Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Demystifying Museum Acquisitions: A Model Exhibit, A Model Proposal

Since June 30, the Wadsworth Atheneum has been showcasing recent acquisitions in a special show called The Museum Collects, which goes beyond the practice some museums have of placing new acquisitions in a special gallery (though I like that, too) — it’s out to explain why museums buy certain things. As Robin Jaffee Frank, the museum’s Chief Curator, told the Hartford Courant:

When you acquire a new work of art, it’s exciting, but it also has to contribute something to the understanding of works that are already here. You have to justify how it enriches the collection, how it is filling a gap and enhancing the museum’s existing strengths, or maybe how it can take that strength in a new direction…. It has to help tell a larger story about art and culture than the museum was already telling.

This helps demystify museums, explaining why they do what they do, and it’s a trend I applaud. The Atheneum has also scheduled a series of gallery talks called “Conversations With Curators” that explores these decisions more deeply. 

The Courant article provides several examples, including two pieces of furniture in the exhibition — one is a cupboard “made in Virginia in the 17th century,” that the Atheneum has owned for a long time. “The other, a fall-front desk made around 1870 by emancipated slave William Howard, was recently acquired,” and Frank said that Howard would have known of similar pieces, as he borrowed ideas from it.

When I wrote an article about acquisitions endowments for The New York Times earlier this year, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts provided me with the documentation used by its curators to propose several recent acquisitions. Although I’ve been writing about museums for a long time, I found them enlightening. Not that they were out of the ordinary — I might have guessed the topics if I’d spent any time thinking about it, but the truth is, I hadn’t. Here they are, though I should add that not every sheet (MIA sent me four or five) had all of them:

  • Description and Summary of Object or Group of Objects
  • Artist, Style, and explanation of the proposed object
  • Condition
  • Provenance
  • Related Objects:
  • Complements the Existing Collection
  • Plans for exhibiting
  • Why do you recomment the object?
  • Comparable Market Prices

I think the public would be fascinated by the answers to these questions for important acquisitions. I’m going to share one of them, for the cup shown here – Nautilus-Cup – which the MIA purchased last year. When museum people talk about stirring up more interest in their permanent collections, sharing information like this should be on the list.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (top); Detroit Institute of Arts (bottom)

 

 

Kids Say The Darndest Things About Modern Art

Get ready to laugh. As museums and parents try to figure out how to get kids interested in art, it’s amusing to learn what they think when they first see it. Can you guess whose paintings in the Modern’s collection these kids are talking about:

  • It’s just a big red piece of paper with four lines on it. It’s not very interesting. I’d rate it a one-star. I think it’s stupid.
  • It’s fun to look at because you see kind of like a target-shaped thing… There are little faces that could be like fake people peeking up and you could try and shoot them with a bow and arrow. They’re real people.
  • Make-up Girl. It’s too much eye shadow. I never saw a lady with pink skin. I think I saw a picture of her before but I’m not sure what her name is. I think she’s in the fashion show. I saw a TV commercial that have those same exact colors.

Those are a few excerpts from a new feature on AudioTourHack called MoMA Unadulterated:

an unofficial audio tour created by kids. Each piece of art is analyzed by experts aged 3-10, as they share their unique, unfiltered perspective on such things as composition, the art’s deeper meaning, and why some stuff’s so weird looking. This is Modern Art without the pretentiousness, the pomposity, or any other big “p” words.

The kids comment on 30 works of art — those above are by Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, respectively — and they are both touching and hilarious at times. They don’t think some of these works should be in art museums. No one likes Jackson Pollock, and one of his critics believes he made No. 31 for the money.

But beyond the fun, AudioTourHack, whose previous effort “reimagined Chamberlain’s sculptures [at the Guggenheim] as an exhibition about the Transformers….” has a serious mission: “to use creative story-telling to send people on fun, interactive journeys, redefining the way they perceive art and their surroundings.”

MoMA cooperated with the team making the tour, and the tour’s website page includes a handy map of where to find these works of art in the collection.

The AudioHackTour people say on their website, “We sincerely hope it introduces a wider audience to the art and gallery and reinvigorates both adults’ and children’s love of art.”  As funny as the podcasts are — and they are worth a listen no matter how you know about art — they may just serve their purpose well. There’s a cute little trailer on the site, too.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of AudioTourHack.

 

 

 

Ever-Busy Theaster Gates Advances An Old Cause in Chicago

Chicago artist Theaster Gates has been on a winning streak for a while now, and he’s making the most of it in a way that, I hope, turns out also to be a good thing for Chicago.

Showing his entrepreneurial side, Gates is now trying to turn an abandoned bank building in his home city into  a cultural hub. He gets a gold star from me right from the start for wanting to reuse a  historic building. Located on Chicago’s South Side, at East 68th Street and South Stony Island Avenue, the Greek-style edifice was set for demolition until Gates decided that it would make a good place for an art space and library. Now it’s his project, with a $5 million price tag, for renovation and renewal.

As he told the Chicago Tribune last week,

I’ve always felt like it’s important that artists be good citizens. Citizenship for me includes thinking hard about the cultural life of the place that I live in. No matter what my resources have been, I’ve always tried to make culture happen.

