I have a trifle in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, an “Icon” piece called “Object of Desire: A Bed (Not for Sleeping).” It’s about the gorgeous late 17th century lit a la duchesse now on view at the Getty in the exhibition, “Paris: Life and Luxury,” and below.  

I say trifle, because the article is so short — but I must also commend the WSJ for publishing pieces like this at all, focusing as it does on an object that’s not even for sale.

These Icon pieces (though sometimes about things that are for sale) are akin to the WSJ’s longer, and even better, weekly column called “Masterpiece,” which I have praised here before. It used to have the apt subtitle “Anatomy of a Classic,” but that has been dropped though it explains exactly what the column does.

The WSJ also had a review of the Paris show in Thursday’s paper, which explicates how the exhibition was organized: it shows the culture of the period explained in the course of a single day. The first gallery is dominated by the bed. What caught my attention when I first read the press release about the exhibition was the fact that, though the Getty had bought the bed in 1979, it had never until now been shown. I had to ask what that was all about, and that’s when I discovered how fragile the piece is. (PR lesson: That fact, btw, is also one of the hooks that interested the WSJ editors.)

But back to the exhibit. When I was at the Detroit Institute of Arts recently, I wanted to see everything in its great collections, of course, but I also specifically wanted to see the museum’s European decorative arts treasures. When those collections were reinstalled a few years ago, I had recalled, the museum had taken a different approach, using some sort of table, with a film, to explain how pieces would have been used. The description (which I saved) called these galleries “Fashionable Living” and “Splendor by the Hour.”

Sure enough, when DIA director Graham Beal showed me these galleries, they are a bit like the Getty exhibit. And the Getty, Beal told me, admits it borrowed the idea from the DIA.

In these cases, the approach works: both museums have the goods to make it so.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Getty Museum 

   

If you look hard, and think, the picture I am pasting at right may seem familiar — reminiscent, even, of a painting. It is, rather, a living wall erected outside the National Gallery in London — made of more than 8,000 plants of 26 varieties. It was erected out of the NG’s concern for the environment, an attempt to reduce its carbon footprint.

It is, of course, supposed to be van Gogh’s Wheatfield, With Cypresses, painted in 1889 — the version owned by the National Gallery, pictured below.

The plant picture is on view in Trafalgar Square, to the west of the National Gallery, now through October. It will, through the seasons, grow and change, of course (though I don’t know whether or when the sky will turn blue).

The ecopicture was made with the help of General Electric, which has a business it calls ‘ecomagination.’ You can learn more about that here, and through the National Gallery’s press release.

How much good the picture is going to the environment was left unsaid — perhaps it is uncalculable.  

But it’s a show — probably useful as an attention-getter both for climate change, art and, of course, GE.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of GE and the National Gallery

 

Lynn Hershman Leeson is one obsessed, or perhaps tenacious, woman.

For more than 40 years, she has been collecting interviews with artists, critics, curators and art historians about the Feminist Art Movement, and now she’s out with her film, !Women Art Revolution. It opened today at IFC Center in New York, after showing at the Sundance, Berlin and Toronto film festivals.

No matter what you think about gender studies and women’s art, the doc has a worthy subject. There’s no denying that women artists have had a much harder time breaking into the big leagues of the art world than men.

I can’t vouch for the quality of this documentary, because I haven’t seen it, but the lede to the review in The New York Times tells an anecdote suggesting the film’s relevancy: When people stopped outside both the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum were asked to name three women artists, most could not get past “Frida…ah…”

That review concludes with “…if this is ‘!W.A.R.,” omission is the enemy. And Ms. Hershman Leeson’s fighting spirit is contagious.”

Movie City News called it “compelling” and added,

This doc is a real gem — as relevant to the feminist art movement as Exit Through the Gift Shop was for street art, albeit less flashy in its composition. If you love art, or have any interest at all in film, art, and the place women have in those disciplines, you don’t want to miss this.

And Film Journal says:

!Women Art Revolution. is a messy mash-up of feminism, art and politics too often punctuated by ponderous statements. But the doc does make the case that women artists were victims of discrimination, deserved to be mad as hell and, as members of the feminist art movement, had the guts to act. What does not come across is that their output, as evidenced by the bits on display here and with very few exceptions, had much artistic merit.

You can’t ask for better than that. In general, I think political art is tough to pull off well, and I can’t say I love feminist art. But political documentaries, they’re a different genre altogether.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of !W.A.R.

 

I haven’t been to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, by the way — one of the museums now available on Google. I will someday. But I couldn’t bear to experience it for the first time in this way. I didn’t fall in love with art — or museums — because of “zoom levels.” 

That is David Franklin, director of the Cleveland Art Museum, speaking on the subject of the Google Art Project. (I actually have been to the Hermitage.)

Given all the praise for GAP, I was a tad surprised to hear his views, which came out at the panel I moderated for International Museum Day at the Toledo Art Museum on May 18. As it happened, one audience member asked a question about the Google Art Project (the entire discussion about “Museums and Memory” has been posted on YouTube) and Franklin, a panelist, was quick to speak out against it.

