Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Britain’s Most Generous Philanthropist: An Artist?

Surprise: Britain’s annual giving list places an artist — David Hockney — at the top of the roster for 2011.

The list, published by the Sunday Times, calculates rank based on the amount of wealth given away as a proportion of overall income, not on absolute value. But Hockney does well on either score, if you allow for the fact that his gifts were of his own art. He gave away £78.1m worth of paintings to charitable causes, which is more than double his estimated £34m wealth.

Hockney also gave away £730,000 in cash through his David Hockney Foundation, whose website is currently under construction. A listing for it at Charities Direct, however, says that it was founded in 2008 with a goal of “The education of the public in the appreciation of art and in particular the creative art of today.” Its “total funds” as of December 2010 were £77.51m.

What I could not determine was how values were placed on Hockney’s gifts — and by whom.

Hockney’s recent exhibition at the Royal Academy, which led to a dispute over what art is with Damien Hirst, did well, according to one of the reports on the philanthropy rankings — before closing on Apr. 9, it attracted more than a half-million visitors and featured some works that belong to the foundation. Which raises another question — of those assets (total funds), how much is art? Will he sell any to put cash into education of the public?

And the larger question is this: many artists are rich nowadays. Are others actively giving away money?

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Third Sector

The Unfortunate Sides Of “The Scream” Auction

With the spring auction season about to move into high gear, everyone’s talking about The Scream, one of four versions Edvard Munch made of the now-iconic image. It comes up for sale on Wednesday night, and like others I did a double-take when I first learned of Sotheby’s titanic estimate — $80 million, the highest presale number Sotheby’s has ever set. (It didn’t even bother with “Estimate on Request,” its normal  but unfortunate practice for such high estimates.)

Like the unnamed art historians cited by The New York Times in today’s Arts & Leisure section, I don’t think the work is worth that, though I know full well that it’s worth whatever someone is willing to pay. Sotheby’s, presumably, has many interested bidders, and we’ll find soon enough if “interest” translates into cash on the table. The Times piece and one in Friday’s Wall Street Journal discuss who might be interested (Russians, Asians, Qataris) and the marketing of the piece.

Unless it fails to sell, The Scream now faces an unfortunate fate, imho: when people look at it, they’ll see dollar signs before they see the art. That’s certainly the case with Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which was purchased by Ronald Lauder for his Neue Galerie for $135 million in 2006, as well as with other works that fetched stratospheric numbers (particularly if they sold at auction).

This all depends, of course, on if the public is allowed to see it at all, which depends on who buys The Scream; the buyer’s own circumstances will determine whether and when we see it. It has been 22 years since van Gogh’s Dr. Gachet sold for $82.5 million to the late Ryoei Saito, and we haven’t seen it since.

How much would The Scream have to fetch to exceed that record, the highest reached at public auction, in comparable dollars? According to the U.S. Inflation Calculator, $82.5 million then would be $144.8 million today.

That, of course, isn’t the record for all sales. If the transaction went through — and there’s talk that it did not – that honor belongs to Cezanne’s Card Players, which reportedly sold to the royal family of Qatar last year for $250 million.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Sotheby’s

 

 

 

Duane Hanson Conserved, And That’s A Challenge And A Tale

If recent exhibitions give a clue, museums seem to think that visitors want to know more about conservation — and I think they’re right. Conservation obviously provides a window on process, on how the artist did it, on creativity.  

Recently the Milwaukee Art Museum conserved a sculpture by Duane Hanson, which it had agreed to lend to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for an exhibition called LifeLike — “artworks based on commonplace objects and situations, which are startlingly realistic, often playful, and sometimes surreal.” This job, rather than an exhibition for the conservation work, had a good story behind it, and merited extensive blog post recounting of the process, which I’d like to share. 

Hanson’s hyperrealistic sculptures — beloved by people but often belittled by critics — aren’t easy to tend. They are, in fact, the subject of vandalism at times, with people lifting small items from them. In Milwaukee, for example, the museum conservators had to seek out ballpoint pens from the late 60s and early 70s, because people had taken them from their Janitor (1973). They also had to clean his uniform, which proved highly difficult when they realized they couldn’t remove the clothes without taking apart the sculpture.

Did they or didn’t they? Read the answer here.  

And how do conservators restore the Janitor’s human hair? Says MAM’s Senior Conservator, Jim DeYoung:

We found a letter written in 1974 from Duane Hanson and it demonstrates that he was very involved with the owners of his artwork in their care and maintenance of these artworks. We read that Hanson was not only involved himself, but that he was eager to get other people involved, too. In this case, he had no problem packing human hair into the letter and instructing how to attach the hair with the gluing method and so forth. So this gave us a bit of a road map in what we thought was ethical to do to, how much latitude we had in caring for the artwork, and how much artistic license we had to move ahead with plans to bring the janitor to its original condition.

