If you’re not into Asian art, you may have skipped the article in The New York Times special Museums section on Mar. 17 about Maxwell Hearn, the incoming head of the Asian art department at the Metropolitan Museum*: “At Met, New Leadership (and Direction) for Asian Art” by Holland Cotter.

Which would have been too bad, because it was the section’s sleeper article. Within it were two-and-a-half excellent points about museums and art in general.

1) Hearn is looking for someone to replace himself as plain old curator of Chinese art, and it’s going to be hard because there’s so little supply. He said,

There’s been a real shift in the field, and I think it is across the board in art history. We’re all seeing that young students are more and more interested exclusively in contemporary. Anything that’s old is a hard sell.

This, I hear from many art historians is true. One well-known respected source said he’d read somewhere that 80% of art history students now want to study just contemporary art. Ouch!

2) Hearn said other departments could take a leaf from Asian art as they think about displaying the permanent collections — that is, regularly changing what’s on view. Because of their fragile nature, and inability to withstand constant light,

In Asian art, we’re used to rotating our collections of Chinese and Japanese paintings and Indian miniatures all the time.

Good idea. Not every museum has the depth of the Met’s collection, but I am surprised sometimes by what’s in storage. 

UPDATE: ORIGINALLY, I WROTE HERE “Recently, for example, when I visited the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, I was disappointed that a marvelous Martin Johnson Heade, which I wrote about in 1999, was not on view. The MFAH had paid $1.25 million for Magnolias on a Gold Velvet Cloth, which “for years covered a hole in the wall in an Indiana home, its value unknown to the owner and its existence unknown to art experts.” ” BUT MFAH TELLS ME THE PAINTING IS ON VIEW. I REGRET THE USE OF THIS EXAMPLE, BUT I STILL AM SURPRISED BY WHAT’S IN STORAGE AT MUSEUMS.

3) Everyone, as Hearn implied, wants to collect contemporary art, including the Met’s Asian art department. But there’s a caveat, from my point of view and Hearn hints at it:

China, Japan, Korea, India, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam — all these places are creating wonderful things, and at the Met we have the opportunity to give this work an historical context.

Many museums seem to be going about buying art from Latin America, Asia and the Middle East without attempting to give that historical context or even attempt to see it in a continuum. Not a good thing, is it?

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The New York Times

*A consulting client of mine supports the Metropolitan Museum

Last November, I wrote here about a proposal by Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum, to sell four works from Still’s gigantic collection (which are part of the estate of his widow, Patricia) before they are officially accessioned by the museum. The museum plans to use the money not for new acquisitions — Still (pictured, right) is dead, afterall, and it’s a one-artist museum — but for all museum activities.

No “accession,” no “deaccession,’ and presumably no furor, Sobel and the city of Denver (the actual beneficiary of the estate) thought. It still caused a minor furor, though.

But Sobel had done the right thing, announcing his idea and seeking court approval for the sale, which ideally will be made in a bundle to another museum.

Last Thursday, a circuit court in Maryland agreed to the petition. A sale can go ahead.

The museum is moving ahead, too: Ground was broken in December 2009 for a building designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture and located near the
Denver Art Museum, the Denver Public Library and the new Colorado History Museum. The museum has raised about $30 million so far, and opening is slated for next fall.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Estate of Clyfford Still 

Everywhere, state governments are cutting spending, including arts budgets and education budgets. What does this mean for college museums and arts centers?

The other day, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a somewhat contrarian article headlined In an Era of Campus Cutbacks, Performing-Arts Centers Keep Going Up. It led off with the opening of the Valley Performing Arts Center at Cal State, Northridge (left), which happened just about the time California was slashing its higher education budget by $1.4 billion.

Of course, these centers were begun a long time ago. But read on:

Multimillion-dollar venues, many of them financed largely by state money, are opening or planned at colleges across the country….prompt[ing] critics to talk about “edifice complexes” and “conspicuous consumption.”

…In February, James Madison University opened its five-venue, $82-million Forbes Center for the Performing Arts. Smaller facilities have opened within the past year or so at George Mason University’s branch campus in Manassas, Va. ($46-million), Sam Houston State University ($38.5-million), and on Montgomery College’s campus in Silver Spring, Md. ($31-million).

