Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

The Getty Gambit — Not With Tim Potts, But With Observation

I’d already been planning to write something about the Getty Museum sometime soon — before the J. Paul Getty Trust announced its choice for the director of the museum today — Timothy Potts, formerly with the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge and before that director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth (here’s the link to the press release). So now I’ll put away what I was going to write and switch to the Getty.

But not about Potts. I know him a little, and by reputation as well. And I know him to be a very ambitous man. How he will fit in at the Getty remains to be seen. The Trust is a messy, hydra-headed entity, and whether it works or not has always depended on the personalities involved. It remains to be seen whether the five people now in place, James Cuno at the trust, and the heads of four divisions will work together nicely.

Let me move to my original post, which is again about getting people to appreciate the art in museums.

On Feb. 7, a new, long-term exhibition opened at the J. Paul Getty Museum called The Life of Art: Context, Collecting, and Display.  It displays four objects from the permanent collection and encourages visitors to sit down and spend time with them, offering the opportunity to examine them closely to understand how they were made and functioned, why they were collected, and how they have been displayed.  The Getty has also installed touch screen interactive displays that highlight and explain visual clues about the life of each object.

The four objects are a silver fountain (France, 1661-1663), a lidded porcelain bowl (China or Japan and England late-1600s) (pictured at left), a gilt-wood side chair (France, about 17351740), and a gilt-bronze wall light (France, 1756) . They’re shown in “an inviting, comfortable setting” and the works are displayed “at table height so that each can be seen easily at close range and in the round.”

The Getty has written labels to prompt visitors to examine the artworks carefully, looking for “makers marks or inscriptions, details of construction or assembly, and visual evidence of alteration or repair.” The interactives do the same. If you go to the exhibition website, you can, as the picture above suggests, “launch the interactive.”

The press release that triggered my interest is dated Dec. 20, 2011, and quoted Potts’s recently departed predecessor:

“Many of the objects in the Getty Museums permanent collection have fascinating stories,” said David Bomford, acting director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “By focusing on close engagement with a few selected works, The Life of Art encourages critical seeing and reveals the full lives of these objects and why they continue to be collected and cherished today.”

Later, it says:

Each of the works of art in the exhibition has a mate, or a similar piece, on view in the adjacent permanent collection galleries, allowing visitors the opportunity to compare the different viewing experiences. Labels will be installed in the spots where each piece is normally displayed—marking their absence, illustrating how each object is normally displayed and directing visitors to the exhibition.

As I always say when I haven’t a show in person, I reserve judgment until, and if, I do. The online interactives seem a little too simple, and perhaps the Getty should have made advanced versions, too.

Nonetheless, this seems to be another excellent example of trying to get people to observe more and learn more at museums, without shoving education down their throats, which they seem to resist.

Good for the Getty. I invite feedback from anyone who has been to the show.

 

 

President Obama’s Arts Budgets — Up, But DOA

Given the state of politics, it hardly makes sense to report President Obama’s  budget requests for FY 2013. The budget is already DOA, say the pundits.

Nonetheless, for the sake of discussion, I can report that the President did ask for a slight increase in the budgets of the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities. Each one, as usual, would get the same amount: $154,255,000 — including a one-time $3 million request to facilitate their moves from the Old Post Office building. You didn’t know about that? That’s a whole different story.

The total minus that allocation is a 3.6% increase over the current year’s allocations.

Here’s a link to the NEH budget release and here’s one to the NEA budget release.

Next, you can bet, comes a whole lot of talking and postponing.

 

Gary Tinterow Hits The Ground Running At MFAH

Quite by accident, because I went to the website of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston the other day, I ran across some pretty smart outreach.

It was only days after Gary Tinterow has assumed his new job as director of the MFAH, and across the top the website read “A Message From and Conversation With MFAH Director Gary Tinterow.” It’s fairly traditional for new directors at a museum to post a director’s message, but I clicked anyway.

I was expecting something I’d seen before: Max Anderson’s missive, posted after he moved to the Dallas Museum of Art in January, is representative of the standard form of a “Welcome.” I decided to check around and see what other new directors are doing. James Cuno, who took the reins of the Getty Trust last August, immediately wrote a blog post, Reflections on My First Day at the Getty – and What’s Next.” But he hasn’t posted anything since — even though he decided in mid-December to become acting director of the Getty Museum, too.

I don’t see anything from Douglas Druick, new director of the Art Institute of Chicago, on its website (it could have come down by now) and something is wrong with the link to Ian Wardropper’s message at the Frick: when I clicked on “Director’s Greeting” on the information page, I got the index page. So I don’t know what he has done. I don’t see any welcomes or messages from Matthias Waschek at the Worcester Art Museum or Thomas Denenberg at the Shelburne Museum, both fairly new to their jobs.

