Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

A Few Thoughts About Robert Hughes, American Art Critic

I met the critic Robert Hughes only once, and had no intention of writing about his death until I read a couple of his obituaries, which mostly ignored or belittled one of the things I admired about him. The New York Times didn’t mention it, neither did Time magazine‘s main piece (there’s apparently a separate story behind the paywall), and the Wall Street Journal, referring to a review of a book Hughes wrote, faulted him for it.

It was not his writing — everyone recognized his high style — or his eye, which agree with or not, signaled a distinct and definite taste, backed by erudition. No, I liked Hughes — an Australian who came to the U.S. via Britain — because he believed that American Art was/is underrated and did something about that — making an eight-part public television series called “American Visions” in 1998. That’s when I interviewed him.

My piece, A Critic Distills American Art into Eight Hours, describes the grueling work that went into the series, which was produced with comparatively little money given its ambitions; the accompanying 648-page book; and a special issue of Time magazine, where he was then critic (here’s an index to his work there). (Can you imagine Time putting out a special issue on art today?) Here’s an excerpt from my article:

…they filmed at more than 100 locations from Maine to Malibu — without the Hollywood conveniences.

“Whenever I’d see movie crews in SoHo, with their mobile toilets and makeup vans, I’d get jealous,” Mr. Hughes recounted. “Our makeup van was carried by a production assistant in her handbag. And when I was dripping in sweat, someone would produce a ratty package of Kleenex.”

The sheer volume of work was a bigger strain, threatening Mr. Hughes’s marriage and sending him to a psychiatrist for the first time. “After finishing the series about a year ago, I had severe depression,” he said. He blamed overwork, a crisis of confidence and postpartum blues.

Yet with deadlines for the book and then the bonus magazine looming, plus the reviews he writes for Time, there was no time to wallow. Sticking to a schedule he used on the road while writing the scripts, Mr. Hughes got up daily at 4 or 5 A.M. to churn out as many as 3,000 words a day.

“I nearly went bats having to write the book at such speed,” he said, dressed in blue jeans and a button-down blue shirt in his loft, which is chockablock with books and papers but devoid of art….

I can attest — 3,000 words a day is a lot; 3,000 good words is really a lot. But Hughes craved the accolades and attention his writing provoked:

Mr. Hughes has been noted for his idiosyncratic, nothing-is-sacred willingness to take on both the academically and politically correct, as well as for his vivid, irreverent language: when he says something clever, he will often stop to savor it and to make sure it has been recognized.

Over the years, it has been. Many deem him the most successful art critic today. In profiles and reviews of his books, writers have called him — besides the apt “ever voluble” — “erudite,” “famously pugnacious,” “brilliantly destructive,” “consistently entertaining,” “sardonic,” “pontificating” and a string of other colorful adjectives.

He is certainly “Nothing if Not Critical,” the title of his last book about art, a collection of his essays. In them, for example, he disparages the importance of Andy Warhol (on whom he has since mellowed) and taken many contemporary artists down a peg, including David Salle, Eric Fischl and Louise Bourgeois.

Hughes told me then that he wanted to make what became  “American Visions” as soon as he finished his more renowned “The Shock of the New” television series — which was broadcast in 1981. It took him until 1992 to enlist a backer — the BBC, not PBS, which added to the BBC funding, did Time, later.

Hughes told me much more in the course of our interview, worth reading if you appreciate Hughes — which artists he regrets leaving out, how he filmed at Monticello, why producers changed locations between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m., why he tied his choices to the land, and so on.

It’s worth reading, actually, even if you don’t like Hughes, and many people don’t. Even his detractors, however, agree that he made people go look at art, which is a good thing.

 

Detroit Institute of Arts Has A Future — UPDATED

Voters in Michigan have given the Detroit Institute of Arts a ten-year lifeline. Local reports, including this one in  the Detroit Free Press, say the milage tax passed easily in Wayne and Oakland counties, and by a very slim margin in Macomb county.

That’s good enough: the DIA will now receive about $23 million a year from locals, and Graham Beal, the director, told me two weeks ago that “the tax is levied in December, and we will start getting funds in January.”

It wasn’t easy, though: As Mark Stryker of the Free Press posted in an online story that when I read it was timed at 5:53 p.m. yesterday, supporters of the millage, which I explained here and here, were making calls seeking support among voters in Macomb — rightly so. DIA  Executive Vice President Annmarie Erickson, told Stryker: “We’ve been phone banking every day and every night for the past 10 days. Right now we have 13 volunteers making calls.” She said she was “really nervous” because the results all depended on turnout.

