Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Akron Museum’s Sherman Deaccession: Brave Or Foolhardy?

Christie’s announced a very unusual deaccession the other day: The Akron Art Museum plans to sell one of Cindy Sherman’s most famous images. Dating to 1981, the photo is known officially as Untitled, #96; unofficially as Orange Sweater, and comes from her Centerfolds series. As Christie’s noted in its release, “Another example of this image was sold at Christie’s in May 2011 for $3,890,500, which represents not only a world auction record for Sherman, but also a world record price for any photograph at the time.* The work from the Akron Art Museum is a vintage print in excellent condition and will have a pre-sale estimate of $2,800,000 – $3,800,000.”

Either museum director Mitchell Kahan is brave or foolhardy, I haven’t yet made up my mind.

In its release, Christie’s quotes Kahan saying, “The Akron Art Museum is extremely happy to partner with Christie’s on this sale. The result will be a new acquisitions endowment that generates significant growth for our collection. I am especially looking forward to continuing a commitment to Cindy Sherman by acquiring works made after the famous Centerfolds images.”

I have mixed feelings about this move.

On the “brave” side: Kahan’s goal is admirable — an acquisitions endowment. As I noted recently in an article for The New York Times, too few art museums have sizeable funds to buy art. Moreover, selling a contemporary work is rare. Most museums tend to clean out works from the past when they sell, even though many directors have told me privately that they should be weeding out what they’ve bought since the 1970s. That’s partly because of undiscriminating buying: some museums admit privately to purchasing “one of each” — that is, one example of many artists that somehow got buzz and critical acclaim for a moment, but have since dropped into to the 90 percent of all artists who will be ignored by art history. Little curatorial eye was involved. Now they’re stuck with things in storage that will likely never be shown. But they fear selling for two reasons: they don’t want to offend a living artist and his/her dealer and they fear making a mistake, even if only a public-relations one. 

On the “foolhardy” side: Whatever you may think of Cindy Sherman, the current consensus is that she is an important artist. The Akron museum owns another Sherman work, also from 1981, officially Untitled #93 and nicknamed “The Black Sheets.” But is the one they’re selling better than the one they’re keeping? It is better known. And aren’t collections supposed to have depth? Even if Kahan finds a later work by Sherman, from a different series, might that be less enlightening than showing two from the same series? Meantime, what example is Kahan setting for other museums? Is selling because of the jump in Sherman’s prices so tempting that museums will become active traders? And will other museums miss his subtler message of using the proceeds to acquire in the same area/time period?   

Kahan told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer that adding the proceeds from this picture to the Akron museum’s $2 million acquisitions endowment could boost the amount of money it has to buy art to more than $260,000 a year, and added: “What’s the greater community benefit, keeping the ‘Orange Sweater’ and showing it once every five years, or having a few more million dollars generating money in perpetuity to buy more works of art?”

European Arts Groups Need Money, So Do Ours: A Modest Proposal

Today’s New York Times page one story on arts cuts in Europe addresses something that’s been on my mind for a while. I of course sympathize with arts groups that are having to grapple with sudden declines in the money they receive from their governments. But I’m not too crazy about the phenomenon described near the end of the article, namely:

As a result, some European arts institutions have begun looking for financial support in the United States, courting American companies or wealthy Americans with emotional ties to an ancestral homeland. But that means, as Mr. [Andreas] Stadler [director of the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York and president of the New York branch of the European Union National Institutes for Culture] acknowledged, that “we are also competing with American institutions, which are also hit hard.”

No kidding. Many European institutions have been recipients of American philanthropical largesse for decades – Save Venice, for example, goes backs to 1966, when Venice suffered crippling floods, and has raised more than $20 million from Americans for various projects since. American Friends of the Israel Museum dates to 1968. The Royal Oak Society, which raises money from Americans to preserve historic houses in the U.K., takes in nearly $2 million a year from Americans. American Friends of the Louvre started in 2002, and American Friends of Musee d’Orsay was begun last year. The list goes on, now growing longer in recent years with Asian groups like the American Friends of the Shanghai Museum (founded in 1995).

