This post is about men, change, and museums — not necessarily separately or in that order, so please bear with me.

On Saturday, I read an article saying the Phoenix Art Museum was parting ways with the Cowboy Artists of America. For 37 years, the two have staged a joint show and sale of Western art in October. But sales declines over the past five years — once $2.8 million, but half that in 2009, according to the Arizona Republic — caused a reevaluation, and … splitsville.

The breakup, said James Ballinger, director of the museum, “reflects a real shift in collecting habits and what people are looking for.” Tim Cox, president of the cowboys group, said the museum “wanted us to make some changes to the show that would have changed our uniqueness as an organization.” 

Both sides may well be correct. But here’s the good thing: Ballinger isn’t parting company with Western art. He promised that the museum would mount an annual Western-themed art exhibit. I say this is good not because I think Western art is so great — there’s good Western art, and bad Western art, the same as any category — but because it is one of the things that makes the Phoenix museum distinctive. Not every museum can differentiate itself from others — but it’s a positive when one can. It’s a reason for out-of-towners to visit.

I learned something else from the Republic article: the Phoenix museum has a Men’s Arts Council. Here’s what it does:

Men’s Arts Council (MAC) of Phoenix Art Museum was founded in January of 1967 to support the programs and activities of the Museum. Admission is by invitation only. With the talents and efforts of its over 125 members, MAC organizes three distinctively different annual events: the Cowboy Artists of America Sale & Exhibition, the Copperstate 1000 Vintage Car Rallye, and Vin Arte, Masterpieces Sale and Dinner. In addition, MAC members provide help in a variety of ways at the Museum.

The efforts of the Men’s Arts Council enable the group to make annual contributions to the Museum’s operating budget, to financially sponsor exhibitions and to fund two separate endowments: the Western American Art Endowment Fund and the Men’s Arts Council Sculpture Endowment.

The website hasn’t yet caught up with recent news, and it says that the April Vin Arte event has been postponed. Which is too bad.

But maybe the wine events weren’t making money either. I’m speculating, but sometimes events live past their sell-by date and it is time to change. I know that some museums have recently decided that many “support” groups have been costing more than they’ve delivered in benefits to the museum.

At the same time, I’d hope that Phoenix does keep events that address the male gap in attendance at museums. It has been a long time since anyone mentioned a men’s museum group. Years ago, I’d heard of one that held an annual men-only acquisitions dinner, at which — supposedly — they all smoked cigars and drank wine and outdid each other pledging money to buy art.

I’d suspect those events have gone the way some people apparently think Cowboy art has.

Photo Credit: © 2007 Judy Hedding

  

The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation* announced 2011 fellows from the U.S. and Canada the other day. Of the 180, 20 were in “fine arts” (that means visual arts) and another eight were in photography. These are prestigious awards, and I always wonder, what does it take to win one?

Here’s the list, and — to find what kind of work was deemed worthy — links to the best website about them I found: their own, their dealer’s, or another art website.

UPDATED: It turns out that I can not do a list with links…the names, I think, are too close together and the links all run together. Some work, some don’t. Apologies.

It’s a range of work. You know some of them already; some, probably not.

Fine Arts
Ann Agee

Gregory A. Amenoff

Janine Antoni

Judith Barry
James Mark Biederman
Katherine Bradford
Rick Briggs
Beth Campbell
Janet S. Echelman
R. M. Fischer
Charles Adam Goldman
Duncan Hannah
Corin Hickory Hewitt
Bernie B. Lubell
Andrew Masullo
Jesus Mora
Endi E. Poskovic
Charles Ross
Lisa Beth Sigal
Stephen Vitiello

Bradford’s “Ferry” is above.

Photography

Karolina Karlic
Jonathan Scott Lowenstein
Richard Mosse His “Breach: is at right.
Pipo Hieu Nguyen-duy
Betsy Schneider
Katherine M. Turczan
Penelope Umbrico
John M.Willis

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the artists

* I consult to a foundation that supports the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation

 

For my latest art news, I visited the website of the National Science Foundation. Yes, there for another reason, I discovered three recent news items dealing with museums and conservation, and the findings made possible by science.

The latest involves two paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago: Winslow Homer’s For to Be a Farmer’s Boy (a watercolor made in 1887) and van Gogh’s The Bedroom (1889). Using new techniques on the Homer, scientists now know for sure that the sky — “starkly blank” now — was once “a vibrant autumn sunset, with organic purples and reds, in addition to inorganic reds and yellows.”

The photo at left shows what a “restored” half would look like, and what the painting now looks like on the right.

The new discovery method is too involved for me to explain here, but it pairs a 30-year-old technique called Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy with nanotechnology. Next up is using “these next-generation nanoparticles …to unlock information on dyes, pigments and binding media, as present in Van Gogh’s The Bedroom.” You can read the whole NSF article here.

In another instance, the Metropolitan Museum of Art* is using new anti-body based research to “uncover the material world of art–the organic compounds mixed with inorganic materials that compose what we see in a painting, a sculpture or even costumes.” Discoveries were not disclosed so there may not be any — yet. But read more here.

Finally, NSF put out this intriguing notice about Attic pottery from 4th to 6th centuries B.C.:

…a collaborative group of California scientists from the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), the Aerospace Corporation and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) at Stanford is investigating the ancient technology used to create these works of art. From their study of the makeup of this iconic pottery, the researchers hope to further current conservation practice and future space travel….

