Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Schimmel, Part 2: MOCA Tries Damage Control And Fails Miserably

Late Friday, the Museum of Contemporary Art issued a press release – not in its press room, but posted on its blog, which is appropriately (in this case) named “The Curve,” about the abrupt and worrying departure of Paul Schimmel, their chief curator, last week.  You can tell how guilty the board and the administration is feeling by how they couched it.

First, they insisted it was a resignation, not a firing — despite the fact the Schimmel was called to the office of Eli Broad (right), the financier who gave MOCA a lifeline in Decemberm, 2008, to learn of his fate. Wouldn’t you have liked to be a fly on the wall to hear that conversation?

Second, they said the press release was drafted with Schimmel.

Third, they said he would work for MOCA as an independent curator in the future, finishing at least one of this current exhibition projects, Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962, which opens in September.

Fourth, they named a gallery in the Geffen Contemporary after him.

The release did not disclose his departing pay package, however, which I would guess could be substantial (for a museum) and probably includes hush money aka a nondisparagement clause. So we may never really know what happened.

Nor did the release say what will happen to the Richard Hamilton retrospective that Schimmel has been co-curating with partners at the Tate Modern in London and Reina Sofia in Madrid.

If you have the stomach or want a good laugh, you can read the release here.  Or you can read Jori Finkel in the LATimes here.

There is no conceivable way to construe the week’s events as anything less than dysfunction at MOCA. There is an obvious dichotomy of vision between director Jeffrey Deitch and Schimmel, and a board that seems to have taken over when those two couldn’t work it out. Given the choice between the commercial gallerist they hired and the guy who has been there, mostly as chief curator and the producer of some of its most well-received shows,  in the last 25 years, they went — naturally — with their hire.

Trustees are not fooling anyone.  As of this writing, for example, the Curve post has elicited 24 comments from MOCA followers: 23 back Schimmel (several say fire Deitch), and one says let’s move on. None agree with the “resignation.”

Worse, this all proves Deitch is either a puppet or a coward, and possibly both. If he’s the boss, he should have dealt with his own chief curator — whether or not they were still speaking.

If the board thought they were insulating Deitch from this decision, they made a mistake. It will take MOCA a long time to recover from this.

 

 

Paul Schimmel: Fired! — UPDATED TWICE

Yikes: According to the Los Angeles Times:

Paul Schimmel, the longtime chief curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and one of the most prominent museum curators in the United States, was fired Wednesday.

The firing was made by the museum’s board of trustees and is effective immediately….

Here’s the link to more, though there’s not much.

UPDATE: And here’s the story that came later, which noted that he disagreed often with director Jeffrey Deitch and said:

Schimmel, who headed the MOCA curatorial staff for 22 years, was let go Wednesday after a vote of the museum board. According to several sources, he was summoned to the office of billionaire art collector and philanthropist Eli Broad, MOCA’s top funder, and told of the board’s decision.

Schimmel is indeed one of the best-known contemporary curators in the U.S., and I would add one of the most respected.  We await the details. Not surprisingly, there’s nothing on the museum’s website.

UPDATE2: Here are Paul’s parting words:

Dear friends and colleagues,
For once I’ve decided to try and post something of some consequence, rather than pictures of dogs and children. I want to talk about my last day as Chief Curator of MOCA. It has been an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have been part of this museum. I have counted each day of my 22 years at MOCA as truly special, and the work of helping to define a gro…wing institution and identify a rapidly changing community of artists, both here in Los Angeles and internationally, has been both a great pleasure and a great privilege.Working at MOCA has meant working with exceptional people, first and foremost the artists with whom I have collaborated over the years and who have made me the curator I am today. There are so many of you out there—artists, museum professionals, dealers, collectors, and patrons—who have meant a great deal to me and to the success that I’ve had at MOCA. And to all of you within the family of MOCA itself, I have found enormous support and opportunity—one that I can’t imagine could have been any better, or will be any better anywhere else. My colleagues in the Curatorial Department, many of whom have gone on to other wonderful opportunities, are extraordinarily dedicated people who have done some of their best work here. And the catalogs that we have produced with our publications department are not only great contributions to art historical scholarship, but testaments to the legacy and longevity of MOCA’s outstanding exhibitions.I extend my profound thanks to all MOCA staff past and present, including Richard Koshalek for having brought me to MOCA, as well as to former director Jeremy Strick, all of whom have made the important happen again and again through the years. These colleagues were driven as much by a passion for art and artists as for a desire for MOCA’s individual successes. Together, we have striven to make our shows not just good, not just great, but the best that artists and curators could ever achieve. I also want to recognize the many trustees and patrons how have supported MOCA over the years. Again and again, individuals have stood up to make important contributions to the museum, whether for the success of an exhibition or for the acquisition of a major work into our collection. I know that these last few years of financial crisis have been difficult ones, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your perseverance and dedication; when you love something, you love it unconditionally.I am so grateful that even during these last years that MOCA has been able to realize so many important exhibitions that it had long been committed to—“William Leavitt,” “Suprasensorial,” “Amanda Ross Ho,” “Ends of the Earth,” and the upcoming “Blues for Smoke” exhibition, as well as my exhibition “Destroying the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962.” After over 20 years, I feel such pride and honor to have been the Chief Curator at MOCA, and I hope that for the next 20 years, MOCA’s staff and trustees can feel the same sense of privilege and accomplishment that I have.

