Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Does Crystal Bridges Have A Collecting Strategy? An Answer

The 1960 Rothko that I revealed on Saturday as being purchased by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is not the only addition to the Bentonville museum’s collection since its opening last November. My article in the Wall Street Journal had room for me to mention a few others, but not in detail. And, in fact there’s even more than I was able even to hint at.

For a start, the museum has received about 20 works of art as gifts, mainly from artists’ estates and foundations. There have been some individual donors as well, including Donna and Arthur Hartman, the former ambassador, who gave a 1902 painting called The Midinette by Alfred Henry Maurer. (The museum declined to release the names of other donors.)

More important, museum director Don Bacigalupi and I talked about about the museum’s collecting strategy. He seemed a little tired by the expectations or suggestions made by others (including me) about holes in the permanent collection and said the museum is not filling gaps. “It’s more complicated than that,” he says. “We are not replicating any institutional story of American art. There’s a multiplicity of stories. So we don’t have a linear strategy for collecting or a checklist of artists we want to purchase. We are looking very broadly, and some names are blue-chip and some are at the margins.”

Bacigalupi said that the museum assessed the Pollock (as well as the $86.9 million Rothko) that was up for sale at Christie’s last spring,  but decided the Pollock wasn’t “the right Pollock.” Unfortunately, I spoke with him before Sotheby’s announced on Sept. 7 that it will sell another Pollock drip painting, Number 4, from 1951 (est. $25/35 million) in November, and could not ask about that.

That price would be a leap for Crystal Bridges so soon after the Rothko, however. The museum draws down about $15 million a year from its acquisitions endowment, and Bacigalupi said that — like other museums — it also depends on “friends” to contribute to purchases. He added that the museum “is working with a number of artists’ estates” on gifts or purchases (maybe even loans?).

Now a few details about the works I mentioned in passing in the WSJ article: the Thomas Hart Benton is called Tobacco Sorters,  from 1942/1944; the Theodore Roszak is 42nd Street (Times Square), from 1936 (above left); and the Miriam Schapiro is a collage from 1984 called A Mayan Garden (at right). 

The museum has also acquired Ammi Phillips’a Woman in Black Ruffled Dress, ca.1835. That large print collection I mentioned, with a few big names, also includes works by Martin Lewis, Benton Spruance, Ida Abelman, Minna Citron, Mabel Dwight, Jolan Gross-Bettelheim, Riva Helfond and Bernarda Bryson Shahn.

Here’s what curator Kevin Murphy wrote about that collection (in part):

The prints address subjects and themes concerning artists and society during the tumultuous years encompassing the roaring 20s, Great Depression, and World War II.  As Americans flocked to cities, printmakers depicted the promise and peril of skyscrapers, bridges, subways, and factories.  Artists were equally drawn to rural America, and documented the increasing industrialization of previously bucolic land.  The Great Depression loomed large in the consciousness of printmakers.  Artists, often on the margins of the workforce themselves, demonstrated their sympathy with the unemployed and those workers who protested against exploitative-sometimes deadly-labor practices.  Artists mobilized in service of America’s entry into World War II, creating uplifting images of soldiers and the home front.  As a whole, the print collection provides an unflinching look at the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, but foregrounds the dignity of human labor and achievement in an increasingly mechanized age. 

Bacigalupi said visitors who went to Crystal Bridges last fall would see different things today — some galleries have been rehung as works are acquired and others have moved from the first temporary exhibition, Wonder World, into the permanent collection galleries. 

Photo Credit: Courtesty of Crystal Bridges (btw, I think the color in Rothko’s No. 210/No. 211 reproduced here in Saturday’s post and in the WSJ is too red — but I can’t quite fix it.)

Portland Makes The Most of Winslow Homer’s Studio — UPDATED

On Tuesday, the Portland Museum of Art opens what will likely be a pride and joy: the 2,200 sq. ft. studio in Prouts Neck, Maine, of Winslow Homer, which it purchased in 2006 from Homer’s great grand-nephew, Charles Homer Willauer. The museum has raised $10.8 million in a national capital campaign to support the acquisition, preservation, interpretation, and endowment of the studio, which it has restored to its appearance during Homer’s lifetime, for $2.8 million.

In the course of the restoration, the museum learned a lot about Homer: some little, such as that he apparently ate clams and just tossed the shells (they were found under the floorboards along with some paintbrushes);, and some big, such as the fact that, instead of being a recluse, Homer and his family developed the Prouts Neck community using Easthampton as a model. As one catalogue essay says: “It is a rare hermit that who exhibits a flair for real estate, but Winslow and his brother Charles, Jr. were active developers, so much so that by the time of Homer’s death in 1910, six hotels and some sixty private cottages dotted Prouts Neck.”

The downside to this, if there is one, is that visitation is via a van from the museum to the studio twelve miles away and then by guided tour — just three a day, limited to 10 visitors each, from Sept. 25 through Dec. 2, 2012 and next spring from Apr. 2 through June 14. A bigger downside: they cost $55 each. 

Wisely, in planning this, the museum has gone beyond the studio, where Homer made some of his most iconic works. The Portland museum will be showing paintings that he created in that studio. Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine, which runs through Dec. 30, brings together 38 major oils, watercolors and etchings — many late seascapes — from museums including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.  For the first time since it was painted there, Homer’s  Fox Hunt (1893) will be in Maine, a rare loan from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

And Portland is putting a contemporary spin on this as well: It has commissioned five artists to photograph the studio using techniques available in Homer’s days, and they will go on view on Oct. 6 in a display called Between Past and Present: The Homer Studio Photographic Project. A few details:

They employed both historic, large-plate cameras and modern digital cameras, and a variety of print processes. The earliest method of making images of the real world with light—the camera obscura—is the technique explored by Abelardo Morell with his unique tent camera. Alan Vlach specializes in salted paper prints, the first form of prints made from negatives, introduced in England in the 1840s. Keliy Anderson-Staley developed her collodion prints outdoors using a portable darkroom at Prouts Neck, much like 19th-century portrait photographers. And the gum bichromate and platinum prints, produced by Brenton Hamilton and Tillman Crane, represent the type of fine art photography most used during Homer’s day.

The Portland museum has a real treasure here, and should make the most of it in a way that’s respectful of the property’s limitations. I suspect it will learn during the coming year, and perhaps make changes after that.  

For more on the Homer studio, see the Maine Sunday Telegram article from last Sunday and today’s piece here, the Associated Press story as published by the Washington Post, a travel story in The New York Times and additional articles listed here.

UPDATE: The Portland museum tells me that the previous top photo on this post, which I drew from the local paper, dated to 2006. They gave me a recent interior shot, which is now at top.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Portland Museum of Art (top), the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (middle), Alan Vlach via the Portland Museum of Art (bottom)

 

Crystal Bridges Fills A Gap

Now it can be told: As I reveal in tomorrow’s  Wall Street Journal — online now — Crystal Bridges is the proud owner of a 1961 Rothko, No. 210/No. 211 (Orange). It should answer a few of the critics who complained that the museum’s postwar collection was weak (including me).

My little piece, an “Object of Beauty” on the Icons page, tells much of the story.

But I will be back with more details and more about the museum’s recent additions to its collection in the next day or so.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Crystal Bridges

 

 

Tidbits: Unrelated Developments At A Few Museums

Every now and then, little bits of news come along that command attention, but not an entire post. So I’ve gathered a few into one:

  • Remember last June when I wrote here about the Worcester Art Museum’s campaign to raise $60,000 to reopen its historic doors? The money was raised lickety-split, and to celebrate the results — about $94,000 at the time — director Matthias Waschek offered free admission to the museum through August. Now the museum reports that the “Open the Door” campaign raised more than $100,000 and that attendance during July and August jumped 151% versus the same months in 2011.
  • The Dallas Museum of Art and the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth are less than 40 miles apart, but they are nonetheless collaborating and planning to show the same exhibition in 2013: Hotel Texas: An Art Exhibition for the President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy will run in Dallas from May 26 through Sept. 15 and then in Fort Worth from Oct. 12, 2013, through Jan. 12, 2014. The exhibit marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and tells a story that today would seem odd (and I doubt would happen). According to the press release (which includes details on the art that was chosen and for where):

Five days prior to the presidential couple’s arrival in Fort Worth, descriptions of the presidential suite at the Texas Hotel were released to the public. Unhappy with the couple’s accommodations, Owen Day, the art critic for the Fort Worth Press, proposed the idea of the installation to prominent art collector and leader of the Fort Worth Art Association Samuel Benton Cantey III. With the support of Ruth Carter Johnson (now Ruth Carter Stevenson), board president for the Amon Carter Museum of American Art; collector Ted Weiner; and Mitchell Wilder, the Amon Carter Director, Cantey conceived a three-part exhibition that would unfold in the parlor, master bedroom, and second bedroom of Suite 850.Drawing on local private and public art collections, each room of the suite was outfitted with works of art that befitted the tastes and interests of President Kennedy and the first lady (guess where Eakins’s Swimming {above} went).

