There’s life after the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis: Michael Rush, the former head of the beleaguered museum at the beleaguered university, has landed a job as director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University.

Makes sense — on several levels, including the snowy weather shared by Waltham, MA. and East Lansing, MI. (I couldn’t find exact statistics, but nearby Boston averages 43 in. of snow each winter and nearby Lansing gets 48 in,)

The MSU announcement came yesterday, and quotes MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon saying:

We have a prestigious donor, world-class architect Zaha Hadid, stunning architecture and have now found the essential missing piece – an innovative art museum director – in hiring Michael Rush. Michigan State University welcomes this award-winning curator and widely published author and critic. With his entrepreneurial spirit, Michael will direct the months leading to a vibrant opening of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in 2012 and the exciting years to come.

For his part, Rush said:

This is for me an extraordinary opportunity; moreover, this new museum is a great moment in philanthropy, education and international contemporary art.

You can read more of the press release here.

The Broads have given nearly $30 million for the museum, which is under construction; there’s much more information, including a live webcam of the site, here.

Meantime, if memory serves, Brandeis now says it will fill the post Rush vacated in 2009.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of MSU

A phone call just brought the sad news that Peter C. Marzio, long time head of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, died last night.

Here’s the Houston Chronicle obit, and here’s a previous post of mine on him. I have admired Peter for as long as I have known him; I can’t remember exactly when or where we met, but it was probably in the early ’90s.  

More from me shortly.

Deciding what to say here about Peter was not as easy as I thought. Certainly, he was one of the warmest, nicest museum directors I’ve ever known. His accomplishments at MFAH are legend, but best left for a Houstonian, who would know more details, to say.

Here’s a link to the tribute on the museum’s website.

I can offer an anecdote or two that illustrate his enthusiasm and his openness. Unafraid of speaking out, he was often a go-to guy when I wanted an art expert to weigh in on a slightly off-beat topic. For example, when I wrote a piece for The New York Times in 1998, pegged to a list of the “top 100 novels,” wondering if there might be a list of the top art works, most people pooh-poohed the idea.

Not Peter, as I wrote then:

Peter C. Marzio, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, is one member of the establishment who is not horrified by the whole subject. He even suggested two lists, one drawn up by experts and one voted on by the people.

”I’d like to know what the general public thinks are the greatest works of art,” Mr. Marzio said. ”It would probably be Monet, Monet and Monet at the top. The one work that might make it on both lists is the ‘Mona Lisa,’ and maybe the bust of Nefertiti.”

Another time, I remember receiving a small catalogue, displaying the work of an upstate New York realist artist, whose work was clearly out of fashion. The artist had no gallery representation in New York (or any other art center), and little chance of getting any. With the catalogue came with a note from Peter, praising the work and asking if I could help out by writing about the artist and his work. He really cared.

Peter was a fine writer as well; he could describe art beautifully and articulate why it moved him.

I saw Peter three times this year, and was set to go to Houston in early January for a longer conversation — for an article about his views on museums today. I’m sad that I won’t get the opportunity to see him again. The museum world — no, the whole world — will miss him.

 

Can sports-lovers be turned into art-lovers? True, they sometimes overlap, but the Dallas Museum of Art had conversion in mind, I think, when it organized Big New Field: Artists In the Cowboys Stadium Art Program. And tourism.

The exhibit, which opened Dec. 5, is keyed to the Super Bowl, which will take place in February at the Cowboys Stadium — a first for Dallas, and thus a big deal. Lucky for the museum — others have tried outreach to sports fans by pandering — the $1.2 billion stadium has an art program. It includes 21 large-scale, site-specific art works in all, by such artists as Olafur Eliasson (whose The outside of inside is at left), Teresita Fernandez, Doug Aitken, Annette Lawrence, Lawrence Weiner, and Franz Ackermann (his My “Ready Now” is below). It was started in 2009 by Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones and his wife, Gene.

The museum’s exhibition features about 20 works by the same artists from its collection and from local private collections. More details here in a press release.

There’s more: According to Dallas Art News, the museum and stadium are offering a joint ticket, an Art Tour at Cowboys Stadium and admission to the DMA, for $16. Regular adult admission to the museum is $10, but it’s unclear — judging from the website — whether the stadium offers art tours regularly at all. But a self-guided tour of the entire stadium costs $17.50; VIP escorted tours are a tenner more.  