What’s wrong with this? My concern is that it’s almost entirely a one-way street. Dollars flow to cultural institutions abroad through U.S.-registered 501(c)3 groups making all donations tax-deductible. Very few Euros, shekels, pounds sterling, or yuan are coming this way — though one recent counter-example is worth a mention. In December, the Kennedy Center in Washington announced a $5 million naming gift from Russian investor/philanthropist Vladimir Potantin (above right) that made headline news. In return, the Center plans to renovate its Golden Circle Lounge, with additional funds from The Vladimir Potanin Foundation, and renamed it the Russian Lounge upon reopening next fall. 

I wish he had more company. Until he does, I think we should tinker with the tax code — making donations to groups abroad, when the money flows out of the country — only partially tax-deductible. Say, by half. If many experts are right, that won’t stop the flow, because they say people don’t give for the tax deductibility (we’d see, wouldn’t we?). But other Americans would no longer be picking up the tab.  

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Vespig.Wordpress.com

My Favorite Booth At TEFAF-Maastrict

One more post on Maastricht: there were so many wonderful things there that I don’t want to try to single out “the best.” But I do have a favorite booth, that of the Weiss Gallery of London. It didn’t have “the best” art, but it did make a lasting impression. Here’s a picture of what you saw as you approached, dead on.

Across the top, Weiss inscribed “Tudor and Stuart Portraits from the Collections of the English Nobility and Their Great Country Houses.”  Those red walls were sumptuous, and the paintings seductive (partly because of their costumes). I smiled when I saw the booth.

I realize that this art isn’t for everyone (what art is?), but … all together, these portraits are simply wonderful to see. Many are unattributed; others are by minor artists, but that’s not the point. “Never before has a commercial gallery offered for sale so many early Tudor and Stuart portraits of such distinction and importance, all of which are notable for their distinguished aristocratic provenances,” Mark Weiss says on the gallery’s website.

Weiss acquired many of the works at last year’s house sale at Cowdray Park in West Sussex, whose contents, auctioned by Christie’s, fetched £7.9 million over three days.  Those works were supplemented by portraits, sold by Sotheby’s, that were once owned by the Earls of Elgin and the Marquesses of Ailesbury, plus a few others. One, “The Family of Adrien de Witte, Lord of Buerstede and Welken” by Hieronymous Francken the Elder, came from an American collection.  An adorable “Young Boy, Aged 3, with Kolf Club and Ball,” dated 1603, came in from a British private collection just a short time before TEFAF-Maastricht opened, no doubt put on offer by someone who could see the impact of being in this group.  

The centerpiece in the picture above, the Ditchley Henry VIII (English school, circa 1600-1610), sold within the first hour of the fair. It had an asking price of £2.5 million. This morning, Mark Weiss answered my email request for these photos and his results with the news that he had sold “a large Flemish family group” to a Turkish client — that must be the Francken mentioned above, which is seen, in part, on the left in the picture below — “and a major Dutch museum has reserved the magnificent pair of Cornelius Johnsons.” He added that “yesterday we sold all three Howard ladies (Catherine Carey Countess of Nottingham and her two daughters Elizabeth and Frances Howard) to just one Russian client!”

Readers may see that Catherine Carey on the Weiss website — where you can also find an e-catalogue with photos and information about most of these works.

 

 

San Diego Museums Receive Transformative Gifts — But It’s Not News — UPDATED

This is a good news story for two art museums in San Diego, but the credit belongs not to them but to Max Anderson, who posted it on Facebook, which is where I saw it.

On Sunday, the San Diego Union-Tribune published an article headlined “Onetime Local Arts Patron, Wife Leave Unexpected Gifts to Two Museums.”

