Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Berlin Gemaldegalerie: Prussian Cultural Foundation Backtracks, A Little

Yesterday, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation took a step forward toward possibly resolving the contentious battle over the fate of Berlin’s Old Master collection. As you may recall from my previous posts (here and here), the donation of a large 20th century art collection and demands by its giver had led the Foundation to a specious plan: moving the older paintings into the already full Bode Museum and into storage (supposedly temporarily, but with no set timeframe and no money allocated for new quarters) to make way for the gift.

Opponents here and then in Germany launched petitions against this appalling plan. (See the petition, and sign it, here). The U.S. petition has more than 13,000 signatories.

Pressed by the outcry, the Foundation has now said it will begin a feasibility study to look at alternatives to its original plans, though it repeated its belief that the leadership’s original stance was correct. (It’s hard to admit when you are wrong.) If you can read German, the text is here. There is also a good article in today’s Berliner Zeitung. Just plug it into Google Translate and you can get the gist.

The study will ostensibly look at keeping the Old Masters in the Gemaldegalerie and at moving them to a new building near the Bode; better, the statement said it would commit to a binding timeline for a move to a new display of the Old Masters.

Jeffrey Hamburger, the Harvard professor who took up the cause, wrote and posted the petition here, and remains on the case told me last night that this is “real progress,” but remains wary. And I agree, the opponents must remain vigilant — or the Foundation will take it as a sign that all is dandy.

Here’s a statement Hamburger gave to Der Spiegel:

It is gratifying to see that the Foundation is taking steps to respond to its critics in a constructive fashion. Their willingness to explore alternatives represents progress, albeit compromised by their statement that they are doing so “in order to avoid any appearance of hasty decisions.” No less welcome is the commissioning of a feasibility study, although one is left to wonder what the need for such a study at this late date says about the years of planning that supposedly took place previously. The public recognition that any such study needs to take into account progress (or lack thereof) on the Foundation’s many other current projects also represents an important concession.

 The study is due by spring.

 

 

 

Come (Or Go) Celebrate: The Menil Turns 25

A change of pace — no complaints today,  just a congratulatory shout-out to the Menil Collection. On Saturday, Sept. 22, the Menil will formally celebrate its 25th anniversary. The date occasioned several efforts, none earth-shaking or innovative, but all an effort to reach out to people who will appreciate a museum that was started and conceived by Dominique de Menil as a quiet “place apart” for contemplating art. (Would that her view were prevelant today.) As you will all remember, Renzo Piano designed it, his first U.S. museum, and one that remains his best.  

First, as ever to me, are the exhibitions. How can you not love one called Silence? Opened in July, it contains  32 paintings (including Magritte’s The Listening Room, at right), sculptures, performances, and sound and video works, and they aim to “explore spiritual, existential, and political aspects of the absence of noise or speech.”

Nearby, the Menil remembers its history, with an archival exhibition called Dear John and Dominque: Letters And Drawings from the Menil Archives. They were sent by friends, artists, curators, and others, and the Menil is turning a gallery into a readin room so that people may have peek.

Second, the celebration on the lawn. It’s free, includes music, dancing, a scavenger hunt and birthday cake.

Before and after that date, there’ll be concerts by the likes of Yo-yo Ma and lectures by, say, Calvin Tomkins. Plus a cell-phone walk through the complex.

It’s solid, not-flashy but appropriate, perfect for the Menil.  

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Menil Collection

 

The MFA’s Misguided New European Art Gallery

Not every new gallery or exhibition is automatically or immediately reviewed. Yet I expected some reaction by the Boston media to the newly refurbished and rehung Koch Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which was unveiled on Saturday.

Why? This was the first (I believe) gallery that Malcolm Rogers, MFA’s director, has specifically taken charge of  since he named himself “acting” director of the Art of Europe there late last year, after the former chair of Art of Europe, George Shackelford, announced his departure to the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth, Tex.

The MFA is calling this gallery its “Great Hall,” harking back to the castles built in Europe in the Middle Ages. This biggest, most impressive room in the museum seems tailor-made for billionaire William Koch, its namesake. Not aligned with his conservative brothers David and Charles Koch, Bill Koch is a bit of a renegade — he gives to both parties — and Rogers has been courting him for years, even giving his eclectic collection an exhibition in 2005. It was controversial. At the time, the Boston Globe said the 100 objects on display ranged from “antique firearms to French Impressionist paintings and 20th-century sculptures,” plus of course his two (in)famous “racing sailboats, their masts rising 125 feet in the air — nearly twice the height of the MFA’s roof.”  Few people applauded.

In the last few years, the MFA’s installations have been less controversial: not everyone loves the new Art of the Americas wing or the Linde Family wing for contemporary art, but they are defensible.

But now, with the Koch gallery, Rogers seems to be returning to his strategy of being iconoclastic to stir things up, despite the fact that he told me in 2010 that “I don’t feel the need to be controversial anymore, but I want to do new things,” which I used in an article for the Wall Street Journal.

What is now the Koch gallery had shown paintings from 16th- and 17th-century Italy, France, Spain, and Flanders, and it still does. Rogers has also pulled four 17th Century tapestries from storage, and hung them amidst the paintings. Fine, I guess, as I believe this gallery was built for tapestries (which it contained until 1996; some people says it’s dreadful for paintings). But at the center of one wall, Rogers has made a huge, garish display of Hanoverian silver pieces. It extends 18 feet from top to bottom and includes 103 pieces. The silver has little if anything to do with the paintings in the gallery.