But the end — more about which in a minute — must have been sweet. The DIA had worked hard, getting endorsements from the Detroit News, Crain’s Detroit Business, the local Chamber of Commerce and dozens of unions, as well as the Free Press.

In July, it  had printed an editorial, Don’t Let the DIA Shut Down, that began, “Losing the Detroit Institute of Arts is not an option.” (That photo, above, was published alongside the edit online.) Later, it noted:

Consider the alternative. Michigan would have to live with the shame of mothballing a collection that still ranks among the top six in the country. Some of the museum’s finest pieces might travel as part of special exhibitions, accessible in distant cities but not in their hometown. Others, including the world-renowned Rivera Court, might simply disappear from public view or be available only on a tightly restricted schedule.

The edit recounts much of the back story (which I also covered) and then hits hard:

This is the time to commit, as a region, to maintaining more than a century’s worth of artwork, much of it in the form of gifts from some of the region’s most renowned families, and to ensuring that it can be viewed for as many hours a day as possible. More than 4 million people — young families just starting out, schoolchildren, senior citizens and many others with tight budgets — would be able to walk in freely whenever and as often as they choose to do so….

A great art collection like this can expand the horizons of children. Sometimes a single piece can rearrange how you see the world….

Adults, too. 

Of course, the DIA’s fundraising work continues — ideally, it should have a $400 million operating endowment, to throw off about $20 million a year. That now stands at about $89 million. The DIA has used $300 million as a goal, according to other press reports, but I hope it can aim higher.  

UPDATE: Today, the DIA website extends three big THANK YOUs to residents of the three counties — plus that Love button  — and is already offering them free admission and other benefits.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Free Press

Syria’s Cultural Heritage Under Threat: Sadly, No Surprise

We knew this was coming: Political troubles in Syria are causing damage to the country’s ancient treasures.

As the inimitable foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, now working for The Independent but with experience at British newspapers including The Times and the Sunday Express, wrote in Sunday’s paper:

The priceless treasures of Syria’s history – of Crusader castles, ancient mosques and churches, Roman mosaics, the renowned “Dead Cities” of the north and museums stuffed with antiquities – have fallen prey to looters and destruction by armed rebels and government militias as fighting envelops the country. While the monuments and museums of the two great cities of Damascus and Aleppo have so far largely been spared, reports from across Syria tell of irreparable damage to heritage sites that have no equal in the Middle East.

Even the magnificent castle of Krak des Chevaliers – described by Lawrence of Arabia as “perhaps the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world” and which Saladin could not capture – has been shelled by the Syrian army, damaging the Crusader chapel inside.

Fisk’s article, headlined Syria’s Ancient Treasures Pulverised, goes on to detail some damage and the reasons why — e.g., armed rebel hiding behind ancient wall, thinking that the Syrian Army would not blast them, wrongly. They did.

He quotes Joanne Farchakh, “a Lebanese archaeologist who also investigated the destruction and plundering of Iraq’s historical treasures after 2003, and helped the Baghdad museum to reclaim some of its stolen artifacts,” calling the losses “catastrophic.” Then, she adds:

One of the problems is that for 10 years before the war, the Syrian regime established 25 cultural museums all over the country to encourage tourism and to keep valuable objects on these sites – many placed stone monuments in outside gardens, partly to prove that the regime was strong enough to protect them. Now the Homs museum has been looted – by rebels and by government militias, who knows? – and antique dealers are telling me that the markets of Jordan and Turkey are flooded with artifacts from Syria.

Fisk, who has lived in the Middle East for more than 30 years, primarily in Beirut, places these battles in a historical context, noting that it has all happened before so many times. He concludes by saying we need inventories of what’s in national museums and on ancient sites. A mild remedy, I’d say.

Interpol issued an alert about Syria in May, calling for “vigilance of its 190 member countries as to the risk of illicit trafficking in cultural goods from Syria and neighbouring countries.” On July 27, the Director-General of UNESCO called for the protection of Aleppo, where fighting has been fierce.  Last month, the Association of Art Museum Directors issued a statement deploring the destruction of ancient sites in Northern Mali, a few days after articles in The New York Times about the situation there.

Nothing about Syria as of this moment (guess they are waiting for confirmation of the damage by the Times), though AAMD did speak up when Iraqi and Egyptian heritage was under threat. Nothing on the site of the American Institute of Archaeologists either…or the World Monuments Fund.