…But even with the economy sputtering and gloom pervading legislative budget committees, new arts venues are in the works at institutions as diverse as Hagerstown Community College, in Maryland; the University of Texas’s Permian Basin campus; and the State University of New York at Potsdam. With colleges everywhere raising tuition and cutting programs, such projects have some people questioning administrative priorities.

The article goes on to say that some people now thing that art centers are a “necessity,” not a luxury, for colleges, while others wonder whether this is part of the oversupply (glut?) in the arts that National Endowment for the Arts chairman Rocco Landesman spoke about recently.

The Chronicle hasn’t done a recent survey on museums, but we do know of some recent or planned openings, including the Broad Art Museum at Michigan State, the interdisciplinary Granoff Center at Brown, and Dartmouth’s abuilding visual arts center.

I think a couple of things are going on here, starting with the fact that donors still prefer to contribute to capital campaigns than operating funds or endowments — which makes for more buildings.

At the same time, I hear — anecdotally — that university museums are being pressed to prove their worth, and often that means getting more attendance from people outside the university community. Not enough visitors = possible support cuts, which is kind of crazy considering that university museums tend to be free (still, right?).

College performing arts centers often serve the surrounding community, too — necessarily in some cases, because they are quite big.

But for museums, going too far beyond the campus may be bad because it will undoubtedly affect exhibition programming, leading it away from scholarship and more toward popular exhibits. And more visitors usually increases costs.

Just this weekend, when I read the annual Museums section in The New York Times — published on Mar. 17, while I was out of the country — it was noticeable how many university museums took out ads: I counted 11, from full page to tiny boxes. Last year’s edition carried four ads from university museums. That’s a change in outreach.

I know I am mixing public and private institutions here, but the repercussions are likely to be similar: additional dependence on private donors, and more pressure on college museums and arts centers to attract visitors from a broader community.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Cal State, Northridge

Well, there are lots of reasons for that. But a FB friend posted about an exhibit that I would really like to see, and when I sent him a message about it, he wrote back that Paris is loaded with seemingly great exhibitions at the moment, at both museums and galleries. So…

What initially caught my attention was The Caillebotte Brothers’ Private World, which opened today at the marvelous Jacquemart-Andre Museum. Of course we know about Gustave, whom I last saw in depth at the Brooklyn Museum’s 2009 exhibit. Even though his best works weren’t there, his innovation was obvious. The Paris exhibit includes his brother Martial, a composer, poet and photographer. New to me, and others:    

…a recent study of Martial’s photographic collection has revealed a great awareness of the subjects represented in the paintings of his brother Gustave: the views of Paris, the sailing boats, the gardens and the river banks. This discovery has enabled the Jacquemart-André Museum to do what no other museum has done before: compare Martial’s photographs directly with Gustave’s works….

 

…the exhibition reveals the underlying similarities between the Caillebotte brothers, by hanging 35 paintings alongside almost 150 modern prints…taken from Martial’s originals. Some of the paintings, which belong to private collections, have never been shown in public before.

Do museums that focus on American art need a new support group?

That idea was floated the other day by Andrew J. Walker, the incoming director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, who starts his job in earnest on April 1.

Walker, who moved to Texas from his post as assistant director of curatorial affairs at the St. Louis Art Museum, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that “he hopes to encourage a collaborative relationship of loans and exhibitions with museums such as the Whitney Museum of American art in New York; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, scheduled to open in November in Bentonville, Ark.; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; and others, to the benefit of all, with the Carter in the lead.”

The Carter in the lead, he said, because it stands “taller” than the others, given its collection of masterworks.

It’s neither a bad idea, nor a great one — because these partnerships tend to develop among museums of similar size and quality anyway.

I’m all for starting exchanges, creating great exhibits of American art, and talking up American art, but I suggest that Walker somehow figure out how to include smaller, less well-endowed museums of American art, because they tend to need partnerships more. They don’t have the goods that draw audiences. Maybe the loan of just one master painting, which I’ve written about before here and here, would help.

But I like that Walker seems to be signaling that he’s going to be a big booster of American art, which the Carter — celebrating its 50th year — owns a great collection of.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Amon Carter Museum