As you can well imagine, some articles are more rewarding for a journalist to write than others. I’d put one I wrote that was just published as the cover story of Art + Auction magazine, January issue in the very rewarding category.

Headlined The New Allure of Old Master Sculpture, it features an area of the art market that is far too rarely noticed. Yes, you see a piece mentioning Renaissance bronzes every now and then, but that’s most of the coverage.

Yet it’s an exciting category, full of discoveries, re-discoveries and re-attributions (see what Eike Schmidt, curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, has to say about that), and the opportunity for collectors to purchase excellent works of art at prices that are a small fraction of a comparable painting. One example I cited:

A few years ago, the Tomasso Brothers, based in Leeds and London, discovered an unknown gilt bronze of Prometheus by Giambologna (1529-1608), court sculptor to three Medici grand dukes. “The equivalent to that would be finding an unknown Bronzino portrait, which would cost £10 million,” says Dino Tomasso. Prometheus is on the market for about £1 million.

And another:

New York paintings dealer Richard Feigen tells how he was approached in 2009 by the Birmingham Museum of Art, which had received about $1 million from a donor who wanted it spent on a triptych altarpiece. “For that amount, I told them, you’d get something insignificant,” Feigen said. Instead, he steered the museum toward a marble relief by Mino da Fiesoli (1429-1484) that was in his gallery in an exhibit organized by London sculpture dealer Sam Fogg. The museum purchased the elegant portrait of a young woman in profile; it’s now the centerpiece of a gallery filled with Italian paintings.

Also interesting is who’s collecting — Old Master paintings and drawings collectors, to be sure, but also contemporary collectors, like Francois Pinault, and contemporary artists, like Damien Hirst. And of course you know about Jeff Koons.

The experts are quick to credit museum exhibitions for some of the revived interest — “Set in Stone: The Face in Medieval Sculpture” at the Metropolitan Museum in 2006-07; “Andrea Riccio: Renaissance Master of Bronze” at the Frick Collection in 2008-09, and let’s not forget “Adriaen de Vries, Imperial Sculptor” which went on view at the Rijksmuseum, the National Museum in Stockholm, and the Getty Museum in 1998-2000 — de Vries (1550-1626), though compared to Michelangelo in his day was all but forgotten soon after until that exhibition.

The cover boy was a St. Sebastian I wrote about last January for the Wall Street Journal.

Unfortunately but understandably, Art + Auction no longer posts its articles on line (at least for a few months). But you can find the issue on newsstands — not everywhere, but in enough places. I hope.

Old Master week in New York is coming at the end of this month — time to go hunting.

 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Tomasso Brothers

The Mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino (right), is sharply raising the fee many non-profits, including museums. must pay to the city in lieu of taxes. It’s an understatement to say that’s bad news in this wobbly economic environment.

Here’s the full story from The Art Newspaper’s January issue. The Museum of Fine Arts would have to pay $250,000 this year (up from $46,000 to $65,000), rising to $1 million by 2016.

So where’s the organized opposition from other museums? In 2009, when Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell tried to tax admissions, memberships and programs at museums and other non-profits, the Association of Art Museum Directors jumped into the fray and issued a statement of opposition.

I praised the organization for acting swiftly for a change. The letter to Rendell, copied to several other Pennsylvania legislators, is inexplicably not available on the AAMD website at the moment. But here were the key words of then-president Michael Conforti:

…this tax is nothing short of a tax on education. Museums, along with other cultural institutions, provide unparalleled educational opportunities for the young people of Pennsylvania, families supporting their children’s learning, adults seeking spiritual and psychological nourishment, and everyone looking for affordable and uplifting leisure activities at a time of economic challenge. Levying a tax on participation in educational programs and experiences will only discourage the public from taking advantage of Pennsylvania’s wide range of cultural resources.

Moreover, the proposed expansion of the sales tax will erode the substantial positive economic impact of your state’s cultural institutions: non-profit organizations in Pennsylvania generate $1.99 billion in economic activity each year.

Checking the AAMD’s website to make sure I did not miss a statement about Boston, I found nothing.

As Malcolm Rogers, MFA’s director, wrote in an op-ed for The Art Newspaper, “When civic leaders look to cultural organisations as a source of revenue, rather than as an invaluable resource for the communities they serve, it has dire implications nationwide.”

Worse, Menino seems to be penalizing museums for success: MFA’s fee is rising, as is the Institute for Contemporary Art’s, because they’ve successfully expanded. It’s like a real estate tax assessment.

This is not a new issue. Rogers has been fulminating about it since at least October. As my friend, Globe columnist Alex Beam, wrote that month:

Curiouser still, the nonprofits prefer to hang separately rather than form a coalition to negotiate with the mayor. Practically every college, hospital, or art museum has some urban bigshot on the board of directors who supposedly has juice in the mayor’s office. (Menino himself is an MFA trustee, although he hasn’t attended a meeting in at least 17 years.) Some institutions – Harvard and Boston College, for example – squawk more than others. But when push comes to shove, most of them pay pretty close to what the mayor asks.

So you can’t blame the holidays for inaction, AAMD brass. You’ve had plenty of time to consider what can be said to be helpful.

I just received the news that Buchanan, at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco for the last six years, died yesterday at the age of 58.

Here’s a link to the press release.

Previously, Buchanan had served as executive director of the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon (1994-2005), director of Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee (1986-1994) and executive director of the Lakeview Museum of Arts and Sciences in Peoria, Illinois (1982-1986).

Buchanan was a controversial figure in the museum world, criticized for staging too many popular exhibitions in fashion, jewelry, Impressionism, etc., at the expense of scholarly exhibits that advanced ideas.

But by the numbers, he was a success.

As the press release notes:

Under Buchanan’s six-year stewardship the Museums welcomed over 11.9 million visitors, presented over 100 special exhibitions rooted in the depth and diversity of the museums’ permanent collections, oversaw the publication of 31 exhibition catalogues and collection-based publications, and increased the museums’ membership to 122,000 households. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have the third largest membership in the nation, are the fourth most visited art museums in North America and are the fourteenth most visited museums in the world.

In its obit for Buchanan, the San Francisco Chronicle noted that Diane B. Wilsey, president of the museums’ board of trustees, had appointed a governance committee of seven of the top administrators as soon as Buchanan took medical leave in mid-December. It is headed by the CFO Michelle Gutierrez.

I knew John, and while he did have weaknesses as a museum director, he also had strengths. He threw his life and his enthusiasm into every museum he worked at. My sympathies go to his wife, Lucy.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco