Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

What Makes A Good Collector? And What Is Craft vs. Art? Two Stories

Usually, the most noteworthy collectors–aside from those, like J. Paul Getty, with the wherewithal to buy anything they want–are the ones that go their own way, that collect a field that’s out-of-fashion but full of worthy artworks. Usually, they both self-educate and they seek expert advice.

One such person is Walter O. Evans (at right), a retired surgeon who began purchasing works by African-American artists back in the late 1970s. He now owns one of the best such collections in the United States. Perhaps you have heard about him–part of his collection was on tour. The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art,” customized for each venue and managed by Evans’s wife, Linda, visited about 50 museums between 1991 and 2012.

Evans also donated about 60 works to the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2005, though his trove still numbers in the hundreds. As I wrote:

Evans now owns works by virtually every important black artist up to and including Modernism icons Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Archibald Motley, Robert Scott Duncanson, Mary Edmonia Lewis, Henry Tanner, Beauford Delaney, Alma Thomas, Norman Lewis, Benny Andrews, and Aaron Douglas.

I saw a number of them myself earlier this year, when I visited his townhouse in Savannah’s historic district on assignment for Traditional Home magazine, which published my article in its October issue. More than one person I spoke with called the collection “museum-quality.” One of his works by Jacob Lawrence is at left.

Evans is an interesting guy, a pioneer in more ways than one. You can read my article about him and see more of his art collection here.

102773785_w_0In the same issue of Traditional Home, I write about a quilt artist named Victoria Findlay Wolfe. She helped start the modern quilt movement, and is also has a very interesting story. She started as a painter and she draws inspiration from artists including Matisse.

Furthermore, for those of you who prefer to think about quilts as craft rather than art, she has another art connection. That “Findlay” in her name refers to her husband Michael, Findlay, a director at Acquavella Galleries and author of The Value of Art.

You can read her story and see some of her quilts here.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Traditional Home

The Revelation in Four “Women Modernists”

9902bb514b018222bcc6adec44a144cfThe Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach has, under director Hope Alswang, strived to increase the exposure to art by women. It is, for example, known for its annual “Recognition of Art by Women” exhibitions that showcase the work of living painters and sculptors. The artists chosen for that, in my opinion, have been excellent.

So organizing and touring “O’Keeffe, Stettheimer, Torr, Zorach: Women Modernists in New York” was a natural. I first saw it last winter at the Norton and in June I visited the same show at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. Ellen Roberts, the curator, chose these four because they all knew one another, lived for a time in New York, and faced prejudices against women of their day. The show considers about 60 works made between 1910 and 1935. My review of the show was published last week by The Wall Street Journal. (Or go here.)

Because it was an “argument” exhibit–putting forth the case that these women would have had different, better reception, and would now be ranked in higher places in the art historical canon, had gender not been an issue–I was duty-bound to consider whether it lived up to that assertion. I found that it did not–not quite. Torr remains a minor character, and so does Zorach–though both of them, in my opinion, had talent.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good exhibition. I’m glad the Norton organized it and, in particular, gave museum-goers an opportunity to see more of Zorach’s and Torr’s work. We know the other two much, much better.

Torr-OysterStakes-Heckscher[1]Seeing the same show in two museums was, as usual, enlightening–illustrating just how important space is. At the Norton, after an introductory gallery, each artist was showcased in her own gallery. The downside: there was little incentive for viewers to compare and contrast. Portland, working in a different and more difficult space, reshuffled the works thematically and mixed the work of all four to show the many faces of modernism. The downside: there wasn’t much of a dialogue in the works of the four artists. Torr and O’Keeffe share an aesthetic, but the others are very different.

I preferred the Norton installation.

For me, who likes and appreciates the work of all four artists, I came away with a greater appreciation for Zorach than I had before. Her range was broad; she painted well in many styles. It really is too bad that she curtailed her career for family and put her husband’s career first. I think she was probably the better artist.

Her Provincetown, Sunrise and Moonset, from 1916, is above left, while Torr’s Oyster Stakes, from 1930 is below right.

 

 

 

U.S. As Boiling Pot: “America After the Fall”

Think about American art in the 1930s. Does anything come to mind? Maybe the Regionalism of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. But there was so much more to the decade than that. For one thing, art was “subsidized” via the Works Progress Administration in the second half of the decade, probably creating a bigger volume and more artists than usual. These years were a hotpot of creativity in many modes, like social realism, surrealism and other modernist styles.

RoustaboutsYet this is an understudied and underexposed period. America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s at the Art Institute of Chicago does some way toward redressing this, as I learned when I visited the exhibition earlier this month. I reviewed it, positively, in today’s Wall Street Journal, where my piece is headlined Bullish on Creativity. I’m sorry I didn’t get to Chicago sooner, because the exhibit runs only until Sept. 18. Then–another good sign for American art appreciation–it moves to L’Orangerie in Paris and then to the Royal Academy in London. It will be the first time, curator Judith Barter tells me, that Wood’s American Gothic leaves these shores.

I won’t summ up the exhibition for you; let me just set the stage and quote from the catalogue. Even as citizens’ faith in America was shaken, American artists strove to develop a national art.

The result was artistic sparring throughout the 1930s between those who wanted an American art based on realism and those who felt that abstraction was a universal language that pushed beyond nationalism. Many artists sought a new realist aesthetic language aimed at the people; others tried to express the inner world of dreams and imagination. Some used their work for social protest and to address politics; still others tried to create new forms of art and politics that could repair a democracy damaged by economic chaos.

self-portrait-LundebergIt must have been hard, then, for Barter to choose just 50 works of art. This show could have sprawled in an attempt to show everything. But I am so glad she did have the discipline to pick only what she thought was best. Not everything is to my taste, but the quality is very high–even though some works were pulled from museums’ storerooms.