What to do about that ’60s watch? And his fraying pocket? It’s all on that post, by assistant curator Mel Buchanan. I enjoyed it.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Milwaukee Art Museum

Who’s That Artist, And How Has He Grown?

Who made the works posted at right?

Don’t look yet. I doubt that you’ll know, right off the bat.

I posted these two paintings, with no attribution, in an online group of art historians and connoisseurs on Facebook, and no one guessed correctly. Few people even tried. Hours of head-scratching later, I provided the answer.

It is, of course, Brice Marden. But if I hadn’t signaled the answer by posting a sample of his previous work below, would you have known?

The man has been around a long time, acknowledged as a major American postwar artist, although, as critic Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times in 2006, “He did not make his name by stopping painting in its tracks and setting it off in a radically new direction. There is no emblematic Marden invention, like a Johns flag or Stella stripes or a Warhol silk-screen Elvis, where you can say, There! That changed painting.”

That was at the time of his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which ended with a paint called “The Propitious Gardem of Plane Image, Third Version,” a larger, six-panel work much like the one below.  Smith called this series “glorious.” And so they were.

And now he has managed to surprise again, totally. These images come from an exhibition now on view through June 23 at Matthew Marks Gallery. They are two of:

fifteen new paintings in oil on marble, which Marden completed last year on the Greek island of Hydra…Reflecting the light and landscape of Greece, these paintings feature vibrant colors and geometric compositions, which subtly incorporate each piece of marble’s natural variations. Marden’s earlier series of paintings on marble, completed over a six-year period between 1981 and 1987, played a principal role in the transition from his early monochromatic paintings to the later calligraphic work.

More images are here.

You can never really tell how good something is without seeing the works in person — and I haven’t seen these yet. I didn’t cotton to this series at first, and I wouldn’t (yet) call them glorious. They are quiet, subtle. They’re growing on me, and based on a few comments I received from art historians, I’m not alone.

The headline from Smith’s 2006 review again (still?) seems apt: “The Man Who Persevered When Painting Was Stalled.”

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Matthew Marks 

 

 

 

“Portrait of Wally” Is Back In The News, Triggering A Few Thoughts — UPDATED

When Egon Schiele painted his tender “Portrait of Wally,” his mistress, exactly 100 years ago, I am sure he never imagined her ensuing notoriety – for “Wally,” subject of multi-decade ownership battle,  is again in the news. This time, perhaps, it’s in a good way. A documentary about her case will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this weekend.

To refresh, briefly: Wally is the painting that was on view in 1997 in the Rudolf Leopold collection at the Museum of Modern Art, then claimed by the heirs of Lea Bondi Jaray, because it was seized by a Nazi and then tangled in Austrian collections and politics. The fight for Wally was finally resolved in 2010, with a settlement favoring the heirs.

No other restitution case has had as much as an impact on the way we view Nazi art cases as Wally. She changed everything.

I was there at the beginning — it was my article in The New York Times about Leopold that brought her plight to the attention of the world and triggered everything else. But as Jane Kallir, the dealer who tipped me to the Nazi connection at the exhibition opening, says in the film, “That was the beginning of events that I think none of us in our wildest dreams could have anticipated at that moment.”

How this case came to dominate involves the action of the U.S. government, as I explain in a short opinion piece published today by The Art Newspaper. It also involves, imho, the way MoMA in particular and other museums in general responded to the heirs’ claim — which was to side, without questioning what was right, with the Leopold Collection.

I recommend the film, though it’s not perfect (and I should disclose here that I am in it), not least because it shows that some museums, at least, and some museum people, still have some soul-searching to do. I believe that notwithstanding the fact that some claims for Nazi-looted art have been specious and over-reaching.

I’m also still troubled that much of the rest of the issues I raised in that 1997 article — about the way Leopold “conserved” his paintings and cared for them, or not — were totally overshadowed by the Nazi story. He’s dead now, of course, and his collection is in the hands of professionals. But I’ve always wondered if other collectors are also mistreating art they now own, but which eventually will belong to the ages.

UPDATE, 4/25: I’m happy to report that Howard Spiegler of Herrick, Feinstein, the key lawyer for the Bondi heirs, has reconnected with me and sent along his own article on the ramifications of the Wally case. Here’s a link to it, in Vol. 7 of his firm’s Art & Advocacy. Herrick’s Art Law Group has published such bulletins on its website (here) and a very useful accounting of all resolved World War II-related art claims.