Steve Wynn brought out his checkbook again last night, and paid an eye-opening $12,8 million for a set of four Empire ormulu-mounted Chinese porcelain baluster vases, including the buyer’s premium. Christie’s had set the presale estimate, minus the premium, at $961,200 to $1.6 million.

The four-foot high vases, which date to the Jiaqing period (1796-1821), with mounts circa 1815, once belonged to the Dukes of Buccleuch. The family sold them at Christie’s in 1973, and they were resold at Bonhams in 1980.

It was a shrewd purchase, even at that price. According to Bloomberg,

After the auction, the casino-owner’s leisure group said the vases had been bought by Wynn Resorts Macau Ltd. for its new Cotai Resort Hotel, scheduled to open in 2015. It was also the buyer of a Chinoiserie tapestry for 169,250 pounds.

“We are delighted to return works of this extraordinary quality to the city of Macau and the People’s Republic of China,” Roger Thomas, executive vice president of Design for Wynn Design and Development, said after the sale.

 Talk about currying favor and good will — and a new reason to exceed estimates.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Christie’s

 

There’s new movement in the game of curatorial musical chairs: George Shackelford (right), the Chair, Art of Europe, and Solomon Curator of Modern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, has a new job as Senior Deputy director (and also chief curator) at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth.

The announcement is expected soon — possibly over the weekend. UPDATE: My blog post prompted the Kimbell to release the news on Friday. Here’s the story as told by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Shackelford has been at the MFA since 1996, and he was previously the curator of paintings at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. He’s a Texan originally from Louisiana. (Apologies for the earlier mistake.)

Shackelford has curated many fine exhibitions at the MFA, including the upcoming fall show, Degas and the Nude, which was done with Musee d’Orsay.

The move makes sense for the Kimbell, though, and gives the MFA an opportunity to recharge the European art department.

According to his MFA bio:

Shackelford has organized a number of exhibitions for the MFA and has overseen the acquisition of paintings, sculpture, and works of decorative art from the middle ages to the modern era. During his tenure, the Museum acquired in 2003 one of the most important paintings by Edgar Degas remaining in a private collection,   Duchessa di Montejasi with Her Daughters, Elena and Camilla (1876, oil on canvas) [left]. In 2003-2004, he was co-curator of Gauguin(1876, oil on canvas). In 2003-2004, he was co-curator of Gauguin Tahiti, organized with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. The centerpiece of this international loan exhibition, which marked the centenary of Gauguin’s death, was the artist’s masterpiece D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Ou allons-nous? (Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?) from the MFA.

In 1996, Shackelford oversaw the reinstallation of the MFA’s Evans Wing European Galleries. Since then, he has served as co-curator of several major MFA exhibitions, among them Monet in the 20th Century, the most highly attended exhibition in the world in 1998; Van Gogh: Face to Face in 2000; Impressionist Still Life in 2001-02; and Impressions of Light: The French Landscape from Corot to Monet in 2002-03. He served as curator of the exhibitions Monet, Renoir, and the Impressionist Landscape (1999); Jean-François Millet (2001); and Delacroix to Munch: Nineteenth-Century Visions (2004), all held at the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts (N/BMFA), Nagoya, Japan. Most recently, he served as curator of The World of Claude Monet, which opened at the N/BMFA in April 2008, subsequently traveling to Sydney, Australia, and Wellington, New Zealand, and was curator of Gauguin, which marked the N/BMFA’s 10th anniversary in 2009.

Shackelford is staying in Boston through the opening of Degas show (Oct. 9), and beyond — early December according to some accounts. 

 

If, in the future (as in the past), the Whitney Museum’s director, board and curators experience identity issues, I hope the powers that be there recall Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World, the exhibition that opened there last week.

It is exactly the kind of show the Whitney should be doing, far more often than it has done: one that makes a definitive statement, showing the full range of work of an artist whose reputation is not what it should be or who (perhaps) isn’t well known.

It’s a scholarly show that is a delight — and may just change Feininger’s reputation. Barbara Haskell, with Sasha Nicholas, are the curators and to them I say congratulations.

I review the show in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, favorably, ending with:

In Germany, Feininger is not only known and shown regularly, but loved. In 2002, a stamp was created in his honor, depicting one of his church paintings. With the Whitney exhibition as evidence, one hopes, he is on his way to long overdue recognition in his native land.

But I have more to say. In the review, I mention that critics like Clement Greenberg shoved figurative modernism aside in favor of abstract expressionism, but there wasn’t room to say that even Greenberg thought that Feininger was a good artist.

In a review of a gallery show of Feininger’ work in 1943, including works from 1911 through 1938, Greenberg said Feininger had “genuine talent as a draftsman” — perhaps damning him with faint praise except that there was more. “Feininger always paints with honesty and grace…he is not important in a large sense but he has a definite and secure place in contemporary painting.” Not bad, really, coming from someone whose heart and mind were in a different place.

