

You can say that most of those visitors are tourists. Fair enough. And maybe some are going simply to see the Mona Lisa in Paris or the Raphaels, Titians, etc. at the National Gallery.  But such people will always exist. And museums are not just about the numbers–they are also about the experience, the stimulation, the uplift, the internal, often inexpressible reaction that people have to great art. Yes, I know, museums are also social–but they can’t be only social experiences or they lose their raison d’etre (and maybe tax status).

Now I’m not letting Tom Campbell off the hook–if he was pushed by trustees, he also put many of those contemporary collectors on the museum’s board. He recruited them. (I cannot account for the media influence, but I am guessing it was far from nil.)

Board composition must therefore also be on the reform agenda. Many collectors still buy beyond contemporary–some collect contemporary AND. Let the Met find them and give them voice.

Which brings me to the subject of board leadership. Daniel Brodsky has been chair since 2011. At the time he was elected, he told The New York Times that “he did not have a deep knowledge of art history or a favorite piece in the museum’s collection, although he prefers modern art.”

He was also said to “get along with everybody.” That’s a great trait–until courageous action is required. It is, I’ve been told, a reason Brodsky did not attempt to remove Campbell before now. If he had, some damage may have been avoided. And he had to be pushed, my sources say, mainly by Hamilton (Tony) James, the finance committee chair, to act now.

These are the people on the executive committee: Candace K. Beinecke; Russell L. Carson; Richard L. Chilton, Jr.; Jeffrey W. Greenberg; J. Tomilson Hill; Hamilton E. James; Bonnie J. Sacerdote; Alejandro Santo Domingo; Andrew M. Saul; James E. Shipp, and Lulu C. Wang. These are the people we will have to look to most to safeguard the Met.

Chilton, btw, heads the nominating committee–I hope they he will help recruit trustees who are not only contemporary collectors to the board.

But back to what the Met should do: New York is just as big a cornucopia for art as Paris or London. I believe the museums here should emphasize their uniqueness, not blur the lines among them–so that the public does not where to expect what, where an exhibition of an artist is likely to be.

Museums thrive when they have distinct identities, not when they are shopping-mall mishmashes.

And what should the Met specialize in? It’s a universal museum, for sure, and should remain so. It should not be specialize in periods as do the Louvre and the National Gallery. But perhaps it should specialize in what, for lack of a better word, can be called canonical art. Art, even art of today, that will most likely be considered as part of the canon 100 years from now. Does that mean it will not show some hot artists that get a show in Chelsea? Yes, it does. But it doesn’t mean that it would not have shown Kerry James Marshall. He is likely to last.

The Met will miss some artists this way–but it already has and it always will. No curator is infallible, and neither can the Met be.

This doesn’t mean that the Met will ossify. The Met can and should still have digital programs, for example. It should still devise innovative ways to show great art. It should still educate visitors and students. It can and should experiment. But let’s rebalance. Let’s move away from the idea that contemporary art is the only entry point for “the masses.” How elitist.

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met.