Back to the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,* I discovered something quite shocking — and indicative — about its history with women artists.

Who would you suppose was chosen to receive the first solo exhibition of works by a female artist? Note that this took place in July, 1921 — 90 years ago.

Are you guessing Mary Cassatt? Artemisia Gentileschi? Judith Leyster? Angelica Kauffman? Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun? Julia Margaret Cameron? Berthe Morisot?

Nope.

According to a “Today in History” post on the Met site, the first solo show there given to a woman opened on July 15, 1921, and featured Florence Wyman Ivins. Never heard of her? Perhaps that’s because she made watercolors, drawings and woodcuts for children, including the Met’s story hours. Her works were shown in the Met’s Education Department, not in its galleries. And she was “family,” so to speak. Per the website post:

Florence Wyman (American, 1881-1948) was raised in Evanston, Illinois, until her parents separated and she moved to France with her mother and a sister. She attended school in Paris and later studied at The Art Students League in New York City. At twenty-nine, when she married William Mills Ivins Jr., she was already working professionally in watercolor portraiture and book illustration. [Her husband, a Harvard graduate, lawyer, and a member of the Grolier Club, later held several positions at the Met: Curator of Prints (1916-1946), Assistant Director (1933-1939), Acting Director (1939-1940), and Counselor (1940-1946).]

Boldface mine, but let’s continue:

For a number of years, Florence Ivins designed the posters for the Museum’s Story Hours for Children program, as well as the covers of the Museum’s Children’s Bulletin, and her work was always well received….

You can read the rest here. A sample of her work is posted above. It speaks volumes that the Met chose an illustrator, rather than a painter or other kind of fine artist, for its first female solo show, someone related to one of its curators, and still showed her work out of the mainstream galleries.

So when did other American museums start to showcase work by women? The Met says this:

…the Met was not the first American museum to present a solo exhibition of work by a woman: the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, presented its first such exhibition in 1882; the Art Institute of Chicago in 1887; and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1913. (The Philadelphia Museum of Art joined this list in 1927; The Wadsworth Atheneum in 1937.)

It did not identify the women chosen. But here is a long list of artists that any museum can choose from. (It does not, by design, include contemporary artists.) Wikipedia also has a list.

So when did the Met give a show to a woman in its real galleries? We don’t know.

Lest readers misinterpret, I’m not advocating for an equal number of shows by male and female artists — over time, maybe, but it would be impossible for most of art history. But women artists ought to be more accepted ss artists, to be judged by the same aesthetic and conceptual standards as men. And that may require a second look at women artists of the past.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met

 

 

Maybe you saw the news last week that a German billionaire named Reinhold Wuerth (below right) has privately purchased Hans Holbein’s “Madonna with Basel Mayer Jakob Meyer and His Family” for at least $70 million. Experts are calling it the most important German Old Master to change hands since World War II. (Here’s a link to the Bloomberg story on it.)

 

That’s not the only reason this picture, which I saw in Frankfurt in 2005, can lay claim to fame. It’s unquestionably beautiful, celebrated for capturing the softness of Italian Renaissance masters and the unstinting realism of Northern Renaissance masters. And it’s in pristine condition.

 

But this painting is also famous for its past, which involves cunning 17^th century fakery, duped royalty, and dueling accounts more than two centuries later over which of two renderings was real and which a copy – all leading to a different renown: Holbein’s Madonna was the subject of what experts say was the first art historical conference.

 

For more than a century after it was completed in 1528, the painting led a quiet life, escaping the religious wars that left many devotional art works in splinters. Then it fell into the hands of an art dealer named Le Blond, of Paris. Recognizing its worth, he secretly commissioned a copy, then sold one work to Marie de Medici, the widowed Queen of France, and the other to an Amsterdam merchant.

 

Both works found their way to Germany. The Queen’s Madonna passed through at least two hands before being purchased for the Count of Saxony and put on display in Dresden. The merchant’s version was soon sold to an even richer Amsterdam merchant. It disappeared until 1822, when Prince William of Prussia bought it from a Parisian dealer as a present to his wife, Princess Marianne.

 

Which German royal owned the original?

 

The mystery raged until 1871, when both works went on view in Munich. Art historians assembled before the two paintings. For about three weeks, they scrutinized and debated. They decided in favor of the one purchased by Prince William, which by that time had passed through inheritance into the hands of Grand Duke Ludwig of Hesse. And they issued what may have been the first art press release.

 

The proof was in the timing. Holbein had started the work in 1526, and when he returned to it to finish it two years later, Meyer asked for alterations. His daughter had wed, for example, and now wore the modest hair style of a married woman. “There are lots of changes,” Dr. Bodo Brinkmann, an expert on German and Nederlandish Old Master paintings whom I spoke with in 2005, when he was a curator at the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt, where it has hung (mostly) since 2003.

 

“The hair of the girl was once long; she was older when the painting was finished than when he started. The bonnet on the second wife was changed.”

 

The copy, he said, “does not show the changes, the pentimenti, that are a feature of time. The copy was made around 1630 and the pentimenti would not yet have shown.”

 

Much of this story – and more, including some heart-stopping moments regarding the painting’s near-extinction during World War II – is detailed in a booklet on sale at the Schlossmuseum Darmstadt, where the painting hung until 2003 (except for an occasional exhibition loan), when it moved to the Staedel museum in Frankfurt.

 

The Hesse family made the sale in mid-July to cover estate taxes. Had it not been listed as a German treasure, ineligible for an export license, it could have fetched more than $165 million, experts estimate.

 

The painting visited the U.S. in 2005, as part of “Hesse: A Princely German Collection,” which I wrote about for The New York Times.

 

 

 

 

The latest from Egypt has Prime minister Essam Sharaf reversing course, and cancelling his nomination of Abdel Fatah El-Banna to hold Egypt’s antiquities portfolio.

Sharaf (left) replaced Zahi Hawass late yesterday or early this morniing, but was forced to recall the invitation to El-Banna “following the demonstrations of archaeologists and the employees of the Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA) at the front gate of the cabinet building calling for the cancellation of El-Banna’s nomination to the ministry’s top post.”

Al-Ahram Online has the story.

Sharag is reshuffling his cabinet and word emerged yesterday that Hawass was out.

Here’s a recounting of some complaints against El-Banna.

Per Al-Ahram:

The archaeological communtiy is now speculating as to whether the MSA will be reduced to an antiquities authority affiliated with the cabinet or remain a ministry with the new minister announced later this week. 

More as I get to the bottom of this, if I can.

UPDATE: According to published reports, unconfirmed, El-Banna has angered many archaeologists and accused of corruption. Here’s one accounting from Bikyamasr:

…Researchers and Egyptologists had sent many requests to Sharaf expressing their disapproval of al-Banna and accused him of having “vengeance” against many of them.

Reports mentioned that al-Banna’s name is on corruption lists and many of his colleagues accuse him of using his position within the department for personal and financial gains…

  

The Egyptian government is reshuffling again today, apparently to address continued displeasure with the progess of reform since the January revolution, and the word is that Zahi Hawass is out.

The Associated Press has a short story, which does not mention Hawass, but he has apparently let the word out and he confirmed that in a text message to The New York Times. Kate Taylor blogs about it here.

There’s no word on a replacement yet.

El Ahram is listing some new ministers, and says more announcements are expected through the day.

UPDATE, 8 p.m.: The Guardian has a longer article, calling Hawass “the biggest casualty” of the reshuffle. But still no news of a replacement.

UPDATE 2, Monday: Please go here for a more recent post on this subject.

 

What do people notice when they visit museums and stand before a piece of art, looking? Today’s New York Times touched on the question in Michael Kimmelman’s commentary today on visiting Leonardo’s Last Supper — because crowds at the Santa Maria delle Gracie are controlled by limiting visitors to 15 minutes with the painting. Not that everyone wants that much, was Kimmelman’s point. (But they should…)

This gives me an excuse to visit the outcome of an experiment at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,* the results of which were announced a few weeks ago (when I was busy writing something else). But the story is fresh, unreported, I think, and so I’m back with it.

Earlier this year, the Met invited visitors to “submit a photo of one detail in a single work of art from the Met’s permanent collection that captures your imagination, along with a photo of the full work of art and your own brief text (approximately 50 words) describing why you find that detail compelling.” It was a contest — called “Get Closer” — and entries were accepted between February 25 through April 8, 2011. The Met then chose five winners from the entries, gave each one a one-year membership at the Met, and posted their pictures on the Met’s website.

You can see the winners here. Other submissions were posted on Tumblr here.

I don’t know the criteria for winning, but I actually prefer some of the other entries. I’ve posted two others here. (Admittedly, I would have cropped the first one in closer, to just the hand or even just the thumb.) But you’ll have to go to the Tumblr site to find out what works they are details of, and some other examples of details that engaged people.

But the point of the exercise is both clear and worthy. The Met is using social media to get people to spend more time with a work of art, to really observe.

This is one of these experiments that should not only be repeated at the Met, but also replicated at other museums.

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met