But back in Houston, Tinterow not only wrote a Welcome message, but also taped five video messages — available on this page. In them, he talks about his roots in Houston and how it has changed since he left to go to college, about growing up in Houston, about making the transition from New York to Houston, about the role of museums today, and about his ambitions for the MFAH.

He made some excellent points, including a comment that he thinks of works of art as a mirrow that reflect your values back at you. He reveals himself as approachable, inviting visitors to give him pointers when they see him in the galleries.

It’s always hard to succeed someone like the late Peter Marzio, something of a legend at MFAH, and the man Tinterow succeeded. And I don’t want to make too much of this. But it looks to me as if Tinterow has hit the ground running.

And here, btw, is Houston Culture’s Map’s account of his first outing as director (above).

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Houston Culture Map

The Met Celebrates Lincoln’s Birthday With A Big Purchase

Just in time for Lincoln’s birthday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art* has aquired its first major image of the president — a rare and beautiful piece with a distinguished provenance to boot.

The bronze piece by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, is one of only 16 known casts of the image, Abraham Lincoln, the Man (Standing Lincoln). Measuring 40 1/2 inches tall, it’s an authorized reduction of the large bronze monument that Saint-Gaudens created for Lincoln Park in Chicago between 1884 and 1887. It dates to 1911, the Met believes.

According to the Met, Saint Gaudens (1848-1907) planned and authorized the limited number of castings, and the terms of his estate alloed Tiffany Studios and Gorham Manufacturing Co. to make them under the supervision of his own mold makers, founders, and studio assistants.  His widow later sold the castings for museum, library, and domestic display. The Met’s says its version was likely one of the first two statuettes to be completed.

Here’s the provenance story:

The magnificently preserved cast was originally in the collection of Clara Stone Hay, the widow of President Abraham Lincoln’s onetime assistant private secretary, John M. Hay, who went on to co-author a 10-volume biography of Lincoln for the Century Company in the 1880s, and later served as U. S. Secretary of State under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Hay, who called Lincoln “The Tycoon,” kept a diary during his years on the staff of the White House (where he also lived from 1861 to 1865), considered by scholars as the most important source of first-hand recollections of the Lincoln Administration. During the “Great Secession Winter” of 1860-1861, and on through the Civil War, Hay also wrote pseudonymous newspaper articles supporting the President-elect, later the President—a common practice of the day.

The Met bought it from a private collector whose family has owned it since 1943.

This acquisition happens at a great moment, as the Met has recently reopened its renovated and reinstalled American paintings galleries — where this piece will go, in the gallery devoted to the Civil War and its aftermath. It joins more than 50 other works in the collection by Saint-Gaudens, but it’s the only major representation of Lincoln in the collection. Unlike George Washington, who’s represented in several major pieces.

For Lincoln fans, I will cite more from the Met, because the press release is not yet on the website and I can’t link to it.

The original bronze was dedicated in Lincoln Park, Chicago on October 22, 1887, in a setting designed by Stanford White. The statue was officially unveiled by Abraham Lincoln II, the President’s 14-year-old grandson and namesake, who would live only another three years. The dedicatory address was offered by Leonard Swett, a leading Illinois attorney who had ridden the judicial circuit with then-lawyer Abraham Lincoln for 11 years. Swett proclaimed that the statue revealed more of the man he knew than any sculpture he had ever beheld.

A replica was later created for Parliament Square in the shadows of Westminster Abbey, and presented to the British people in 1914 by the American National Committee for the Celebration of the Centenary of the Treaty of Ghent. An entirely different statue was originally designed for the prestigious site, but Lincoln’s son, Robert T. Lincoln (a close friend of John Hay’s), intervened and urged that the Saint-Gaudens sculpture be cast for London instead.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Met

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met

 

 

Shocker News: Why Galleries Are So Empty

Today’s Telegraph contained startling news from the U.K. that makes me wonder about the U.S.

…Four in 10 children have never seen the inside of an art gallery, while 17 per cent haven’t visited a museum with their parents.

…a quarter of children haven’t been to the theatre, while six in 10 have never heard or been to a classical music concert. One in 10 kids hasn’t even left their home town to visit other cultural sites in the UK.

And half of parents admit they make little effort to educate their children on culture or history, relying on schools to do so.

The story did not include a margin of error, and admittedly was based on a survey of only 2,000 parents of five to 12 year-olds throughout the UK. But I have no reason to believe that numbers would be better in the U.S. Please comment if you can shed light on this.

Perhaps the most worrisome statement in the article was this: “The poll found today’s children are more likely to think of ‘culture’ as modern technology such as computer games, the rise of the digital age and fast food restaurants.”

That is backed up by the way “culture” is written about in newspapers and magazines. Video games, web phenonmena, and restaurants are all grouped together in Style or Culture sections. That may, though, be a mixed blessing — a true Culture section might simply be ignored. Again quoting the Telegraph,

When questioned on why they make no effort to make their children more ‘cultured’ and knowledgeable about past history, a fifth of parents claim their offspring simply wouldn’t be interested.