Not that I believe that such statements — other than Interpol’s warning — have much effect. But they do focus attention on the issue, and that is usually good.

Photo Credits: Roman Theater in Borsa, courtesy of The Independent (top); Wikipedia (bottom)

More Creativity For The Delaware Art Museum’s Centennial

For a smallish museum, the Delaware Art Museum has gotten a lot of attention from me on this blog. That’s because it has often been creative, and over the weekend I learned of another example worth remarking about –partley becauses it gets visitors to focus on the permanent collection — thanks to Edward Sozanski, the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s contributing art critic.

Sozanski’s story, Delaware Art Museum and How It Grew, outlines where and how the museum got parts of  its collections. The roots go back to the death of local illustrator  Howard Pyle, which a group of locals bought from his widow for what became the museum, and continue through other gifts, notably of Pre-Raphaelite paintings from the family of Samuel Bancroft Jr. and of a group of more than 5,000 works Helen Farr Sloan, the widow of John Sloan. They provide evidence for the simple fact that, as the article says, “the majority of acquisitions are gifts or bequests; few museums can afford to buy much of anything that’s worth bragging about. Furthermore, a few major gifts prove to be the catalysts around which the collection accrues, like a coral colony.”

But there’s more, and that’s the creative part — how Delaware has chose to display “100 Works for 100 Years,” in celebration of its centennial. When the museum announced the exhibition in April, I somehow missed this aspect. As Sozanski describes it (I obviously haven’t seen it myself), the exhibition is

… not gathered together in the special exhibitions space but distributed throughout the building, even overflowing into the Copeland sculpture garden.

As if on a treasure hunt, visitors proceed with a map-checklist. With one noteworthy exception, all 100 objects are found in the galleries where they normally reside; each is identified by a special label, easily recognized.

It’s these labels that explain how the museum acquired each object, through gift, bequest, or purchase.

Online, visitors will find a map listing the 100 works and their locations. They will also find audio clips about the works, recorded by “community members” including the First Lady of Delaware, the conductor of the Delaware Symphony, a charter school student, the state’s poet laureate, and others. One by Danielle Rice, the museum’s Executive Director, discusses The Return of Tobias, by Benjamin West, pictured here.

Something similar to that tactic, non-experts commenting on paintings was tried notably with Leonardo Live, the documentary made for Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, shown at the National Gallery in London several months back to mixed results. I know that other museums have done so as well. Some have had non-experts  write labels. When I’ve heard or seen these efforts, most seem to fall short, for me at least.

But the treasure hunt aspect of this show seems to be handled very well. It can be followed or, seems to me, ignored, as each visitor prefers.

Add this to previous posts, which include pop-up painting reproductions around the state and a battle of the sexes contest to see if people can really tell who painted a picture, and the Delaware Art Museum seems to me to be on a roll.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum

 

Stay Tuned: News Coming About MOCA This Week

The Los Angeles Times is back on the MOCA case. Over the weekend (today’s paper, I think, but online yesterday), they let director Jeffrey Deitch have another stab at telling his side of the story, which he has been unable to do successfully a couple of times in the past. Before we get to that, though, he did suggest that the week ahead would bring developments. The article’s penultimate paragraph says:

Deitch says that two “significant’ new trustees will join the board within days, and he intends to recruit new artists to the board to replace Ed Ruscha, Catherine Opie, Barbara Kruger and John Baldessari. The core of his board and staff, he declares, is now fully behind him.

I find his locutions amusing. Does he think other trustees are insignificant?

But let’s let that pass, and wait to see who these people are: their names will be telling. Would any artist sign up now? Would truly independent people, unbeholden to megapatron Eli Broad, sign up? We’ll see.

In the article, Deitch tries to defend his stance and his record at MOCA — noting that he has boosted attendance to record levels, is taming the museum’s budget troubles, and is generating scholarship for such exhibits as The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Andy Warhol (on view through Aug. 20).

But the article’s sources are very telling. On Deitch’s side, the paper cites “Aaron Rose, who co-curated “Art in the Streets,” MOCA’s exhibition on the history of graffiti and street art, for Deitch” and artist Shepard Fairey, who has a contract to develop a graphic identity for MOCA. Not exactly unbeholden to Deitch, are they?

On the other side, there’s Lenore S. Greenberg, a MOCA life trustee, who “says the museum’s problems stem from Deitch’s programming decisions as well as new board members who ‘are not familiar with what their responsibilities are’ ” and then added, “The board is dysfunctional, and I don’t think the director is functional either.”

She’s a significant trustee.