Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

The Art of the Enlightenment Ends In Beijing, With A Whimper?

On Saturday, The Art of the Enlightenment exhibition closed in Beijing. How did it do?

Organized by by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen München Collections, along with the National Museum of China, where it has been on view for a yeaer, the exhibition featured “artworks in which the central ideas of the Enlightenment are visible, their influence on the visual arts, and the impact they have had on the artistic revolutions of the 18th century until the present.” It covered all the art, from painting and sculptures to graphics and craft, fashion and scientific instruments. Among the artists represented were  Friedrich, Gainsborough (his Marsham Children is below), Goya, Greuze, Hogarth, Houdon, Kauffmann, Piranesi, Raeburn, and Watteau.

It was hailed as an event, a show that would reveal to the Chinese the cultural values of the Enlightenment. That role took on added weight, and baggage, when the Chinese imprisoned artist Ai Weiwei last year. Some people, if I recall correctly, even suggested pulling the show from the Chinese museum.

So I was more than curious to check out the attendance, which the German museums on Mar. 23 said had exceeded 450,000 — not bad, except that that was over an entire year. The Germans nonetheless pretty much declared it a success; Michael Eissenhauer, Director General of the Berlin museum, said in a statement, “I am particularly pleased about the positive reactions from visitors who have been fascinated by and have thought intensively about the works.”

There are no Beijing museums on The Art Newspaper’s just-published Exhibition and Museum attendance list. But the Shanghai Museum is there, and it offers a comparison. Nearly 611,300 people attended a Maori treasures show that ran from July 21 to Nov. 6, about three months.  More than 349,000 visited a show called Alexandre Perrier: Mountains and Lakes that ran from Sept. 21 to Nov. 27, about two months.

Cornelia Pieper, Germany’s Minister of State in the Foreign Office, and Zhao Shaohua, Deputy Minister of Culture for the People’s Republic of China, marked the official conclusion of the exhibition in a ceremony on Mar. 25 that also began the last in a series of five dialogues on the topic.

Meantime, I checked China Daily, the state English-language newspaper, for coverage — but found none, at least in the U.S. edition.  The last mention I could find was in late February, when a story headlined “Ties Bind China and Germany” talked about a year of cultural exchange and mentioned the show in passing.

All in all, I’d therefore guess that some Chinese people in Beijing stayed away from the Enlightenment show, perhaps for political reasons. But here’s the good news: the exhibition website provides much information about the Enlightenment, in English, German and Mandarin, and there’s no telling how many people visited that.

 Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

 

 

 

A Telling Moment For Crystal Bridges

Most reviews of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, including my own in the Wall Street Journal, noted that the best works came in the first few pavilions, before the art from the ’50s through now. I noted that Alice Walton, the benefactor, had passed up opportunities to buy major works by Mark Roth, Andy Warhol and Clyfford Still in the last few years. Her heart, I am guessing, just wasn’t in that period of art — though officials in Bentonville more often bemoaned the lack of opportunity.

Now they have another chance, and we shall see what happens. As reported in today’s New York Times, Christie’s will soon auction many works from the collection of David and Geraldine Pincus. The works on the block include at least two major works that would look great in Crystal Bridges.

One is Rothko’s Orange, Red, Yellow from 1961, an 8 ft by 7 ft painting of orange and red. Estimate: $35 million to $45 million.

The other, possibly more likely, is Pollock’s No. 28 (at right), from 1951, estimated at $20 million to $30 million, which was in the Pollock show at the Museum of Modern Art a few years back.

According to Christie’s, the Pincuses bought the work in the late 60s, “from the famed collection of Mr. and Mrs.
Arnold H. Maremont of Chicago, through Harold and Hester Diamond from whom the Pincuses acquired
the work.” It measures 38 x 54 inches and “is distinguished by its black enamel and silver grey paint with pourings and drips of white, red and yellow. There has not been a Jackson Pollock of this quality or scale at auction since 1997.”

It’s pricey, no question. Crystal Bridges likely could not purchase it on its own, without help from Walton, despite it $325 million acquisitions endowment. Will she come up with the money? Or would Geraldine Pincus, the consignor, do a private treaty sale for less money to see the work go to a museum?

 

 

Brooke Astor Leaves $20 Million To The Met

Whoo hoo! The Metropolitan Museum* announced tonight that the Brooke Astor estate has been settled, and it will receive about $20 million. It will, the museum said in a press release, “be used to support the institution’s curatorial programs and art acquisitions, as Mrs. Astor wished.”