DMA has planned other related programs as well.

When the Dallas Morning News reviewed the exhibit on Monday, it focused, interestingly, on scale.

Pieces more than 100 feet long that hang over concession stands in Arlington have siblings that are scaled for the museum’s walls. Still big, they are petite compared to those that are painted in escalator lobbies or hang over the four stadium entrances. The tone is different, too – the museum pieces are more contemplative than the dynamic stadium creations…

Artists were chosen for their ability to create large-scale works, and they didn’t disappoint, which is a facet lost in the museum.

…The most compelling aspect of the exhibition comes from appreciating how environment plays such a pivotal role in appreciating the nuances of a piece.

It’s a worthy experiment for the DMA. I can’t wait to hear how it all turns out.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art

 

Here’s one for the books: Last night, at Sotheby’s, a 2nd century marble Roman bust sold for a record $23,826,500 — more than 7 times the high presale estimate, which was $3 million (not including the buyer’s premium).

The portrait bust, “of the Deified Antinous, Roman Imperial, Reign of Hadrian,” came from the estate of Clarence Day, who was known to have a fine antiquities collection. Still, the entire sale was estimated at $5.7- to $8.6 million before the auction, and it fetched nearly $36.8 million.

Day died in 2009 after a car accident and, according to the Commercial Appeal of Memphis, inherited land in Mississippi that he expanded into “a collection of companies that dealt with everything from plywood to oil and gas exploration.” In his obit, the Appeal said that he had given away about $50 million in his lifetime. The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art was among his beneficiaries — in 1989, he donated 60 pieces of Roman, Greek, Etruscan and other anitquities (but I found no mention of them in the collections area of the Brooks website), the paper said. 

According to Sotheby’s:

The Marble Portrait Bust of the Deified Antinous is the only known Classical representation of Antinous, outside of his coin portraits, to be identified by an inscription. Auctioneer Hugh Hildesley opened the bidding at $900,000 and two clients in the room and one on the phone began to battle. The winning bidder, a European collector, entered the fray at $6.5 million and prevailed against the three existing bidders and another client who only joined the competition at $11.2 million. In all, it took more than eleven minutes for the lot to sell and when the hammer finally fell the room broke out in applause.

Other lots also fetched much more than the estimates — results are here. Which shows there is no lack of interest in antiquities. Auction houses always say “it only takes two,” but in this case, there were a lot more.

Sotheby’s also racked up another record yesterday, when a first edition of John James Audubon’s “Birds of America” — which has 435 hand-colored illustrations — fetched $11.5 million, a record for any printed work sold at auction. The previous record was $8.8 million, for another copy of Audubon’s work.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Sotheby’s

 

Today’s Wall Street Journal carries a Cultural Conversation I did with Rebecca Robertson, president and executive producer of the Park Avenue Armory. It lays out the challenges she has creating a new cultural venue for New York City, one that will stand out in a place that’s already full of cultural offerings.

The peg was “Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision By Peter Greenaway,” which opened last Friday and runs through Jan. 6. But the piece was more about her plans for the giant drill hall. Her strategy is about “the power of the space.” She wants to “do all of the arts equally,” offering a home to arts installations, dances, operas, etc. that don’t want to contain themselves in other places.

Her challenge, as I see it and as she acknowledges, is to create a large constituency from people who are interested in all of the arts. Traditionally, many have not been — they favor one or two over others. Her response:

I think crossover is really important if you look at the way arts are going. People want multimedia.

She may be right. (But she can’t be happy with Holland Cotter’s review of the Greenaway piece, which called it “a dud” — personally, I liked it better than he did, but not all of it. I though the prologue was lame and the main section too repetitive.) Other institutions, like the Walker Art Center, successfully draw people interested in many art forms, though perhaps not all.

But visitors are not the same as financial supporters, and it remains to be seen if she can attract them as well. Part of that will depend on the vision she reveals — created by Herzog and de Meuron for additional renovations, including the 19th Century period rooms. They are set to be revealed next spring. Robertson declined to discuss, or even hint at, what the architects are planning. But she has seen some ideas and says they will surprise people.

As someone who generally favors historic preservation, it’ll be in a good way, I hope.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Park Avenue Armory (bottom)