Haskell told me that about one third of the works in the exhibition were borrowed from Germany, which makes sense, considering that he is more appreciated there than here. But I was surprised to see that many U.S. museums also own some very fine Feiningers — including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Met, MoMA, the North Carolina Museum of Art (its Green Bridge II is shown above left), the National Gallery of Art, and the Walker Art Center (its Church of the Minorites II is above right), among others. One wonders why his time for a retrospective like this hasn’t come up before.  

The Whitney, btw, owns only one Feininger painting, and it’s fine, but is not one of his best.

This may be Feininger’s moment, however. Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World moves to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts next January. And, meanwhile, the Harvard Art Museums are circulating two Feininger shows: Lyonel Feininger: Drawings and Watercolors from the William S. Leiberman Bequest to the Busch-Reisinger Museum has been traveling in Germany and Lyonel Feininger: Photographs, 1928-1939 is in Germany now and moves to the Getty Museum in October and then back to Harvard.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the North Carolina Museum of Art (top) and the Walker Art Center (bottom).

 

The Best Art You’ve Never Seen — it’s quite a title. Imagine an exhibition of art works long hidden in private collections or remote museums.

The Best Art You’ve Never Seen isn’t an exhibition, though; it’s a book, by one Julian Spalding, a former museum director in Britain. It was published late last year, but I just came across it recently (it hasn’t had much recognition here, at least), and I was intrigued. The subtitle is 101 Hidden Treasures from Around the World. Fittingly, the publisher is Rough Guides, because I tend to use book like this to guide my travel.

Spalding divides his book into ten chapters, not geographically however, but rather by the reason for the hiding: “by chance,” “by choice,” “by place,” “by hate,” “by convention,” “by collecting,” and so on.

So let’s look at what is hidden “by time,” by which he means objects that time is destroying:

• totem poles of Sgang Gwaay Llanagaay on Anthony Island, in Canada — which the descendants of the Haida people who made them have decreed should disappear into the forests from which they, and this village, came
• The Isle of California, an enamel mural by Terry Schoonhoven and Victor Henderson in Los Angeles, which shows LA after the Great Quake which is to come
• The Fight for the Standard a work on paper by Rubens, after Leonardo, in the Louvre
• Qin Shi Huang’s Tomb in Xi’an, China, which may have been raided a long time ago (but may not have)

Not a bad list.

One may quarrel with Spalding’s classifications (and I do) — are Redoute’s floral watercolors really “hidden by art” because they’re mostly owned by reference collections of botanical gardens? And likewise Audubon’s paintings because they’re not on display often enough? Is Tilman Riemanschneider’s Marienatler really “hidden by hate”?

But on the whole, I love books like this because they are enlightening, and fun. And, as I mentioned, also great for travel-planning, just like the World Monuments Fund endangered sites list and Thomas Hoving’s ”Greatest Works of Art of Western Civilization.” Try it.

 

 

I’ve sometimes wondered here whether viewing art online will lead people to visit museums, but I’ve not thought much about whether viewing art at museums will lead people to their website for more about the art they’ve just seen. I did praise The Mourners’ website (here), and a few others, but that was about it.

I certainly don’t recall visiting an exhibition and then going home eager to see what’s online about the show — until today. I was up at the Jewish Museum* to see Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore. It’s drawn from the renowned, and large, Cone Collection of modern art that is the jewel of the Baltimore Museum of Art.

On display in the Jewish Museum’s last gallery of the show is Matisse’s Large Reclining Nude, which he painted in 1935, devising the design over five months, photographing his variations, and sending 22 photos to Etta Cone in hopes that she would buy the work, a tactic that worked. Near the picture, the Jewish Museum has posted small version of six of the 22 photos — and a note that the entire set is available on line.

Hence my post-visit log on, where I was pleased to find the aforementioned photos and much more — under a tab for the exhibition called “Look Closer.” For a start, here you can get a look at all 22, along with a podcast of the audioguide spot museum-goers hear (plus a transcript).

But the images are tiny, and I was about to turn away in disappointment when I noticed tabs on the bottom of that page: “All Images,” where they parade across your screen; “Figure,” which displays only the photos in which Matisse is working out the figure form; “Room,” ditto for the space; “Patterns,” likewise for the furnishings; and “Process,” which outlines how Matisse worked as he made changes (e.g., he attached paper in some cases, experimenting with changes before painting them). Each of those categories is accompanied by a podcast and transcript not available on the museum audioguide.

I found this fascinating — a very good reason to go home and look at what’s on a museum’s website (assuming it informs visitors that there’s more there).

And there is more for the Cone Sisters show — an illustrated chronology of their lives and collecting, podcasts of the audioguide, a list of all events and programs, and of course a link to merchandise associated with the exhibition. In this case, that’s all books (alas — I’d have liked reproductions of a few of the jewelry pieces in the exhibition!).

Not every exhibition will have such rich, web-friendly accompanying material, but in this case the Jewish Museum seems to have made much of what it had.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Baltimore Museum of Art

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Jewish Museum.