Do you ever let magazines pile up, taking weeks to get to them? I do; I am always behind, particularly with magazines like The New Yorker, which I read most of.

That’s why it has taken me until now to take note of the article headlined The Mark of A Masterpiece in the issue dated July 12 & 19. If you haven’t read it, I commend it to you — all 20 pages of it (well, minus the space for cartoons).

In it, David Grann lays out the methodology of Peter Paul Biro (left), a Canadian whose forensic art expertise has been used to authenticate, or support the authenitification of, various paintings as the works of Leonardo, Turner, and Pollock. That includes the conclusion reached last fall that La Bella Pincipessa is by Leonardo — which some connoisseurs still dispute.

Grann strings readers along for several pages, letting you think that fingerprinting will take authentification to a new level (though if you’ve paid attention in recent years, you’ll know that fingerprinting has been deemed wrong in some criminal cases), and then he lowers the boom: little things don’t seem quite right, and Biro is revealed as not the expert he appeared to be. Biro’s website exists mainly as a shell “presently being updated.”

UPDATE, 9/10/10: I have been informed that the website I linked to above is not Peter Paul Biro’s site — but rather is the site of his brother, Lazlo. Hard to sell, since the “About Us” is one of the pages “presently being updated.” PPB’s website is now here, which has a blog begun in July responding to Grann’s article.

Grann certainly did everyone a real service with the article, no doubt heartening those who think human expertise is the best way of authenticating art. Maybe it is, but I’d hate to rule out technical analysis, which has been so useful in other areas — and in art. For a couple of examples, see this Q & A, by Nova/PBS, with Eric Posma, an artificial intelligence professor at Maastrict University.

Incidentally, Grann referred to a coming PBS documentary about Biro, but if it is still in production, there’s no mention of it on the PBS site.

 

The Foundation Center released a report on foundation giving the other day, and it confirmed some of the trends I’ve read in the tea leaves: for arts institutions, the worst impacts of the recession are probably yet to come.

For a start, the report put paid to the dire predictions by some Cassandras that the arts would suffer more than other types of grantees, which was based on the notion that arts were going to be seen as expendable compared with health, human services, etc. That may yet happen, but in the numbers we have, it is not true for foundation giving — which, admittedly, is a small part of funding for arts groups.

According to the Center, in 2008 — the first year of the recession — the arts received a larger share of the pie: 12.5% of total dollars vs. 10.6% in 2007. Museums, followed by performing arts groups, received the largest portions — 34% and 30%, respectively.

Meantime, giving to human services and to science/technology actually declined.

The bad news is that the arts are not enjoying the proportion they had ten years ago: in 1998, the arts received 14.8% of grant dollars. (Unfortunately, the chart I have goes back only to 1998, so I do not know if that’s a peak.)

And, worse, the lack of an overall decline in grant dollars — which actually grew 5.4% — suggests that foundations, many of which use a three-year rolling average to determine their annual payouts, probably had to cut grants in 2009, 2010 and …  

In 2008, the biggest arts funders were the Packard Humanities Institute ($173 million), the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation ($130 million) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation ($122 million). Go Kansas City!

The Architect of the Capitol received the largest 2008 award — $156 million from the Packard — followed by $60 million given to the Crystal Bridges Museum (at left) by guess who?

That’s a segue to a consistently troubling aspect of arts in America, at least to me. The West (only 9% of grant dollars) and the South (13%) continue to lag behind the Northeast (16%) and the Midwest (14%) in giving to the arts.

The South’s total was no doubt boosted by the Walton Family Foundation’s gifts to Crystal Bridges — when that’s taken out, the South is behind, too.

If we who love the arts want to ensure their future, we need to make sure that all parts of the country have exposure to great art.  

You can find a press release about the study here and a highlights PDF here.  

