There is sad news in the antiquities world this morning: Donny George, former director general for the Iraqi Museums (2003-2005) and former Chairman of the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (2005-2006), died yesterday, apparently of a stroke.

He was in Toronto to give a lecture.

George has been a visiting professor of archeaology at SUNY-Stonybrook since being forced to leave Iraq. He was known for saving much of Iraq’s cultural heritage, helping to recover hundreds of artifacts stolen from the Baghdad museum in the Iraq war.

His bio is here.

When there is an obit, I will post. In the meantime, here are two reports covering two speeches he gave on the Iraq situation (here and here).

UPDATED: Here’s the link to his obit in The New York Times.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of SUNY-Stonybrook.

“This remarkable work is made up of five hundred dazzling green, red, blue, and white quetzal feathers, with three-foot-long iridescent green tail feathers radiating from a multicolored semicircular band.” So wrote the inimitable Tom Hoving in his book Greatest Works of Art of Western Civilization.

He was describing Montezuma’s headdress, the only surviving pre-Columbian headdress of its type. It was given to Hernan Cortes, the conquistador, in 1519. Cortes later gave it to the Hapsburg emperor Charles V, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. It has been in Europe ever since, but now — perhaps — it may go home to Mexico on a three-year loan.

Martin Bailey has the story in the March Art Newspaper, just published online this morning. Like Bailey, I agree this could be a model for other disputes pieces of cultural property. In return for the loan, Mexico would send an artifact to Vienna: “This could be the golden coach of Mexico’s Emperor Maximilian in the Museo Nacional de Historia,” The Art Newspaper says.

Bailey reports:

Last year the two countries agreed to co-operate over this part of their shared cultural heritage with Mexico’s National Institute for Anthropology and History and Austria’s Museum of Ethnology forming a bi-national commission.

…Two issues need to be resolved before a loan can be arranged. The first hurdle is legal, since there is a long-standing Mexican law that forbids the re-export of any archaeological material from the country. Initially it was hoped that the headdress would not be regarded as archaeological, but the Vienna museum needs assurance that its return would not be blocked. A special presidential decree on the headdress was discussed, but this might not be legally binding on future presidents….

Austrian and Mexican conservators also need to agree to the loan. The headdress was remounted on a display board in 1992 and cannot be easily detached. Conservators are reluctant to do so until a decision has been made on a new backing. This will depend on whether it has to be fit to travel.

Resolution of both issues are likely this year.

I hope it happens. It would help move forward the debate on cultural property and establish a model that other countries might follow to resolve disputes.

 

 

Among museum world developments this year, high on the list of big events is next fall’s opening of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (below) in Bentonville, Ark. Everyone wants to see what Alice Walton has produced.

This week, director Don Bacigalupi spilled some of the beans when he addressed about 500 tourism executives at the Arkansas Governor’s Conference in Little Rock. Come Nov. 11, opening day, the museum will apparently be organized around four themes that emerged during the last few years as Walton made her purchases for the collection — which are ongoing.

According to a community paper called The Citywire of the Fort Smith Region, the museum’s treasures — works that range from the colonial era to contemporary works will be arranged — to illustrate four themes.

This will not be, it seems, a traditional chronological installation. Crystal Bridges will cover these themes:

• The Artist and Nature: Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits will go here, and — let’s admit it — this is a natural for American art.
• The Artist Innovator: true enough, sometimes — artists are sometimes at the forefront of change. Bacigalupi said that Thomas Eakins’s Professor Benjamin Howard Rand and Devorah Sperber’s After the Last Supper fit in here.
• Women in Art: Fascinating. Walton seems to want to acknowledge that art by women has been underappreciated, and that women are often the subject of art. Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter will be here, plus glass clothing art by Karen LaMonte.
• American Artist on the Global Stage: This section can be robust, and will include Benjamin West’s Cupid and Psyche (above).

Some people, I imagine, will be upset by this organizational structure. Walton has already been the butt of criticism for spending too freely — undeserved, in my opinion. I think it’s great that she is bring great art to an underserved region of the country. With this installation, she’ll seem to be going outside the lines again.

I am reserving judgment on it. Most of the time, when I have seen themed installations, they haven’t worked well. But, in fairness, it’s sometimes the conception of the themes or the less-than-robust collection of works supporting the themes that are at fault. With her resources, Walton shouldn’t have to contend with the latter issue, at least.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Crystal Bridges Museum 

 

Exactly what it is about German art that speaks to me I can not say. As you may recall, for example, I am a big fan of Max Beckmann.

So it was not surprising, I guess, that one artist I discovered last week, at the ADAA’s annual Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory, turned out to have been a student of Beckmann’s.

