Let’s return to the subject of Yup’ik masks, which as you may remember, I posted about here two weeks ago. Canadian dealer Donald Ellis was taking two prize specimens to the Winter Antiques Show in New York, which opened at a party on Thursday evening.

Ellis was asking more than $2 million for the both Donati Studio Mask and another mask dubbed the Donati Fifth Avenue mask.

Both sold almost immediately. The Fifth Avenue mask was the first to go, purchased by a New York collector of modern and contemporary art — one who also owns Native American works — for about $2.1 million, thus setting a new record for Indian works.

At 6:42 p.m, Ellis sold the Studio mask (at right) for more than $2.5 million — breaking his minutes-old record. I got no answer when I asked who that purchaser was.

I’m glad to see Native American works of such high quality getting their moment in the sun.

Before this, only a handful of Native American works have sold in the six figures.

Here’s a link to my Wall Street Journal piece of two weeks ago, which has more background.

It varies from city to city, museum to museum, of course, but at the Seattle Art Museum, Picasso has punched out both van Gogh and Impressionism.

You’ll recall that the museum has been on shaky grounds in this recession, and era of high finance, and it needed to do well, very well, with its Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris show (which included the luscious 1937 Portrait of Dora Maar at left).

It did: the museum reported yesterday (very timely, thank you — many museums say they can’t disclose exhibition attendance for weeks after a show closes) that Picasso drew more visitors than any previous exhibit: more than 400,000. Even better, membership has reached an all-time high of 48,000 (a sum that may rise higher as paperwork is completed). The exhibit ran from October 8, 2010 through January 17.

The previous record-holder for SAM was Impressionism: Paintings Collected by European Museums, which attracted 316,000 attendees between June 12 and August 29, 1999.

But it was van Gogh, in 2004-05, who had attracted membership to the previous high, 40,000, according to an article last fall in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that laid out the museum’s financial troubles.

Seattle, it seems, made the most of the exhibit, which was expensive. Good for the museum, but I would love a better window on the economics.

UPDATE, 4/30/11: According to an economic impact report released by SAM, the Picasso exhibit generated $66 million in economic activity for Washington State.  

The Picasso exhibit, which is touring to seven cities, now moves to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where hopes are also riding high. Director Alex Nyerges calls it “without a doubt a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the American public.” 

 

Should art museums, or any museums, engage in high finance?

That’s the question I had to ask about the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, which you’ll recall reached a debt-restructuring agreement a few weeks ago. The deal, in which the city of San Francisco will guarantee bonds that will be floated to replace the troublesome, variable rate bonds that nearly bankrupted AAM, is complicated. And so was the 2005 deal — involving the variable rate bonds, hedged with an interest rate swap — which replaced the 2000 deal.

If your head hurts or your eyes have glazed over already, I understand. You’re helping me prove my point: Even if the AAM’s gamble to reduce its interest payments had paid off, I’m not sure it was worth it.

I lay the whole situation out in an article in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal — liquidity squeeze, collateral returns, letters of credit, etc. But as John Nelson, a managing director at Moody’s, told me of the AAM’s maneuver “It’s very different from a fixed-rate deal, where you know the cost up front.”

Many people and many institutions got caught up in the financial mess of the last decade, but not every one of them was a helpless victim — which is how the AAM sometimes portrays itself. I think non-profits should probably be more conservative in financial matters than other institutions, and as Nelson said, Moody’s studies show that museums, among all non-profits, are most vulnerable to decreased revenue intake during recessions.

All in all, the Asian Art Museum isn’t doing badly, operationally. Attendance is fine — not what it projected when it moved to the new building, but as good as a move would realistically suggest.

It has a tough road ahead in fund-raising to get back to health. But it does have the breathing room now. It should remember that good exhibitions, good programs beget donors — often with requiring a push, of course, but nonetheless gets them.  