Until then, I went with the flow in favor: I rather think it’s fun to zoom in on the brush strokes and pigments in, say, Holbein’s The Merchant Georg Gisze at Berlin’s Gemaldegalerie, though I haven’t had the patience to use the technology that allows computer users to pan around galleries of each museum that are part of the GAP. (GAP’s creator, btw, has said he never intended the site to be a meta-museum, but that’s how some people are treating it.) I also thought it might draw people to visit museums, and that would obviously be a good thing.

But Franklin doesn’t think GAP is a good introduction to art. In Toledo, he mentioned that he had spoken about GAP at the recent TED conference in Cleveland, known as TEXxCLE. His talk is posted here, and I asked for and received a copy of his script (from which he says he diverted at times).

The quote above is from his talk, which begins with a slide of the Cleveland Museum’s Stargazer, a sculpture from what is now Turkey. It’s true the picture above does not do justice to this 5,000+ year-old object. Franklin showed his TED audience a slide, and then her, and said: 

When you encounter the Stargazer in the museum, she looks as though she could have been sculpted yesterday. Translucent marble, clean lines, almost an interpretation of the human form that Picasso would have envied. 5,000 years ahead of its time, but embodying a gesture still timeless — a small human figure looking hopefully to the skies.

The Stargazer tells a story of human aspiration. Her place in the story stretches back into our prehistory. But she also holds a special place in a story that stretches forward. The story of why museums matter.

Museums matter because they create the space to behold, to circle, to covet, to engage with an object so small, and feel the continuity of something so large.

I really like that description.

Franklin goes on in his speech to elaborate on four reasons why technology can’t replace going to a museum, but should instead be used to better understand the originals, and says that art must be experienced, that viewing something online is hardly the same as experiencing it. I don’t think he would get much argument on those points from RCA readers.

The question, though, is whether viewing art on GAP makes one more or less likely to visit museums — and I suspect the answer is not a universal one. Sometimes it will, and sometimes it won’t. Not much downside in that.

But one final thought, now that GAP has been around a while and publicity has died down: I’d like to know if the initial attraction of GAP has continued. Are the hits still high at participating museums?

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Cleveland Art Museum

 

While at the groundbreaking for the downtown Whitney Museum last week, I got to thinking about the uptown building. As with most change, there are risks associated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent deal to occupy the Whitney Museum’s Madison Avenue Breuer building when it decamps for Tribeca.

But there is a huge opportunity too. So forget about the knee-jerk reactions others have expressed about how putting contemporary art into the Whitney “outpost” turns it into a stepchild, or how Met will lower its quality standards to fill those galleries.

Or even, from another point of view, how it will divide the Met’s audience — the cool kids will go to the contemporary galleries and the fuddy-duddies will go to the Fifth Avenue Met.

I have aspirations for the Met-Whitney, which are related to the third.

It isn’t always easy for museum-goers to see or understand links between old art and new art, yet many contemporary artists are inspired by pre-WW II art. I would like to see the Met organize exhibitions in the Breuer building that helps people learn about those relationships.

I am thinking out loud here, so no “ideal” model is coming to mind. But I know of two recent examples that address this issue. Both are/were overseas, however, so I haven’t seen them. I mention them for their concepts.

One is on view now through July 4 at the Rijksmuseum: Kiefer & Rembrandt. For it, Anselm Kiefer was invited to create a work inspired by The Night Watch. He did it in a roundabout way, making La Berceuse (for Van Gogh), as van Gogh greatly admired Rembrandt, and Kiefer admires them both. As described recently in a New York Times blog post,

Mr. Kiefer…reinterprets “The Night Watch” as a three-dimensional triptych, each piece approximately 5 feet wide and 13 feet tall. The center element displays a worn antique garden chair, seemingly floating in space. The two side sections showcase inverted sunflowers and cracked, dry soil — Mr. Kiefer has chosen to depict Rembrandt with objects distinctly attributed to van Gogh.

The sculpture, a detail of which is pictured above, is on display in The Night Watch gallery; the Rijksmuseum has also mounted a photography exhibition showing Kiefer at work nearby. Every weekend, the museum has a program introducing the relationship between Kiefer’s work and the Old Masters. 

The other exhibition took place in London in 2009 at Robilant + Voena: it was called Back To the Future: Young Artists Look To Old Masters, and I wrote about it here.

The trouble with both examples is that they are rather literal, and all of the new art was commissioned by the museum or the gallery. I’d like to see exhibits that do not depend on such instigation, but rather interpret contemporary works that were made, on their own, by artists, without interventions.

Perhaps readers know of such models.  

I’m not suggesting that the entire Breuer building be devoted to these shows. But it would be nice to see them come around from time to time. If done well, they could be very popular, as well as enlightening.

Photo Credit: Myra May, Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum