Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

“Art Is Everywhere” — Or Could Be

Starting today, residents and visitors to Delaware will see reproductions of paintings from the Delaware Art Museum on main streets and other open-air spaces in three counties. This “pop-up” exhibition is part of the museum’s celebration of its 100th anniversary year, which began last November.

The reproductions  of Edward Hopper’s Summertime (at left), Winslow Homer’s Milking Time and 13 other works of art are printed to scale and framed. In a press release, the museum’s Executive Director Danielle Rice said that “By sharing reproductions of some of our most beloved works of art, we’re hoping Art is Everywhere will spark curiosity and inspire both new and current visitors.” A map of the installations is available online, and there’s a list on the museum’s website exhibitions page.

As long as the reproductions are good — the exhibition is sponsored by the printer,  Aztec Printing & Design — I like this idea. I have since the Detroit Institute of Arts did the same thing on a larger scale (40 paintings)  in 2010, and called it DIA:  Inside|Out. (More details are here.)

At the time, I criticized the DIA for missing the opportunity to solicit small donations via texting from passers-by. One commenter then told me that was too expensive (a surprise because other museums have successfully used texting, such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for its drive to purchase Lime Green Icicle by Dale Chihuly). And the DIA, if I recall correctly, did not comment publicly but told me privately that Inside|Out wasn’t used to fundraise because the museum had recently completed a large campaign and that the outdoor show, marking its 125th anniversary, was outreach. That’s fair.

At the time, the DIA said it was “the only museum in the country doing it, though the idea came from the National Gallery in London’s 2005 program where they posted reproductions of their masterpieces around SoHo” and said it was “wildly successful.”

So the Delaware Art Museum gets a pass on fundraising, thanks to the DIA. But I must quibble a bit with the selections. Although the museum says it is “best known for its large collection of British Pre-Raphaelite art, works by Wilmington-native Howard Pyle and fellow American illustrators, and urban landscapes by John Sloan and his circle,” how come five of the 15 selected works are by Pyle? And five by Pre-Rapahaelites?

Only one is by Sloan, a better artist than Pyle; and the Delaware museum owns “the largest collection of art by Sloan, as well as the John Sloan Manuscript Collection, a treasure trove of archival materials.” That’s Sloan’s Spring Rain at right.

I know the Delaware Art Museum is more varied than this selection, and while I believe in stressing one’s strengths, maybe this wasn’t the time for that.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum

 

 

 

Kimerly Rorschach Gets The Job

Just out now:  The Seattle Art Museum has appointed Kimerly Rorschach as the museum’s new Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director.

Rorschach was the runner-up for the director’s job at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which went to Gary Tinterow.

Rorschach has been the Mary Duke Biddle Trent and James H. Semans Director of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University since 2004. She moves to SAM in the fall.

Press release is here.

Rorschach recently became president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, succeeding Dan Monroe of the Peabody Essex Museum.

According to the museum’s release,

At the Nasher, Rorschach partnered with institutions from across the country and around the world to develop a program of high-profile and high impact exhibitions, from the 2008 exhibition El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III, organized in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-1918 in 2010, a partnership with the Tate Britain and Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. Among her current exhibition projects are The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, which includes works by David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Christian Marclay, Dario Robleto, and more and is currently on view at Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery; and Wangechi Mutu: Walk This Wayopening in 2013 and traveling to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The strong exhibition program established by Rorschach has been accompanied by a series of in-depth scholarly catalogues that are distributed worldwide.

That’s a pretty good track record, especially for a university museum.

I wish her luck there. Her predecessor, Derrick Cartwright, resigned in May 2011 after about two years in the job amid rumors that the museum’s financial situation was worse than he was given reason to believe.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Duke

 

Banner Year For The Met: Record Attendance

The Metropolitan Museum of Art* just released its attendance for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2012, and all I can say (up here) is congratulations: 2012 was a barn-burner, with some 6.28 million visits, including those to The Cloisters museum and gardens. That is more than any year since the Met began tracking attendance more than 40 years ago, it says.

Last fiscal year, total visitors were about 600,000 fewer.

And here’s another tidbit worth noting: Membership has now reached a record-breaking 170,000.

There were reasons, starting with the new galleries for Islamic art, inaugurated last Nov.1, and the opening of the final portion of the refurbished and reinstalled American wing, which opened in mid-January. These two gallery suites attracted 593,000 and 365,000 visitors respectively.

But exhibitions did very well, too:

  • The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde drew 324,000 visitors;
  • The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini: 205,000
  • Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City: 179,000
  • Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations: 166,000
  • The Game of Kings: Medieval Ivory Chessmen from the Isle of Lewis at The Cloisters (97,000)

Saraceno and Schiaparelli and Prada are still on view. It’s worth noting, too, how well the Cloisters did with the little chessmen. Although the Steins (including Matisse’s Woman With A Hat, right) did well, I’m disappointed that the show did not fare as well as, say, Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which between April 27 and August 15, 2010, attracted 703,256 visitors. The Steins was a traveling show, with loans from all over and a powerful narrative — but not that Picasso name. The Picassos looked great, but the museum does own them all.

FY 2012 also benefited from the final five weeks, with extended hours, of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. The Costume Institute’s Schiaparelli/Prada is far less crowded, but it’s still a great show — better than I ever expected.

The Met’s release also notes that its website “had 44 million visits in Fiscal Year 2012. The Museum’s Facebook page now has more than 677,000 fans and its Twitter feed has more than 471,000 followers.”