With love,

Paul

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the LA Times

Does Nicholas Serota Have The Only Formula For the Future? UPDATED

Calvin Tomkins profiles Nicholas Serota, longtime head of the Tate Gallery (-ies, really), in this week’s New Yorker, and it’s largely laudatory, as one might expect. Tomkins doesn’t shy away from saying, straightaway and approvingly, that

­Serota­ has ­been ­widely ­acclaimed— and ­often ­vilified—for­ changing ­the ­culture­ of­ Great­ Britain. The establishment, the press, and the numberless upright citizens who used to regard modern art as a joke, a foreign-born absurdity practiced by incompetents or charlatans, now embrace it with almost unseemly fervor. Tate Modern, the Tate’s new building for twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, which opened in 2000 in a derelict power station on the south side of the Thames, draws about five million visitors a year, making it the world’s most heavily attended modern-art museum.

Tompkins chronicles Serota’s rise to these heights, changing from an economics major at Cambridge to art history; running Whitechapel Gallery in the East End; co-organizing shows like ­“A ­New­ Spirit ­in­Painting,”­ at ­the ­Royal ­Academy in 1981, with ­work by the likes of deKooning, Bacon and Richter; inviting artists into the galleries during his first days at the Tate; raising private money for the Tate Modern; etc., etc. It’s not a puff piece, but you know exactly where Tomkins stands.

I’m fine with that. Serota has done marvelous things for art in London. What makes me worry a little is signaled in the headline and deck: “The Modern Man: How the Tate Gallery’s Nicholas Serota is reinventing the museum.” Those definite articles imply that his way is it — he’s leading everyone else to the museum of the future.

If so, various revealing sentences comes as early as the first column. Describing the scene inside the Tate Modern, Tomkins writes about its visitors:

They drifted around in pairs or small groups—hardly anyone was alone—chatting convivially, taking pictures of one another with their smartphones, pausing now and then to look at­ a­ work of art. [Boldface mine]

This theme continues in later passages, all challenging the definition of a museum. Examples:

We have many more people than we’d anticipated who want to hear lectures and ask questions, or just spend time here, looking at art, buying ­a ­book, having coffee with­ a­ friend….

For students and young Londoners in their twenties or thirties, the members’ room at Tate Modern is one of the cooler places to hang out on Friday and Saturday evenings, when the museum stays open until 10 P.M. The museum as a social environment, where people interact with art and with one another on their own terms, and create their own experiences, might seem to work against the close study of individual works that Serota learned from Michael Jaffe, at Cambridge. “One criticism of this building is that you can’t have an intimate experience with ­a ­work of art,” Serota conceded. “That’s something we are going to address in the new building, where we’ll have some smaller galleries, for photographs and modestly scaled works. But, if you come here at ten or eleven on­ a ­weekday morning, you can still have that experience.”

Later, Tomkins gives his blessing, by quoting an impeccable source:

John Elderfield, the greatly respected, British-born scholar who recently joined the Gagosian Gallery after many years at MOMA, believes that what’s happened at Tate Modern is “a really radical change in howpeople use museums now. It’s not only about looking closely at works of art; it’s moving around within­ a ­sort of cultural spectacle.­I ­have friends who think this is the end of civilization, but­ a lot more people are going to be in the presence of art, and some of them will look at things and be transported by them.” [Boldface mine.]

Hmmm. Does really matter if a lot more people are in the presence of art if they’re not paying attention? No one can predict how big, or small, that “some” will be.

There has to be more than one way to run a museum: Serota has a formula, and a good one, but it’s not the only one.

Here’s the link to the article, though I believe it’s behind a pay wall.