I’m sorry to say that I’ve been out, taking in the AIPAD Photography Show New York at the Park Avenue Armory, and have not had time to reflect on this deal.

But that’s the gist. One sticky point, concerning a painting her son Anthony Marshall sold illegitimately, was resolved this way:

As the settlement makes clear, $3 million of the funds assigned to the Metropolitan are given in recognition of the Museum’s claim for proceeds from the sale of a painting from Mrs. Astor’s personal collection—Childe Hassam’s Flags, Fifth Avenue (also known as Up the Avenue from 34th Street, May 1917). Although Mrs. Astor bequeathed this iconic work to the Metropolitan, it was wrongly sold in 2002.  The painting’s current whereabouts are unknown. The Museum continues to regret that it will be unable to display the work for its public as Mrs. Astor so long hoped.

Here’s a link to the Met’s statement on the settlement.

The New York Public Library and Central Park are among the other beneficiaries.

BTW, the AIPAD show looked good: I can’t say I learned of some stunning new photographer, but there was a lot of excellent work on display.

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met 

 

Score Another Point For American Art: Another New Museum

Until I saw the Anschutz Collection on tour a decade or more ago, I didn’t much appreciate Western art. My mistake, because the best of it is very good. And Philip Anschutz has some of the best of it. Now, we’ll all be able to see it again, because in May Anschutz will open the American Museum of Western Art in downtown Denver.

It’s housed in the Navarre Building, built in 1880 and directly across from the Brown Palace. The Victorian building once was a school for girls, then a coed school, then a bordello, then a dining club, then a restaurant. Anschutz bought it in 1997 and restored it. It has been open to the public a couple of hours a week, by appointment, in recent months. In May, it will be open regular hours for walk-ins, though tours by curators will require advanced sign-ups.

Anschutz owns about 650 paintings, made from the early 19th Century to the present, as described on the website:

the museum’s holdings include examples of early American expeditionary painting, Hudson River School and Rocky Mountain School landscapes, 19th century American narrative painting, early American modernism, Expressionism, Cubism and Abstraction, American Regionalism, “New Deal Art”, and even Abstract Expressionism.  

According to the Denver Post,  about 400 of them will be on view, hung in three floors of galleries. The paper also named some of the artists, including Frederic Remington, George Catlin, Charles Marion Russell, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Georgia O’Keeffe and Ernest Blumenschein. It added:

The paintings themselves are cohesive in their collective take on the old West — the work is as journalistic as it is artistic. Crossing from realism to abstraction, the paintings depict lush, hilly landscapes, Indian families, frontier settlers, cavalrymen in battle. They can take a wide view of high desert pueblos or offer a closeup of the patterns on native pottery. They are, at times, earthy, colorful, intimate, violent and serene.

The website has a slideshow preview of some works in the collection, including Thomas Eakins’s Cowboys in the Badlands, above, and there’s also the catalogue for Painters and the American West: the Anschutz Collection, which was shown at the Denver Art Museum in 2000.

 Need I say it? This is great news for Denver and for American art, which is having a moment in the sun — the new wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the renovated wing at the Met, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

 

Hilton Kramer, RIP — UPDATED

Right or wrong, Hilton Kramer was usually sure. I applaud that in an arts critic. He was also enlightening — we learned from him, even when we disagreed. The visual art world, I believe and have written, needs better criticism — Kramer showed a way.

In his New York Times obit, now on the website, William Grimes quotes Roger Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion, which Kramer served as founding editor, saying “He called it as he saw it — an increasingly rare virtue in today’s culture.” I agree. Or, criticism simply asserts, without reasoning, without arguing. Not Kramer; he argued.

Later, Kimball added, ““He was a high modernist, but he embraced a rather diverse lot that ran the gamut from Richard Pousette-Dart to Pollock to Matisse to the Russian constructivists.”

I suspect that we could all learn something from Kramer’s art essays, which have been republished, Grimes notes, in four collections: “The Age of the Avant-Garde: An Art Chronicle of 1956-1972” (1973); “The Revenge of the Philistines: Art and Culture, 1972-1984” (1985), “The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War” (1999); and “The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985-2005” (2006).

The New Criterion says it will devote its May issue to Kramer, and in the meantime here is Kimball’s announcement of Kramer’s death.

I didn’t know Kramer, but I read him, especially in his prime. The sad part about his career is that he became too predictable in his later years.

UPDATE: The New Criterion has compiled a list of some of his articles, with links to them, here.