There are all kinds of collectors, as RCA readers know, and in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, I have a short piece on the Icons page on Morris Offit, a money manager who collects American flags. He likes the designs, he likes the patriotic feeling, and — his dealer Jeff Bridgman told me — he is grateful that the United States has been so good to him.

Not that Offit spends a lot of money on this hobby. He is definitely not the buyer who set the record for historical textiles at Sotheby’s in 2006, paying $12.33 million for a Revolutionary War calvalry banner. The same person, in the same sale, paid $5.05 million for a lot with three additional Revolutionary War battle flags.

No, Offit keeps his costs down, declining, for example, the opportunity to buy an 1869 presidential campaign flag for John C. Breckinridge, who finished third behind Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. It fetched $100,000.

Offit, hardly a slouch in the business arena, gets mileage out of the collection there, too. He displays his purchases at his office, and has put the best ones in public areas — for example the Whipple design in the picture at right.

“We’re known as the flag office,” he told me. Indeed.

What I didn’t know until I did this article was that there was no official flag design until 1912. The sweet spot for collecting U.S. flags is between about 1830 (earlier material is pretty rare) and 1890, when — even though the designs weren’t set — industrialization led to the mass production of flags.

 

 

Just a quickie: The Brooklyn Museum said today that it has added three new board members, including artist Fred Tomaselli. He is the first artist to sit on the board “in recent times,” the museum said in a press release.

That’s good news. I don’t know Tomaselli personally, so I have no idea how effective a voice he will be. But it’s never bad to have an artist’s view of what goes on at a museum. And the Brooklyn Museum has said that it wants to forge tighter relationships with the borough’s many working artists. And that is a good thing, which could improve the museum’s standing.

Tomaselli, of course, had a mid-career survey show at the Brooklyn last year.

Tomaselli is a native of California, but moved to Brooklyn in 1985.

Two other new trustees were also elected: Tamara C. Belinfanti, an Associate Professor of Law at New York Law School, and David L. Berliner, Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Forest City Ratner Companies, the real estate outfit.

Photo Credit: Big Raven, by Fred Tomaselli, Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum

Doling out news just before holiday weekends is usually a tactic of institutions that want to hide bad news. But today Brandeis University put out good news: it has settled the lawsuit filed by supporters of the Rose Art Museum there, ending any plans to sell the collection.

I just filed an article with details to The Art Newspaper, which has posted it on its website.

For background, here are previous posts:

More on the renovation (here), on artists’ support for the Rose lawsuit (here), and on the university’s improved financial condition (here).

And here is Brandeis’s press release posted a short time ago.

And Geoff Edgers in the Boston Globe has reached two of the plaintiffs, Meryl Rose and Jonathan Lee, both of whom praised the new university president, Fred Lawrence.

Lawrence, as you will see if you read my article in The Art Newspaper, graduated from Williams College, which may have something to do with his grasp of why the Rose is important. Though not an arts major, he took two art history courses at Williams. Often, Lawrence told me today, “when I mention that I went to Williams, that is enough of a credential in the art world.”

UPDATE, 7/1: The AAMD approves, in a letter to Lawrence.

 

The art world’s show of the fall season promises to be in London, at the National Gallery: Leonardo da Vinci, The Painter at the Court of Milan. (Extra points from me for choosing, as its poster picture, one of my all-time favorite paintings, Lady With an Ermine.)

But while the exhibit — seven or eight paintings, plus about 50 drawings — doesn’t even open until November 9, it is already causing problems. Yesterday, things got worse.

The NG knows that Leonardo will be popular, so popular that tickets — costing £16.00 (or about $25) at full price — went on sale on May 10, and along with that the National Gallery took the extraordinary step of reducing the number of slots available. As The Independent reported at the time, some people who viewed the Tate Modern’s Gauguin: Maker of Myth (which closed in January) were really angry because they could barely see the pictures amidst the crowds. Trying to avoid what people called “gallery rage,” the National Gallery is rationing the number of timed tickets: Rules allow 230 entrances per half-hour, but it will sell only 180 per half-hour.

As Luke Syson, the curator, explained it, “Essentially, we felt very strongly that the fewer people who will see the exhibition will have a better experience. It’s about having time to be contemplative. It will be crowded, but it won’t be overcrowded. We felt that although there was a sacrifice involved, these pictures are unlikely to be seen together again.”

Admirable goal but, to me, only a partial solution. It’s great to limit the number of people in the exhibit, but then we need to extend hours. For this show, the NG is doing some of that — the exhibit is open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., daily, till 7 p.m. on Sundays, and till 10 p,m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Plus, if I have counted correctly, there are 10 other days when closing time will be 10 p.m.

Normal hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily, and until 9 p.m. on Fridays.

But this show is a once-in-a-lifetime occasion. I’d like to see it open earlier and later, as demand demands — most tickets, afterall, will be sold in advance. Some exhibits have had round-the-clock access, at least for the last days. Maybe that will still happen.

Another accommodation, btw: the opening will be broadcast live.

Why did it get worse yesterday? ARTNews broke a story that has been percolating among some reporters (including myself) about a “found” Leonardo — a picture of Christ once owned by Charles I. This is the painting that caused a brief stir some months ago, when the Washington Post said that it was at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (which was true).

This work will be in the National Gallery exhibition, I am told, and that announcement will come this summer — causing more clamor to get in among the public.

I’m posting the link to the ARTNews article, although I believe that it is neither complete nor 100% accurate, based on my own incomplete reporting. The Illustration, I’m told, is also out of date — the work, has been conserved (again), and some of the previous damage caused by restoration and overpainting has been reversed.

 

 

Most of us stick a lot of things in storage closets or rooms or basements, and then forget about them — for years sometimes. So do museums, as the many finds, like the Velazquez at Yale that I wrote about last year, attest.

A new initiative by the BBC and Britain’s public art collections scratches the itch many people have to find out what’s in those museum store rooms — as well as the galleries themselves. It’s called Your Paintings, a website just launched and still in beta. On it, the BBC, together with the Public Catalogue Foundation, aims to post all 200,000 oil paintings in the UK’s national collections. Right now, only about 63,000 are online, but… that’s still pretty impressive. Eventually they’ll all be there.

You can browse the site or search it; here’s the link.

The paintings come from about 850 collections around the country. At the moment, the most common artist is Sir Alfred Munnings by a long shot. But it has the best artists, too — like Raphael (his picture of St. John the Baptist Preaching from the National Gallery is below), Botticelli (a portrait by him at the National Gallery is at left), Leonardo and so forth and so on.

The BBC is encouraging participation by asking people to help tag the paintings, making them more searchable. Right now, only basic information about each painting, like the title, artist, and execution date, is on the site — there’s nothing about the type of painting, the subjects portrayed, the styles or the movements the represent, for example.

The site also has a nice feature — guided tours by “names,” like Yinka Shonibare, Mary Beard, Alistair Sooke, Gus Casely-Hayford, Frank Skinner, James Fox, Dan Snow, Tracey Cox, and others.  

Some people don’t like this migration of images to the web, but while I do not in any way think it is a substitute for the in-person experience with art, I don’t see the harm in it either (as some do).

For me, another thing what makes a very good idea is that these paintings really do belong to British subjects, not to private museums — so they should have a real interest in knowing what they own. Most people are never going to visit the 850 galleries involved in the project. And the subtitle to the project is “Uncovering the nation’s art collection.”

 

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the National Gallery/London