UPDATE: I’ve made a PDF of the article — NewYorker-Serota.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the New Yorker

 

 

 

The Panoramic Star In St. Louis, Now Undergoing Work

The iffy economic environment, as we all know, is causing many museums to be creative, and one good result from that is the recent trend toward turning conservation work into an exhibition. In one way, at least, the St. Louis Art Museum has the biggest example — “Restoring an American Treasure: The Panorama Of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley.” Last summer and again now, since June 8, it has been restoring the work in its special exhibition galleries.

The panorama is a huge thing — 90 inches tall and 348 feet long; that is nearly the same length as the great Gettysburg Cyclorama and more than double the length of the Metropolitan Museum’s “Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles,” by John Vanderlyn, which occupies its own gallery in the American wing.

I explain more about the St. Louis panorama’s history, how it was damaged, and the nature of the conservation work in an article in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Sadly, many of these relics of 19th century visual culture — once extremely popular – have been lost. The St. Louis’s museum’s in the only survivor of six known Mississippi River valley panoramas, for example. And it might have been lost, too.

Its owner was the eccentric amateur archaeologist. Montroville W. Dickeson, who commissioned it and who, starting in 1851, took it on the road as a prop to accompany his speeches, charging 25 cents. He gave it to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, which gave it to the University of Pennsylvania’s University Museum around 1899, along with his archaeological finds and notes. The museum didn’t want it, though, and deaccessioned it in 1953 – fortunately to the St. Louis museum, which had shown it in 1949.

The museum exhibition website has more details and images for each of the scenes.

These artifacts are often fascinating things, and those who’d like to learn more can take a look at a book called The Painted Panorama, or even just check out the Wikipedia page on panoramas, which has some good references and links — e.g. to something  called International Panorama Council. It holds an annual meeting, this year in Pleven, Bulgaria from Sept. 9 to 13th.

The things one learns as a reporter, happily.

Photo credit: Scene 2, Courtesy of the St. Louis Art Museum

Appalling Situation in Berlin: You Can Help – UPDATED WITH PETITION

UPDATE: Please help by signing the petition here; it asks for disclosure of the impact on the Old Masters and a concrete plan for their display in a different building. It does not oppose expanded galleries for modern art.

You may recall that in late 2010, the German collectors, Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch (pictured below in 2009, at an exhibition of some of their collection), signed an agreement with the state of Berlin to bequeath their internationally renowned collection of modern art to the city. It now appears, however, that the conditions were too stringent — and will result in the emptying of the great Berlin Gemaeldegalerie, which houses the State Museums’ world-class old master paintings collection, and its conversion into a museum that would showcase the Pietzsch collection and related works. The Old Masters, mainly, would go into storage — paintings by Durer, Titian, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt, on and on.

Everyone should be appalled by this development — and many in Germany are. They need international support, however, and Jeffrey F. Hamburger, the Kuno Francke Professor of German Art & Culture at Harvard University, is helping to galvanize dissent here. He is seeking signatures from American art historians and museum curators to a protest letter. More on this later.

It is true that the Pietzsch Collection is outstanding. It comprises Surrealist works from Paris and Abstract Expressionist works by the New York School – paintings by Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux and Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newmann, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. among others. At the time of the agreement, it consisted of about 150 paintings, drawings and sculptures, with an estimated value of €120 million. Announcing the deal, Hermann Parzinger, President of the Foundation of Prussian Cultural Heritage, said: 

Today’s agreement is a decisive step towards integrating the Pietzsch Collection into the National Gallery’s collection at the National Museums in Berlin. I am convinced that the Foundation of Prussian Cultural Heritage will find the space to exhibit the works in the way Heiner and Ulla Pietzsch see fit. [Boldface mine.]

The couple wanted their treasure to go to “the National Gallery in particular,” Heiner Pietzsch said at the time. The announcement referenced above also said this:

The agreement will only come into effect under the condition that Berlin city council places the collection, in its entirety, in the hands of the Foundation of Prussian Cultural Heritage as a permanent loan, and that the Foundation guarantees that parts of the collection are placed on permanent display within its own collection of modern art. [Again, boldface mine.]

On June 12, the German government allocated €10 million to renovate the Gemaeldegalerie to accommodate the Pietzsch collection. But the Old Master collection would have to go – some will be moved to the Bode Museum for display amongst sculpture of the same eras, but much more will, under this plan, go into storage until at least 2018, and probably longer, when it is hoped that a new museum space would be built alongside the Bode.

Many fear that, given the financial outlook, such an expansion will not occur by 2018, and all those wonderful pictures would be locked away in storage for a long, long time.

This plan should not stand. I’ll have more information on how to protest it soon.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Getty Images via Zimbio