Men may be scarce in art museums, but it’s obvious they often go there on dates (for one, the Obamas went to the Art Institute of Chicago on their first outing, or so a story goes).

So it’s great that the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford is taking advantage of Valentine’s Day with an exhibition called Reunited Masterworks: From Adam and Eve to George and Martha that opens on Sunday. Cleverly, it features 10 sets of historical, biblical, and mythological couples painted from the 14th through the 18th centuries — by artists like Frans Hals, George Romney, Simon Vouet, and Juan de Valdes Leal — that had been separated and owned by different museums.

Among the couples are Adam (at left) and Eve, as depicted in the 17th century by Hendrick Goltzius, and George and Martha Washington, as portrayed by British portraitist James Sharples.  

The Atheneum is making an art historical point by saying that many “iconic paintings were originally conceived in pairs or sets and have been separated over the hundreds of years since their creation,” and it’s doing a service by reuniting them. “It will be a revelation to finally have these paintings displayed together–some for the first time in centuries– allowing us to fully understand and appreciate the artists’ intentions,” said Dr. Eric Zafran, the Wadsworth’s Curator of European Art, in the press release. 

That’s all fine, but the idea is also creative fun.

These aren’t the most romantic or erotic paintings, however, and that’s another show that’s been germinating in my mind over the past several weeks. I’ll post one or two later today or over the weekend — and I’d love to hear your suggestions. Send them to me at RealClearArts@gmail.com.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Wadsworth Atheneum

 

Speaking of the potential of online catalogues, as I did here recently regarding exhibition catalogues, the Freer and Sackler Galleries* of the Smithsonian Institution recently announced a virtual catalogue of some of the treasures in its collection. It put online, for everyone’s use, the “Song and Yuan Dynasty Painting and Calligraphy” resource, which contains hundreds of images, plus detailed bilingual documentation, of the Freer’s collection of 85 works of Chinese brushwork from the 10th through the 14th centuries.

At right, for example, is Pavilion of Rising Clouds, “traditionally attributed to Mi Fu (1052-1107),” Southern Song-Yuan, mid-13th to mid-14th century, acquired in 1908. It comes with a 13-page PDF of information.  

Freer-Sackler bills this resource as a pioneering effort, an “unprecedented assemblage of documentary information.”

“The new site,” a press release continues, “represents 100 years of collecting: Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919) acquired his first Song painting in 1902 and the latest addition was made by the Freer Gallery in 2002.” Read the entire release here and access the database here.

Invited, I roamed around the site — which I like. But it has (at least) two deficiencies. I’m no Chinese art scholar, but I’d still like to zoom in on the images. The technology for that exists, used by places like Sotheby’s, the Juilliard School archives, and many others.

Here’s an example of what can be done from Abbeville, a look at its new book, China. You can turn pages and zoom in and out.

More important, the project isn’t searchable. That limits its use and, at best, makes use cumbersome. 

I emailed the Freer-Sackler’s press office about these problems on Tuesday, despite the east coast snowstorms, and yesterday received an answer from Julian Raby, the museum’s director.

You are quite right: currently the site lacks two important features — zooming and searching. I took the decision to make the important scholarly research on these paintings available in this technologically limited form, because it is not information available elsewhere, and the beauty of a digital presentation is that we can make improvements, to both the information and the presentation, as we move forward.

And:

We are currently completely redesigning our Collections Online, and this requires a thorough overhaul of the underlying architecture and programming. The aim is to connect information on our collections on the website to our museum management system, which is the one most widely used by museums across the States. There will be a completely new Search facility for the entire Collections site, and Zoomify. 　

We hope to have this new Collections site up and running later this year.

So, a happy ending — if delayed.BTW, the Freer-Sackler has another online catalogue, for a ceramics collection, but it too has limitations. Photo: Courtesy Freer-Sackler

*A consulting client of mine supports the Freer-Sackler.