 

Over the weekend, the new head of the Miami Art Museum — Thom Collins (below, with Suzanne Delehanty, former MAM director) — had his say in the Miami Herald. On first glance, the article makes him look good, perhaps the right choice. But a close reading throws some doubt on him and his take about art.

Among my quibbles:

• “Miami is the only major city in the U.S. that doesn’t have a major art museum of its own,” he said. Would that this were true. Perhaps he forgot that the Las Vegas Art Museum closed last year. Perhaps he doesn’t realize that, say, Fresno, is another city with a larger population than Miami’s, but no “major” art museum — and a struggling non-major one. Mesa, AZ, has more people than Miami — according to Wikipedia’s list of the largest cities in the U.S. In other works, many Americans have little opportunity to see good art.
• ” ‘To engage people, they have to be able to see themselves in some aspect of what you do, whether it’s their histories and issues that are important to them or just fleshing out how best to communicate with audiences, how best to serve them through education and in our various neighborhoods,’ said Collins, a trim, effusive Pennsylvanian who describes himself as an ‘anti-elitist’ when it comes to art.” I take issue with the “see themselves” argument, which is made by others as well; not only is it not universally true, but also I believe that such thinking undermines one of art’s greatest virtues – its universality.
• “A public institution is committed to collection growth with an eye to putting together a more-or-less encyclopedic survey of major developments in its area . . . and to protect and preserve those collections in perpetuity. When this building opens, I trust that all of us in public and private institutions will coordinate what we are doing so we can really together make the case for Miami as one of the most significant art centers in the U.S.” Well, it’s a nice goal – but is it possible, in this day and age, to build an encyclopedic collection from such a small base? MAM was a kunsthalle until 1996. Nowadays, I believe that museums have to focus and build on their strengths — unless they have unlimited resources. MAM does not; Collins still must raise more than $50 million to complete the museum’s planned building.

Ok, he’s an enthusiastic guy — why cavil? Because Collins is raising expectations, and that’s a dangerous game: he is bound to disappoint.   

Either great minds do think alike, or someone in Nebraska has been listening to Jerry Saltz (and, less prescriptively, me).

Saltz has railed about the lack of work by women artists on display at the Museum of Modern Art many times, including for an article I wrote for The Art Newspaper’s June issue. That’s when he said:

“I don’t believe in hanging work in museums according to gender. But MoMA has been so frustratingly remiss in this area that for now I am in favor of anything that MoMA can do to get more work by women artists on view. If this means removing every Picasso and Matisse and Brancusi and Mondrian for nine months, do it.”

That was in the context of MoMA’s women’s initiative, but I’m pretty sure his feeling applies to other museums.

So I was thrilled to see that the Sheldon Museum of Art, part of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, is devoting some 85% of its gallery space to work by women, despite the fact that works by men dominate its collections 12 to 1 vs. works by women. According to the Omaha World-Herald:

In a two-part exhibit self-consciously titled “Better Half, Better Twelfth,” the Sheldon is featuring a range of works — paintings, prints, photographs and sculpture — by women artists as famous as Georgia O’Keeffe and as up-and-coming as post-representational painter Jennifer Scott McLaughlin.

The museum also is showcasing other works by women through special exhibits, including a traveling first-ever show of female pop artists from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, on display through September.

The article quotes Sheldon director Jorge “Daniel” Veneciano saying he believes his domain is the “first U.S. museum he’s aware of that has stored most of its male artists — including the popular Brancusi, Rothko and Hopper — to free up space for lesser-known women.” He drew inspiration from, and visited, the Pompidou Centre’s elles@pompidou exhibit, which stripped the Centre’s galleries of work by men in favor of showing women’s work.

It’s sad that these kinds of measures are necessary — in the long run, the selection of art must be gender-blind (and color-blind).

But it’s not now, and voluntary measures can help remedy the situation.

A strawberry to Veneciano (left).

Photo Credits: The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, by Faith Ringgold (top); Jorge Veneciano (bottom), courtesy of the Sheldon Museum