Final note (for now): The Met raised its suggested price to $25 about a year ago, and that hasn’t seemed to deter visitors much, though I’d like to know what the average contribution is now.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Met

* I consult to a Foundation that supports the Met

 

Las Vegas Does Spend on Culture — Just Not Art Museums

The photo was pretty astonishing, and so was the pricetag: $470 million. As I caught up on newspapers I’d missed while I was away last week, I came upon an article in last Sunday’s New York Times headlined Las Vegas Becomes As Much Liszt as Liberace, illustrated by a gorgeous interior photograph of the city’s new performing arts center.

I’ve written here several times about the lack of an art museum in Las Vegas, a city of 1.8 million people and plenty of tourists. The Las Vegas Art Museum closed for lack of interest in early 2009; a proposed contemporary art museum was abandoned even while the designated sculpture park sat empty; plenty of money was going instead to two museums about the Mob in Vegas; and the Southern Nevada Museum was getting just a handful of visitors a day — ok, two to three handfuls.  (See also here.)

So the idea of a center for classical music in this city that lacked one caught my attention.

After my posts on the museum situation in Las Vegas, commenters had often written in to make excuses, some valid. Last June, following the post about the Southern Nevada Museum, one commenter noted that Las Vegas residents are often transients, aiming to move in a few years and unwilling therefore to invest in cultural activities in the community. Another said visitors to Las Vegas are not interested in art. And another wrote:

It’s hard to get public support for the arts in Nevada. NV is a state with little public funding of ANYTHING, even when the economy is good….

How to square that with the Times article, which included these passages:

When the Smith Center for the Performing Arts opened in Las Vegas in March, Jennifer Hudson was on the program and Neil Patrick Harris was the master of ceremonies. But it was Joshua Bell, the classical violinist, who drew the most applause from the homegrown audience, cheering what seemed a moment of arrival for a city whose cultural association is more likely to be Liberace than Liszt.

…For more than 25 years, Las Vegas has laid claim to being the entertainment capital of the nation. But it has presented a very specific kind of entertainment — elaborate, mass-market, big-ticket showstoppers like Cirque du Soleil, Elton John, Celine Dion and Siegfried & Roy. And it has been aimed at a very specific audience: tourists who come to the Strip, as opposed to the people who live here.

Las Vegas had the unwelcome distinction of being the largest city in the nation without a major performing arts center.

Sounds familiar. So how did this supposed cultural wasteland get a $470 million performing arts center?

…A delegation of Las Vegas civic leaders toured concert halls around the world — La Scala in Milan, the Opera House in Budapest, Carnegie Hall in New York — in search of inspiration as they conceived what was in effect their dream hall….

The financing of the project suggests the civic hunger: $150 million was donated from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, a philanthropic organization in Nevada whose president is Fred W. Smith, a retired newspaper executive and for whom the center is named. Fifty-seven families and individuals wrote checks of at least $1 million. Another $150 million is to be raised through a tax on airport car rentals, approved by the State Legislature….

The Smith Center looks beautiful — check out the slide show run by the Los Angeles Times last March, as well as the photos here.

So why can the performing arts raise money but not the visual arts? I suspect one reason is the edifice complex: donors will give to build a building, especially if some hall, some rehearsal space, some staircase, is named for them. But why the rental tax for this and not for art? Where is the hunger for great visual art?

Of course it remains to be seen if the likes of Joshua Bell and Yo-Yo Ma continue to sell out, or whether the Smith, like some other performing arts venues, is forced to go pop. I’m rooting for classical. Perhaps a successful track record will convince civic leaders that a city as big as Las Vegas must also elevate its visual art offerings.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Las Vegas Weekly (top) and Las Vegas Sun (bottom)

 

 

 

Catching Up On The New Parrish Museum

Tomorrow night, the Parrish Art Museum holds its last midsummer benefit in its Italianate mansion home in Southampton, Long Island — by next summer, the Parrish will have moved to its new digs in nearby Water Mill.

This has been a long time coming, as followers will recall — because its first expansion plan was scrapped  by the economic crisis: too big, too involved, too expensive. The new new Parrish, which will open next November, is smaller, less difficult to maintain, and still — probably — beautiful. For once, a museum blinked, reconsidered, and reconfigured to match its resouces. That’s a good thing, and I wish more over-expanded museums had done that.

You can read more about the current situation in an article I wrote, commissioned by Hamptons Magazine, out today.

One main gain in the new building is this:

November will bring the first-ever installation featuring art from all periods in the Parrish’s 2,600-work permanent collection. Many will be completely new to visitors, including some from the more than 30 works that have been acquired in the ongoing “Campaign for Art.” They include a large Louise Nevelson sculpture, Dorothea Rockburne’s Touchstone and Rainer Fetting’s Two Sunsets in East Hampton. [Terrie] Sultan, like every museum director, has her eye on more. “We covet a major Jackson Pollock, and some more great Abstract Expressionism pieces,” she says. “We have some, but it would be nice to have more works by Fischl, Salle, Bleckner, Close, Alice Aycock….”

After the first year, when visitors flock to new museums just because they are new, visitorship usually drops and become exhibition-driven. The Parrish should have plenty of ammunition within its permanent collection to create related exhibitions that will be fresh. It has already begun that, with shows of still lifes and artists like Dorothea Rockburne in the last few years. The new Parrish needs to be ambitious without ignoring its roots in the art of artists who lived and worked on Long Island. That leaves it plenty of territory to explore.

 Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Parrish Museum