The article outlined how a man named Vance Kondon, once a resident of San Diego, remembered his city when he died, even though he had left it — left the country, in fact — in the early 1990s. He owned a collection of works by Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Gabriele Munter (her Tuntzing is at left), Robert Ryman, and others, that today is valued at $45 million, according to the paper.  

In his will (he died in 1996), he, and his wife, Liesbeth Giesberger (who died last year), made the donations. The Museum of Art, according to the paper, received 48 works, mostly pre-1950 works by Expressionist artists, including Schiele, Klimt, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Ott Dix and August Macke. Roxana Velasquez, the museum’s director, put a $20 million value on the gift.

Meantime, the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, received 30 works, ” mostly post-1950 Minimalist canvases, mixed-media works and sculptures by artists that include Richard Serra, Christo, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Craig Kauffman, Robert Mangold and Brice Marden.”  Director Hugh Davies called the windfall “the largest single gift in the history of the museum” and said they were “conservatively”worth $25 million.

Great for these two institutions, and — oddly – neither museum announced the gift, at least no on their websites. You’d think such transformative gifts would be worth a press release, no? Or at least a link to the Union-Tribune article? Maybe a note on their Twitter feeds (here – for the Museum of Art — but no), though the contemporary museum did tweet about it. Is it because the donors are deceased?

If I were running one of these museums, I’d be more active spreading the news.

UPDATE, Mar. 22: OK, the San Diego Museum of Art has now posted a short item on its homepage, with a link to the newspaper article. Not idea, imho, but better than nothing.

UPDATE 2: Now there’s a press release online, with more images.

 

What’s Really Happening at TEFAF – Maastricht

It’s not just great art that draws so many people to TEFAF Maastricht;  the fair is also popular because it’s fun — though not like the stay-up-all-night, get-plastered parties at Art Basel Miami Beach. (Maybe there’s some of that, but the only whiff I heard of it last week came from two art-history grad students, at the fair and in other European art sites on a class trip, who said they knew of other students who’d been drinking till 6 a.m. on the morning of Mar. 16.)

In Maastricht, much of the fun takes place at the fair in the MECC convention hall, starting at noon on Thursday with a “by-invitation” vernissage. Champagne and other drinks, plus coffee, flows all day long until 8 or 9 p.m., as does the food. Everywhere you turn, some is offering you something to eat or drink — though there are also sit-down cafes where the public can buy food and drink on later days. You’re always running into someone you know — museum directors and curators, collectors, dealers who don’t have booths, etc. It’s a gabfest, an artfest and a foodfest rolled into one. More than 10,000 people attend, and in one of those backward twists of fate, these people pay nothing to enter — they’re the big-spenders who are treated, while ordinary people, allowed in on Friday and until Mar. 25, pay €55 per person or €110 for a season ticket, both including the one catalogue.

Fashion makes an appearance at the vernissage now and then — people were talking about outlandishly high heels on some women this year — but mostly, I thought, people were well-dressed without being overly showy. I heard of one woman who came dressed in a bright orange ball gown (the color of the Dutch royal family), her hair elaborately fashioned in an evening style — but I didn’t see her.

The hall is beautifully transformed by tulips, magnolias and cherry blossoms (about 100,000, all told, TEFAF says).

And then the art. You can see the exhibitors here. Suffice it to say that the dealers all try to bring their best, but this year, masterpieces were few and far between. Take your pick of pickers: here’s Souren Melikian in the International Herald Tribune; here’s Faye Hirsch in Art in America, and here’s what Art Info had to say.

As for sales, Art Market Monitor has links to many stories, so I’m going to send you there.

But Paul Jeromack has the coup: he has reported for Artnet that Ned Johnson, of Fidelity Investments, laid out some $12 million to buy Mankind’s Eternal Dilemma – The Choice Between Virtue and Vice by Frans Francken for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Here’s the link, and this is what it looks like: