As I’ve said before, you never know what you’ll find in the basement — even if you work at an art museum. Here’s another case in point.

Over the weekend, the Cincinnati Enquirer ran an exclusive about a find at the Cincinnati Art Museum: more than 800 antique musical instruments have “languished” in storage for decades, forgotten and untouched. Charles Rudig, a former head of musical instruments for Sotheby’s, said about the discovery:

They’ve got a fabulous world music collection. It’s wonderful. It’s big. And it’s very similar to the Metropolitan Museum (New York) collection. The Met’s is bigger, but they were both formed at about the same time – the late 19th century.

Rudig has been hired as a consultant to assess and catalogue the collection, which the newspaper said “spans four centuries and represents the cultures of more than 20 countries on four continents.”

Among the treasures are a “19th-century African drum carved from a log, a Burmese crocodile zither, a Chinese version of a hammered dulcimer, a Native American ceremonial raven rattle and a beautifully carved Turkish harp… a rare 17th-century Amati viola, an 18th-century oboe d’amore by Jakob Denner (one of four known to exist) and a stunning Ruckers virginal (a keyboard instrument), one of just two known in the country.”

The museum plans to clean 75 to 100 of the instruments and display them in 2012, when the World Choir Games take place in Cincinnati.

Here’s a link to the article. 

But then, the article says, while some pieces with be interspersed in the galleries, the museum has no plans to create a gallery for them. The director, Aaron Betsky, says that wouldn’t fit the museum’s current mission.

I’m not sure why not. I could not find the museum’s mission statement on line, but in the volunteers’ section, it was stated simply as “to bring people and art together.”

On Guidestar, the CAM states its mission this way:

We will actively engage a diverse and growing audience with great art for the enrichment and enjoyment. We will collect, preserve, study and exhibit art in accordance with the highest professional standards. We will operate in a fiscally responsible manner.

In the Enquirer article, Betsky himself is quoted as saying, “When I arrived here in 2006, a few of them were out, like the Amati in the case upstairs … I found out that we hadn’t really paid attention to this incredible collection because, like so many other parts of our collection, we don’t really have enough room. This is really about instruments from around the world. And it was collected for the visual intensity of the pieces, not necessarily for their functionality. It shows the delight that people took in designing and decorating these objects.”

Giving them permanent space doesn’t seem off-mission to me. Of course, I don’t know what else is in storage, so I can’t make the call.

But I’m not the only one who seems to feel this way. Quoting the article:

J. Kenneth Moore, curator in charge of the Musical Instruments Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “You don’t find these things in many places. You just find them in a handful of places. It’s something that, I think, should be put on display and should be appreciated by Cincinnatians, and people who visit your city. It should be a point of pride.”…

“We have seen an increase of visitors in our [musical instrument] galleries, and it’s not only just the treasures of Western art music,” the Met’s Moore said. “I think there is more of an interest in the non-European cultures, in understanding them on various levels, and music is one of them. Certainly, the instruments can tell you a lot about what’s going on.”

It seems to me that displaying these instruments would be one way to distinguish and differentiate the Cincinnati Art Museum, in an era when many museum collections seem generic.

Photo Credits: 19th C. Balkan angel harp (top); 19th C. Native American carved flute, detail (bottom), Courtesy of the Cincinnati Enquirer

 

No, I haven’t lost all sense of the news. I’ve been away for the last five days, on a short vacation to Iceland (pretty good timing, wasn’t it — considering the temperatures reached in NYC while I was away. It was just luck — the trip was booked weeks ago). For the curious, I’ll post a little about Iceland art in a few days, once I upload photos (which comes after I unpack).

Meantime, let me just share a very short article that I had in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, a “Backstory” on the Icons page headlined: A 1530s Italian Fashionista Comes Clean, Takes Tour.

It’s about Titian’s famous La Bella, on loan from Italy, which started a three-museum tour at the Kimbell in Fort Worth on Friday. AKA Woman in a Blue Dress, she has recently been cleaned of varnish, and as Kimbell director Eric M. Lee told me (this was cut from the story), “you’ll see the painting afresh even if you know it.”

After the Kimbell, La Bella goes to the Nevada Art Museum in Reno and then to the Portland Art Museum in Oregon.

Lee reports that the Kimbell had a “packed house” over the weekend.

Regular RCA readers know that I love these one-paintings shows, built around masterpieces, and Titian’s women are mostly masterpieces.

Photo Credit: Palazzo Pitti, via the Kimbell Art Museum 

Next Wednesday, the Skyscaper Museum in NYC opens a neat exhibition called Supertall. As you can guess, it’s a show of “superlative skyscrapers worldwide, featuring projects that have been completed since 2001, are under construction, or are expected to top out by 2016.”