If you click on the WSJ link, you can see Aaron Douglas’s Aspiration. So let me post two works that are not well known, but which I liked a lot. Up top is Joe Jones’s Roustabouts, from 1934, and below is Helen Lundeberg’s Double Portrait of the Artist in Time, from 1935.

I can think of only one flaw, but I can’t attribute it to the curator, as I didn’t ask: There is music playing in the galleries. Woody Guthrie, for example. I like music; I like Guthrie. But I found it to be distracting and tried to blot it out. Let’s not have this mini-trend spread.

 

 

 

The Fisher Folly: SFMoMA’s Bad Deal

We’ve never known exactly the details of the deal that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art made in 2009 with the Fisher family to get its collection (better described, actually, as access to the family’s collection–at first for 25 years and later changed to 100 years). And we still don’t. But an article by Charles Desmarais in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, Unraveling SFMoMA’s Deal for the Fisher Collection, bares more about it than I’ve ever seen before. What he reports is troubling, very troubling.

FisherCollection-SFMoMAI urge you to read it. But because it is behind a paywall–and you may not have access to it–let me post some key elements here, counting down to the worst part, in my opinion:

  • A grouping of Fisher collection works must hang together in the galleries once every 10 years.
  • The museum’s partnership is with an entity called the Fisher Art Foundation, but Doris Fisher actually owns most of the works. Like any lender, she can recall a work on loan to the museum any time she wants. Only those owned by the Foundation can’t have “private use.”
  • Of about 1,100 works in the Fisher collection, about 260 are on loan now to the museum—and only five of them are owned by Doris Fisher. But how many others in the whole collection does she own? We don’t know.
  • The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection Galleries—occupying the museum’s fourth, fifth and sixth floors–are required to contain primarily Fisher works at all times. No more than 25 percent of what is on view may come from other lenders or donors.

The final bullet point is critical. As Desmarais wrote:

It means that something like 60 percent of SFMOMA’s indoor galleries (not counting free-admission areas that serve as combination lobby and exhibition spaces) must always adhere — or, at least, respond — to a narrative of art history constructed by just two astute but obdurately private collectors…

[Thus] for the next 100 years, [museum curators’] job will be limited in those galleries to a kind of scholarly embroidery, filling in around the edges of a predetermined scenario with works by other artists, such as women, artists of color or California artists.

Devoting that much space, 60 percent, to the Fisher collection is way too large a proportion of the museum. The Lehman wing at the Metropolitan Museum* is most analogous; the collection must stay together as it was at the time of the gift. But, while I don’t know what proportion of the Met’s total space the wing occupies, but it must be paltry by comparison with the Fisher deal–and yet it was controversial.

And at SFMoMA, the provision lasts for 100 years, no less–which creates another problem. The Lehman collection was older art; it had weathered centuries of exposure and criticism and emerged as museum-worthy. The Fisher Collection is contemporary art: who knows how it will be viewed in 100 years? Take a look at the list of artists written about by Vasari. Where are some now? And whom did he leave out?

Desmarais didn’t mention the financial part of the deal in his story, but at the Met, the Robert Lehman Foundation provides a substantial annual payment to help defray the cost of the wing.

I understand the pressure that SFMoMA director Neal Benezra must have been under to cut a deal with the Fishers. But it seems to me that he and the museum’s board were out-negotiated. I–and, I think, others–will have to look at the museum differently, knowing these details. I hope other museums do not emulate Benezra and the museum’s trustees.

I commend Charles, a friend, on his digging. We need more of it.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of SF MoMA

 

A Master, A Mysterious Girl and An Unsolved Question

Petrus_Christus_-_Portrait_of_a_Young_WomanWhen I traveled to Berlin earlier this summer, I spent about four and half hours at the Gemaldegalerie (not enough time)–a full hour of which was spent looking at Portrait of a Young Girl (1470) by Petrus Christus. It’s the subject of the “Masterpiece” column I wrote for The Wall Street Journal, and was published on Saturday under the headline The Girl with the Sidelong Glance (at right). (If you are not a WSJ subscriber, you can read it here.)

It is a great picture, clearly, but I wouldn’t have noticed all the details without the help of Stephan Kemperdick, the museum’s curator of Early Netherlandish and German Painting. He spent most of that hour with me, and two things in particular come to mind that I might have missed without him: the very thin “tissue” draped around her shoulders (easy to see around her neck, but not across her bodice) and her unmatched eyelids. He also pointed out the geometry of the painting, the molding that aligns with her mouth and the vertical axis, neither of which I mentioned. (I read catalogue and book excerpts about her, too.)

As if to demonstrate the portrait’s drawing power, while we were talking, comparing it with three nearby van Eycks, a man came into the gallery with a folding stool. Taking no note of us, he plopped his stool right in front of the painting and sat there staring at it for at least five minutes. And then he got up and left, cursorily looking at other works.

Chron_hainau_det (1)

Some people are bothered by that heavy strap around her neck holding the headdress in place. Christus used it as a pictorial device, as my article notes, but Kemperdick did not know of another like it in paintings for a female, though he did tell me that a picture of Philip the Good shows something similar. I found that manuscript page, painted by Rogier van der Weyden, which is the frontispiece to the Chroniques de Hainaut held in Royal Library of Belgium–it’s at left (for a larger image, click on it and click again on the next page).

Still, the girl is mysterious and neither Kemperdick nor any of the written materials I consulted knew anything about the loop in the bonnet. Imagine my surprise–and delight–when a read wrote to me this morning saying that long ago she had been told by “an expert” that the velvet forehead loop advertised that she had a dowry of some known quantify–perhaps “10..thousand? hundred? pounds? gold coins?”annually.

Can we solve that mystery? Does anyone reading this know about the loop?