I wonder two things: is any other museum next? I couldn’t one exactly like this. And, when is someone going to try this again? Never, I hope.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Asian Art Museum

 

Elizabeth Catlett is often presented as a soothing, non-challenging and not very innovative artist. So I was intrigued to receive word about an exhibition that opens on Jan. 27 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts: Stargazers: Elizabeth Catlett in Conversation with 21 Contemporary Artists is intended to explore Catlett’s work, from the 1960s to the present, in the context of the other contemporary artists who are working today. It’s a first.

The BMA has gathered works by 21 artists, including Sanford Biggers, iona rozeal brown, Ellen Gallagher, Kerry James Marshall, Robert Pruitt, Mickalene Thomas, Roberto Visani, and Carrie Mae Weems, to prove the point that Catlett was a pioneer. The common themes are race, gender, history, memory, and politics, and the media include Catlett’s prints and sculptures alongside the ceramics, new media, painting, photography, and sculpture of others.

Catlett was born in 1915 and is still working, in both the United States and Mexico. According to the press release:

She received first prize in the 1940 American Negro Exposition held in Chicago for her graduate thesis at Howard University and was the first recipient of an MFA in sculpture at the University of Iowa. Other notable achievements include serving as the first female professor of sculpture and the head of the sculpture department at the National School of Fine Arts, San Carlos, and receiving the International Sculpture Center’s 2003 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.

That’s all fine, wonderful even.

But I’m very glad to see a number of male artists on the BMA’s list, as Catlett was not just a woman artist. The museum has chosen a good point to make, and if I’d be happy to see the guest curator Isolde Brielmaier, successfully demonstrates her influence on younger artists. Catlett may come to be more appreciated. 

Her record auction price, btw, was achieved in 2009, for a life-size red cedar sculpture called Homage to My Young Black Sisters, from 1968: $288,000.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Bronx Museum

While we were busy disclosing deaccessioning at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Cleveland Art Museum’s planned sale of 32 works almost slipped by unnoticed.

But on Saturday, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer spilled the beans. Close readers of a Jan. 6 Sotheby’s press release about its Jan. 27 Old Master sale would have been tipped off: it mentions a pair of paintings from the CMA. But I didn’t get that release.

Once again, I don’t quibble with the sales, as I know them. Steve Litt, who wrote the Plain Dealer article, says the whole shebang, all 32 works, are estimated to fetch just $706,000 to $1,022,000. Small potatoes — so no masterpiece is being sacrificed. Most of the works were gifts (be careful what you accession…) and a couple of others have had their attributions downgraded to lesser artists.

For example, we have here a work first thought to be by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, but downgraded to a follower. It’s expected to raise $200,000 to $300,000.

Another work for sale was ruined by poor conservation.

Further, the plan is to reinvest the proceeds in Old Masters. All good.

This plan to divest some works predates the current director, David Franklin, who took over last September. But it jibes with what he told me recently over coffee: everything the museum buys should be a masterpiece, displacing something already hanging on the walls.

For Cleveland, not really a universal museum, that make sense.

Cleveland also had, and seems to have followed, a real plan, a 12-step process, including:

Jon Seydl, the museum’s curator of European painting and sculpture, sifted through the more than 200 old master paintings in the collection.

The museum also consulted experts in the field, including curators Lawrence Nichols of the Toledo Museum of Art, Edgar Peters Bowron of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and professors Edward Olszewski of Case Western Reserve University and Christina Neilson of Oberlin College.

Members of the museum’s education staff were asked whether they could see using any of the potentially salable items in classes.

There’s only one thing wrong with this picture: how we learned about it. Why the museum didn’t get ahead of the story, releasing a press statement of its own, I will never understand.

When something seeps out, it raises suspicions — even ones that are not justified by fact. So why risk it?

UPDATE, 2/2: Here’s another good example of transparency: The Rosenbach Museum and Library reecently decided to deaccession several works by Walter Greaves and possibly one by Whistler, which would go to another museum. It put out a press release on Jan. 17 (here) and the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about it two days later (here).

After reading my blogs posts on deaccessioning, a press representative for the Rosenbach called both to my attention. Apologies for the delay in updating this post.