Led by Karen Trentelman, a conservation scientist at the GCI, the grant team is working with conservators and curators from the J. Paul Getty Museum to attribute characteristic material “signatures” to known artists, which should aid the classification of unsigned works. The information will provide a deeper understanding of ancient pottery techniques and inform future conservation methods.

Of importance to aerospace industries, the effort will also create a deeper knowledge of iron-spinel chemistry, which is critical for advanced ceramics found in aerospace applications.

Many more details and descriptions are here. Finding “signatures” and making attributions to works that are currently “artist not known” would be great fun, akin to the work attributing Native American works that I wrote about here. 

Indeed, that’s what ran through my mind reading about these conservation techniques: they hold other promises for art research, too.

I’m not sure how competitive these NSF grants are, but here’s a link to the NSF’s Chemistry and Materials Research in Cultural Heritage Science program.  

Photo Credits: © Kristi Dahm, Loren McDonald, The Art Institute of Chicago (top); J. Paul Getty Museum (bottom)

*I consult to a Foundation that supports the Met

 

From afar, the exhibition called Monet’s Water Lillies at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City has a lot of good things going for it.

But it also, I believe, has a downside or two…and I hope this is not the way of the future there. Until now, I’ve been mostly impressed by the museum under new director Julian Zugazagoitia (see here and here).

The exhibit, which opens Apr. 8, reunites a Monet triptych, whose panels have long since been acquired by three museums, for the first time in three decades. The 14-feet wide, 6-feet-tall paintings are hung together, in a panorama, as Monet intended, not separated by space and not surrounded by other paintings — similarly, as I recall, to the way another water lillies series is hung at l’Orangerie (below) in Paris (and, maybe an old installation at the Museum of Modern Art?).

In nearby galleries, visitors will see archival photographs and a rare 1915 film that shows Monet painting in his garden at Giverny.

The curators have done their scholarship, too. From new conservation studies, they believe that Monet changed the composition over the years, and the exhibition will explore his process.

You can read more in the press release.

So what’s not to like? Background music, for one thing. The museum is piping it in to gallery displaying the triptych. What kind I do not know, but while I love music as much as paintings I don’t need or want background music to go with my Monet.

What would be the point?

These Monet Water Lillies in particular can hold their own. As an AP article appropriately quotes Ann Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of paintings and sculpture: “What’s amazing about them is the mood they create in the room where they’re installed. It’s a magical one. It becomes a very quiet place. The visitors become quite contemplative.” Here’s the AP article, printed in the in the Seattle Times.

I also have minor questions about this, as the Kansas City Star describes it:

Bound to be a big hit is a touch-screen paint program, where visitors can create their own water lillies paintings with virtual brushes and colors and email the finished works to their home computers and to an online gallery on the Nelson’s website.

And:

…[the exhibit] will not only have X-rays and that touch-screen paint program, it will also have books and a “touchable” version of the “Water Lilies,” created by associate conservator of painting Mary Schafer.

 

Schafer’s 20-by-60-inch canvas, loosely divided into vertical strips, provides a chronological account of the way Monet built his canvas from the white ground to thick applications of pigment for the water lilies to the thin washes he applied over them.

 

Viewers will be encouraged to feel the surface texture of Schafer’s painting, which she fully expects will get dirty over the course of the show.

It’s that touching part that bothers me most (though I wonder if people will conclude that they can paint as well as Monet!). Later in the show — it runs until August — Schafer plans to show children how to clean that painting, in the course of which they’re also supposed to learn why they can’t touch the real thing. Good luck with that… months later. And who’s to say the children who did the touching will later do the learning? Probably not, as a matter of fact.

 

There’s also a bit more on this in the Basehor Sentinel and the AP story. 

 

I wonder, too, what signals museums are sending with some new “add-ons.” Maybe these are fine — I’d like to see them before weighing in definitively — but are museums saying that art, even great art, is not enough. As I understand this exhibit, visitors exit through the “active” and “interactive” areas; they don’t leave with that marvelous feeling of peace and thoughtfulness that Water Lillies creates.

And that’s a bit of a shame.

 

Paris may get a Frank Gehry museum after all. In February, French courts created some drama about the private museum planned by billionaire Bernard Arnault, chairman of the luxury goods company LVMH, which Gehry had designed. Arnault’s $142 million building,  future home of the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation, is located in western Paris, on the northern edge of the Bois de Bologne and adjacent to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, a children’s playground operated by LVMH.

But some neighbors objected; they want the space to remain green. And they don’t want this to be the start of more buildings in the bois, even if it’s by Gehry. 

Essentially, French administrative courts agreed, stopping construction on the glass-encased museum because a path near the gallery was declared to be a public right of way.

But last week I read on a Forbes blog that the French Senate had weighed in on Arnault’s side. It passed a bill permitting construction to continue.

When it was announced in 2006, the opening date was to be 2009 or 2010. Now it’s 2012.

One person suggested that Arnault, who plans to put both his private and corporate collections on view in the museum — with works by artists like Picasso, Elsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, Yves Klein and Agnes Martin — might have taken his multi-million-euro collection to Switzerland if construction did not resume.

As for Gehry, in February, he’s been indignant, telling reporters that he was “distressed, shocked and furious” at the threat to his “magical” creation. French architect Jean Nouvel agreed, saying he was “outraged by the selfishness, lack of civic pride and ignorance” of the opponents.

I haven’t seen any statements from either of them, or Arnault, since the Senate acted.

Photo Credit: Getty Images via AFP