  • Talk about collaborations (and captive audiences!): The Dulwich Picture Gallery is mounting an exhibition at the American Embassy in London this fall of the United States of America which “can be viewed by members of the public awaiting visa interviews in the Consular waiting room of the Embassy.” The show, called Across the Pond and inspired by the city of London, will display art created by young artists during a long-term programme sponsored by the Gallery at the Salmon Youth Centre – evening drop-in sessions that are part of the Gallery’s Urban Youth programme and that involves visiting artists including Erica Parrett, Liz Charlsey-Jory, Joanna Veevers and Ruth Dupre. The Dulwich Picture Gallery began its youth program a dozen years ago to offer cultural activites to at risk kids. For some silly reason, the Gallery does not allow the public to see its press releases, so I cannot link to it. (There’s a lesson there…)

 

New Money For American Art Scholars!

Here’s some good news for lovers of American art, straight out of that (until-recently) backwater of any art — Arkansas (I say that kiddingly, because I love that there’s great art in Arkansas, though some RCA readers do not): Crystal Bridges has announced a research and residency program for scholars to study and promote the understanding of American art and a prize to recognize “lifetime achievement in American art.”

Both are being funded by a $5 million pledge from the Tyson family and Tyson Foods, the chicken processing company largely expanded by the late Donald Tyson and now run by his son John (below). It’s a naming gift — scholars will be called Tyson Scholars of American Art and it’s the Don Tyson Prize.  

Crystal Bridges (a favorite wall of mine there, showing Martin Johnson Heade’s Gems of Brazil is at left) has an extensive library and manuscript collection that the scholars can mine, and the press release noted that their research “may also provide fertile ideas for Crystal Bridges’ own dynamic exhibition program,” which is good since Crsytal Bridges has always said it wants to go beyond the current received wisdom in American art. Scholars will be expected to interact with the local community via lectures, symposia, and collaborations with the University of Arkansas.

The first class has already been chosen – through an internal committee headed by museum director Don Bacigalupi and the museum’s curator of American art, Kevin Murphy. From now on, a committee of Crystal Bridges’ staff and outside art historians will sift through applications, choosing on the basis of “their proposals’ potential contribution to the field of American art.” Tyson Scholar receive stipends “competitive with other prominent residency programs,” are housed in Bentonville, and “may apply for multiple semester-length terms of residency with a stipend for research and travel expenses.”

The first class, described in detail here, include  Matthew Bailey, from St. Louis; Jason Weems, from Riverside; and Susan Rather, from Austin.

The prize is in the works, but not announced. According to the press release:

A jury of respected museum and academic art historians empanelled by the museum will recommend for recognition an individual whose work has significantly advanced knowledge in the field of American art over the course of a career.  The honor carries a cash prize as well as recognition by Crystal Bridges during an event given in the recipient’s honor. Crystal Bridges has begun the selection process for the first winner, who will be announced once the rigorous nominating and vetting process has been completed.

Begun by Don Tyson, who bought Western art starting in the 1960s, the Tyson Foods corporate collection has been expanded and diversified by John Tyson. It now includes works by “Ansel Adams, Troy Anderson, Thomas Hart Benton, Charlie Dye, Sam Francis, Harry Jackson, Frank McCarthy, Charles M. Russell, Andy Warhol and Jack Woods,” according to the release.

I’m giving the penultimate word to Bacigalupi (because I agree with him!):

American art has historically received too little attention from scholars and academic programs as a field of research. Funding for its study has been sadly limited. Here at Crystal Bridges, we have made it part of our mission to help improve that situation. Thanks to the generosity of the Tyson family and Tyson Foods, our museum will be able to develop and foster a community of scholars committed to furthering the understanding and appreciation of American art. In addition, through the Don Tyson Prize, named in honor of the late Don Tyson, former chairman and CEO of Tyson Foods, we’ll also be able to honor people who have advanced American art during their career.

This changing, no doubt about that — and this will add more momentum.