You may have already heard of Marie-Louise Motesiczky, but in case not, I’m calling her to your attention. According to Galerie St. Etienne, in 1927 Beckmann told her, “Paula Modersohn-Becker was the best woman painter in Germany, and you have every chance of succeeding her.”

Of course, I wish he had not used the qualifier “woman,” but it was a different time. Fact is, the public doesn’t know much about either artist.

Galerie St. Etienne held an exhibition of Motesiczky’s paintings last fall, but it ended on Dec. 30, and I never saw it. A few of her works were at the Art Show, though. Here I’m sharing Self-Portrait in Black, 1959, a mix of oil, charcoal and pastel on canvas.

Jane Kallir, co-director of GSE, told me that there is a move afoot to organize a museum show for Motesiczky.

Meantime, you may want to go to GSE’s website, and click on Exhibtions — Past, to learn more about her backstory, which is full of the glitz and the intrigue that was part of Jewish life in the Austro-Hungarian empire and its aftermath. It’s a fascinating tale that can not be summed up here, really. But it involves connections to many renowned personalities, her escape from the Nazis, and her artistic development. Here’s one bit about her art:

Very few of the painters who dominated the art scene in prewar Austria and Germany survived, artistically, the upheaval of the Nazi period. Whether they went into actual or “inner” exile, the work they produced in the second part of the twentieth century seldom met the standards of what they had created earlier. Motesiczky is the great exception to this pattern: a painter who actually discovered her artistic identity in exile.

In England, Beckmann’s influence gradually dissipated, and the solid, sculptural masses seen in Motesiczky’s prior paintings were replaced by more translucent, lambent veils of color. Just as this increased transparency allows one to see down through the structural layers below a painting’s surface, it allows more access to the interior life of the subject. With characteristic humility, Motesiczky once said that her intention was to depict women’s everyday existence: “women at the hairdresser’s, girls sitting in the windows of dry-cleaning shops doing the invisible mending and gradually getting old, dying women, bathing women, laughing women, sad women.” In fact, what she achieved was a comprehensive meditation on life and loss, death and transcendence, seen through the eyes of a woman.

Maybe that’s why we don’t know of her. She was also, apparently, known for depicting women in old age. Not a favorite subject.

As a rich woman, Motesiczky did not sell her art, and much of it is in a London-based trust. It shouldn’t be hard to organize an exhibition. I hope some museums step up.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, London, and Galerie St. Etienne, New York

Did the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — to name a few recent examples — overpay for and underdeliver with their new wings?

Aaron Betsky, left, thinks so. Betsky, director of the Cincinnati Art Museum, is also an architecture critic (a graduate of the Yale School of Architecture) and professor.

The February issue of Art in America contains Betsky’s view of museum architecture today, and he makes what I think are very solid points, starting with the provocative question, “What is the difference between the average Wal-Mart and the average new American art museum wing?”

Betsky proceeds to make cost comparisons — $50 million for a 100,000 sq. ft. Wal-mart versus $345 million for the MFA’s 121,000 sq. ft. wing by Norman Foster and the $294 million, 264,000 sq. ft. modern wing at the Art Institute by Renzo Piano. He calls them “big boxes for art.”

Moreover, Betsky says, the new museum wings have “less accessibility and logic” than Wal-Marts.

“I would argue,” he writes, “…that American art museums currently do things in too fancy a manner.” He cites the 200,000-sq. ft. Museum Aan de Stroom museum, which will open this spring in Antwerp, as a contrast: It cost $50 million.

Art in America is not posting this article online, so I urge you to get a copy of the magazine. In it, Betsky provide many details, examples of how he believes museums have gone wrong. Then, he says:

I would argue that the very way in which they are funded and planned causes, or at least contributes to, both the high cost and the problems with character and layout. Donors want to see something distinctive but not too adventurous or shocking. The venues need to earn income by being rented out for events and donor parties. …

Again, he gives details.

What does Betsky like? He cites the Steven Holl addition to the Nelson-Atkins (I’m with him on that — pictured above), the Allied Works Architecture’s Seattle Art Museum and Frank Gehry’s Art Gallery of Ontario (haven’t seen the latter two in person yet).

I don’t agree with everything Betsky writes. He hints, but never says outright, that the gigantic costs of these buildings would be worth it if they were knockouts (seems to me that the starchitects are most overpaid and guilty of underdelivering. Need I mention Denver?), and he suggests investing in satellite museum spaces instead of new wings (which I think leads to higher costs and two-tier exhibitions). I disagree with both points.

But this is an important article, and it should stir discussion at every museum considering an expansion. Which is just about every one, isn’t it? (Just kidding. I hope.)

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal (bottom)