The museum defines “supertall” as buildings that rise at least 380 meters, or 1250 feet — the height of the Empire State Building — not the traditional 300 meters. They each have, or will have, 100 stories or more.

The Skyscaper Museum last approached this subject in 2007, when as part of its exhibition on what was then the world’s tallest building — the Burj Dubai, now known as the Burj Khalifa — it conducted a census of tall buildings. That first global “Supertall Survey” discovered 35 buildings, “historical, contemporary, and planned.”

What’s happened since then? As you might expect, they weren’t all built. The new census discards 12 from that list, because they were not built or because they didn’t achieve their planned height.

Now, though, it found 25 more supertalls — for a grand total of 48 that will be completed, undercontruction or topped out by 2016. Of course, some of thse may not be fully realized either. China (that’s the Shanghai World Financial Center above), South Korea and countries in the Middle East are most avid new builders of the supertall. According to the press release,

The exhibition includes projects in ten Chinese cities, with three buildings each in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Wuhan. In Seoul and Busan, South Korea, four towers will range from nearly 500 to 640 meters, or more than 2000 ft tall. While new development has slowed in Dubai, the emirate is still home to six supertalls, including Burj Khalifa, which at 828 meters/ 2,717 feet reigns as the world’s tallest skyscraper by more than 1,000 ft.! No project yet announced has challenged its supremacy, and if a rumored kilometer-tall tower does go forward, Burj Khalifa will remain the tallest manmade structure for at least for five years- the standard time it takes to complete a supertall.

Obviously, the museum can’t haul in the buildings, so what’s in the exhibit? “Organized geographically, the installation includes architectural and engineering models, renderings, animations and construction photographs and films,” says the press release.

The Skyscraper Museum has published its census, and done a great service to people who love tall buildings. Or, at least, looking at them.

 

 

Forget that newly rediscovered Leonardo, there’s been word more recently of a rediscovered Michelangelo. The news has been out in the UK for several days, but it got very little pickup here.

The 12 by 27-inch painting was found hanging in Campion Hall, a student residence at Oxford University. Titled “Crucifixion With The Madonna, St John And Two Mourning Angels,” it was puchased at Sotheby’s in the 1930s, and Italian scholar Antonio Forcellino says it has been misattributed. According to a BBC story:

The Campion Hall painting, which depicts the crucifixion, had been thought to be by Marcello Venusti.

But Antonio Forcellino said infra-red technology had revealed the true creator of the masterpiece.

It has been removed from a wall of the Jesuit academic community and sent to the Ashmolean Museum for safekeeping.

The Daily Mail did a little more reporting:

Michelangelo expert Professor William Wallace, of Washington University in the U.S., said yesterday: ‘The interesting thing is that Forcellino believes it is genuine and he is a reputable scholar.

‘We are never going to be totally sure if it is genuine as Michelangelo’s contemporaries would paint designs that he drew and it is down to the academic community to assess it.

‘It’s not a totally gorgeous object but it’s extremely important in telling us about the taste of the time.’

As one expert said on hearing the news, people are going to argue this back and forth for a long time. One can never tell from afar — even experts — but this story sounds more credible to me than the so-called Buffalo Michelangelo.

So let the debates begin.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the BBC

 

A press release from the Dallas Museum of Art sent me to the website of the National Endowment for the Arts the other day, to see what merited money in the recently announced Access to Artistic Excellence awards. In them, plenty of museums received money for a variety of activities, including the Chrysler Museum, to catalogue its glass collection, and the Montclair Art Museum, to help digitize its permanent collection. Dallas got $85,000 to support its exhibition archives resources online.

But it was the earlier round of grants that proved to be more interesting. They show how the NEA actually is giving more money to individual artists — as filtered through artists’ communities and residencies.

You’ll recall that NEA chief Rocco Landesman has said he wants to restore awards to artists, which were lost in the ’90s culture wars and are unlikely to be resurrected any time soon. But a few years ago, the NEA also created a category ot Access to Artistic Excellence awards specifically for “Artist Communitites” like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and many more. Previously, artist communities could apply for NEA money, but they did not have a category of their own.

There have now been two rounds of grants in this category. Last year, NEA gave 26 awards in this category totalling $575,000. The grants ranged from $10,000 to $35,000, assuming I counted and added properly.

This year, the NEA gave 25 awards in this category totalling $610,000. The grants ranged from $10,000 to $50,000.

I’m guessing a bit here, because there’s no easy way to search for previous grants to artist communities, bit I think that have done better than they used to. And — I postulate — because it’s at least partly because these awards are a backhanded way for Landemann to get money to individual artists.