His vision for the building includes a “soul food pavilion,” artists’ studios, offices, and a room housing the books by black authors from the collection of John H. Johnson, the founder of Ebony and Jet magazines, some of which would also be available.

Asa the bank, empty since the ’80s, the paper said, is cleaned out, Gates gets raw material — “some of [the bank’s] debris, once destined for a landfill, would make its way into Gates’ coveted pieces of contemporary art,” the Tribune piece said.

Of course, Gates needs help — approval of his plan and some public financing — $1 million of the total. He and other investors will put in $3.5 million, the Trib says, while donors provide $500,000 and a bank loan covers the rest.

If other artists were trying this, it might have slim chances. But Gates has had a few other success with housing and arts projects — he seems to have a good chance at this.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Chicago Magazine

 

Turkey Admits Theft, Fakes At Its Ankara State Museum

No sooner had I written about the looting and destruction of cultural heritage troubles in Syria  this week than the last lines of the article to which I referred, Syria’s ancient treasures pulverised by Robert Fisk, came to mind:

This is why it is so important to have an inventory of the treasures of national museums and ancient cities. Emma Cunliffe, a PhD researcher at Durham University, published the first detailed account of the state of Syrian archeological sites in her Damage to the Soul of Syria: Syria’s Cultural Heritage in Conflict, listing the causes of destruction, the use of sites as military positions and what can only be called merciless looting. Much of her work has informed the studies of archaeologists like Farchakh.

Then I read about a situation in Turkey, where the Hurriet Daily News published an article on Aug. 8 headlined, Ministry Admits Grand Theft from Art Museum. That article began:

Over 200 works of art are presently missing from Ankara’s State Art and Sculpture Museum, according to a report from the Culture and Tourism Ministry, which has pinned the blame for the losses on Turkey’s 1980 coup d’etat.

A recent report by the ministry, which was later shelved away from public view to avoid a possible backlash, claims that 46 pieces from the museum’s catalog were stolen and replaced with fake replicas, daily Milliyet reported. The authenticity of 30 more art works is also “highly suspicious,” according to the report.

Some 202 art works, now “missing,” are priceless works of art belonging to Turkish artists such as Şevket Dağ, Şefik Bursalu, Hikmet Onat and Zühtü Müridoğlu, among many others.

To which the minister replied:

The Ankara State Art and Sculpture Museum was founded in April 1980 and left significantly unattended and managed inadequately as a result of the Sept. 12 [1980] coup. During this time, the museum records were not kept, healthy inventory work was not done and necessary minimum precautions were not taken.

I’m with Fisk on this. The fact is, museums around the world, don’t have or don’t use good inventory systems and many lack the money to record what they own. I don’t know who has the money to support this, but it would be nice if some rich collector decided to begin to tackle the job, perhaps through the World Monuments Fund. I know, it’s difficult and some countries don’t want help. But others do.

Even in the U.S, some museums lack complete inventories. We’ve seen several recent cases where museums suddenly “find” things they barely know they have: for example here (where Yale found a Velazquez in storage) and here, where the Cincinnati Art Museum rediscovered its collection of musical instruments.

 Photo Credit: Ankara museum, courtesy of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism

 

Is That A Strand of Hair In My Painting? Technology And Fakes

Don’t laugh if it is, and least not if we’re talking about Still Life with Peonies, a painting (left) that looks something like a van Gogh, but… no one is sure.  

Now, using technology that analyzes DNA, a conservator named Ester Monnik plans to assess a three-inch strand of red hair that she extracted from the painting, drawn from deep in the paint (!). She’ll compare it with DNA taken from van Gogh’s descendants.

All this is at the behest of Markus Roubrocks, a resident of Cologne, who is said to be a multi-millionaire art collector. He says he inherited the  painting from his father, and that it was found in Belgium in 1977 — “in an attic,” according to the Daily Telegraph. Roubrocks has shown the work before, getting validation from two “independent” art experts but a nay from the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which the article says believes “the brush strokes are inconsistent with Van Gogh’s style, and therefore the painting is nothing more than an expert piece of forgery.”

I have not a clue as to whether or not this painting is real. It certainly has a crazy backstory, but so have other real paintings. I’m more interested in the techology and its implications. While developments like this suggest that we might solve more art-world mysteries in the future, they may also bring forward a lot of fancy fakes. Technology can make copying easier.

And, to hear some stories, it’s not that difficult now. Last weekend, the Wall Street Journal published a review of Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of An American Art Forger by Ken Perenyi. Perenyi — for three decades — “duped auction houses, dealers and collectors in the United States and Britain with hundreds of forged paintings by his own hand, ranging from pseudo 17th-century Dutch landscapes to watercolors mimicking those of Alexander Calder,” Jonathan Lopez wrote in his review. “…anybody with the slightest interest in painting or deception will find “Caveat Emptor” an engrossing read. ”

Lopez ought to know. He wrote The Man Who Made Vermeers, a biography of the art forger Han van Meegeren.

As it happens, the BBC is about to start a new series called “Fake or Fortune” in September, according to Art Fix Daily. In three episodes, Philip Mould uses forensic evidence to examine “paintings that may or may not be by Degas, Turner and Van Dyck.” Perhaps PBS will once again lean on the better art offerings of the BBC and bring the series here.