A bit horrified for myself, I’ve inquired around among art historians. The consensus: Rogers seems to be decorating, not hanging great works of art. He’s equating the likes of a Velasquez, whose Don Baltasar Carlos and Dwarf is among the paintings on view, with household decorative furnishings, made for a drawing room.

Now, the museum says that 40 paintings hang in the gallery. See more details here. Cutely, the MFA has produced a speeded-up video of the transformation, here.

The museum isn’t shrinking from the decorative descriptions. In fact, a Gallery Talk, set for later this month, is entitled “A Display Fit for a King: A New Installation of Hanoverian Silver for Art of Europe.” It will focus not on the paintings, but on “Hanoverian silver and gold illustrating the magnificence of the Hanoverian court from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries.”

As much as anyone can admire silver, it doesn’t really rise to the artistic and aesthetic value of masterpiece paintings, does it?

I think the MFA has gone wrong here. Unfortunately, for fear of retribution (no loans from the MFA), no one wants to agree with me on the record. And the critical silence, to use an old cliche, is deafening.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the MFA (and Photoshop)

National Museum of Women In the Arts Strays From Mission

This is a corollary to the item I posted other day about the death of authenticity. In search of attendance, art museums — as well as those of other stripes — are deviating from their true missions. As they do, they risk their authenticity.

Here’s just one example: On Friday, Women Who Rock: Vision, Passion, Power, opened at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The exhibit, organized by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, was a long overdue examination of the role many pioneering women played in the rock revolution — starting from the beginning. I happened to have seen it while in Cleveland last September, and I not only enjoyed it but also thought it was, for the most part, well done. It goes back to Ma Rainey and Billie Holiday and continues through a few stars of today. You can read the details here and review the included artists here, along with what related to them is on view. Nicely, the NMWA has also posted texts of the wall labels.

But does this show belong at the NMWA? Here’s its mission statement:

The National Museum of Women in the Arts brings recognition to the achievements of women artists of all periods and nationalities by exhibiting, preserving, acquiring, and researching art by women and by teaching the public about their accomplishments.

Pretty basic, and perhaps rock music could slip into that definition were it not for the museum’s history, cited on the same webpage. Wilhelmina Cole Holladay collected visual art, and aimed to put female visual artists into the mainstream of art history. I don’t think rock-and-roll shows, like the one here, are genuinely part of that mission, even taking an expansive view of it. 

What’s in this show is video, vinyl records and record covers, dresses worn at performances, music clips, and the like.

There are legitimate art shows about rock and roll, one being Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present, which was organized by the Brooklyn Museum, shown there in 2009-10, and has been on tour. Some critics disputed its contents, though not the concept (The New York Times, for example, said its contents were chosen “mainly on the fame, charisma and notoriety of its subjects” rather than aesthetics, but still called it “entertaining and sometimes absorbing.”), but photography is part of the visual arts. Some pieces in that exhibit were photojournalism, but wasn’t Otto Dix’s war series, say, documentary in nature? 

Last spring, I wrote here about the first 25 years of the NMWA, I mentioned that attendance overall was 2.5 million — an average of 100,000 a year. In Washington, D.C., that beats the ailing Corcoran’s most recent year (85,441), but not by much. WomenWho Rock will help increase attendance, I’ll bet. But to what end? As I wrote the other day, “it’s important for them to keep authenticity in mind when [museums] design initiatives intended to lure broader audiences.”  The mission, too.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Rock Cellar Magazine

An Update On That Rediscovered Picasso

Remember that mislabeled Picasso gemmaux portrait discovered in the basement of the Evansville Museum of Arts, Science and History?

The other day, USA Today caught up with the news and added two interesting tidbits, one of which shows the dynamics of some museum boards. One might explain the other, but not in a satisfactory way, to me at least. First, the reporter managed to get a price estimate for the work from Guernsey’s, the New York auction house that discovered it and will sell it: Femme Assise au Chapeau Rouge is estimated at $30- to $40 million, according to Arlan Ettinger. Some people think that’s high, however. (And so do I, from afar, but you never know.) At the time of the gift, in the late sixties, it was appraised for tax purposes at $20,000.

Second, the story quotes John Streetman, the museum director, saying: “I wanted to show it, but the president of our board came up with a list of good reasons not to.”

The article says the board debated the picture’s fate internally before announcing the discovery, but it seems that the board, led by a president named Steve Krohn, a lawyer and businessman, had their eyes on the money — the museum’s endowment totals $6 million. He told the reporter: “It would have cost too much money to insure and to adequately protect. We might have had to hire additional security and make changes to the physical plant that we couldn’t justify for one item. We made the only prudent decision.”

Call me skeptical,  but I think he’s exaggerating. I’m with the local who said,  “Something that’s been there since ’68, to right away take it to where no one’s going to see it again? I’d say keep it and put it on display a year or two, then sell it. But that’s just me.”

With money from a sale — which will be private, not at auction, Guernsey’s has said — the trustees can rest on their fund-raising laurels, which is a pretty seductive reason to sell.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Evansville Museum