 

I’ve been roaming around the continent via the Internet for the last several days, writing about museums in Las Vegas, Fargo, Alberta and Tampa — and in the course of this I’ve found two museum website “innovations” I want to single out. With strawberries — which I hand out from time to time. (No raspberries today.)

The first, especially, is a no-brainer. The Delaware Art Museum has added to its home page, right at the top, in red and white that stands out, a “Please Donate Now” button. Take a look (I can’t copy it).

I checked about 15 other museum websites around the country, and none has so direct, so easy an appeal. Most are leaving their appeals to small “Support” or “Give” or “Make A Donation” links in their web navigation. Of all those I checked, only the Worcester Art Museum comes close — but its “Donate” button is softer.

Donate Now appeals may not work in ordinary times, but these aren’t.

On a completely different note, the Tacoma Art Museum has, at the bottom of its home page, something really smart: buttons that translate the site (Google translation) into six languages — Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and French.

The Metropolitan Museum offers its visitor page information in nine languages other than English, but that’s all. I couldn’t find any foreign language accommodations at MoMA, which like the Met draws many international visitors.  

Yet with so many people around the world visiting museum sites remotely (rankings here), it’s a wonder more museums don’t offer this service.

Strawberries to both.

It was just last July when the world was stunned (pleasantly) by the finding of more than 1,500 gold and silver 7th Century Anglo-Saxon treasures that are known as the Staffordshire Hoard. Because it is the largest and probably most important discovery in the U.K., Staffordshire — a West Midlands country — naturally wants to keep them where they belong, which is near where they were found.

Last November, the Treasure Valuation Committee set the magic number of their “worth” at Â£3.285 million, and the Art Fund and the county, plus several other local councils, set out to raise that amount so that the hoard can be jointly acquired by the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent.

The money, as U.K. law dictates, will be split equally between the finder, a man named Terry Herbert, and the landowner, Fred Johnson. Some of the treasures have been on display at the British Museum and, on Saturday, about 80 of these artifacts will go on view at the Potteries Museum.

The campaign began on Jan. 13, with an April 17 deadline. I just checked in on the progress to date: as of Feb. 3, £550,000 had been raised.

The fundraising effort is retail: If you buy the BM’s book on the subject, called The Staffordshire Hoard, for Â£4.99,  Â£1 goes to the fund.

The Art Fund recently launched an interactive web game, too:

“Buy Your Dig Site” is a virtual map of the field where the Hoard was discovered. For a donation of £5 individuals can try their luck by “digging” a square of the field to see if it reveals an item of the Hoard. Players can buy as many virtual squares as they wish to boost the campaign.

You can access that site here.

Or people can just donate, online or sending in money.

Celebrities like Judi Dench, rock stars like Bill Wyman, historians like David Starkey and others are rallying support for the drive.

But the campaign has a long way to go — about a quarter of the time has passed, but less than 20% of the necessary total is on the books.

You can read more about the find here or in this ten-page PDF.

It’s unclear what happens if the locals don’t raise the money…but I’d rather not find out.

Photos: Courtesy Staffordshire Hoard website

In its 31st birthday year, the Tampa Museum of Art opened a new building. That happened Saturday, and news accounts heralded it.

The $32.8 million structure, designed by Stanley Saitowitz, has 66,000 sq.ft, including 26,000 sq. ft. of galleries, and is set in a sculpture garden and an eight-acre park. It plans to be open seven days a week. Adult admission: $10.

It starts off with exhibitions on Matisse, especially printmaking, but with paintings borrowed from the Cone Collection and other works from the Pierre and Tana Matisse Collection; From Life to Death In the Ancient World (from its own collection); of works borrowed from the Bank of America collection and another of works from the Martin Z. Margulies collection; and of photos by Garry Winograd.

As with the new Art Gallery of Alberta, that’s a nice beginning, and the challenge will be to keep it up.

But happily (I think) the Tampa museum tempered its initial, overblown ideas, which involved a $45 million building by Rafael Vinoly and ambitions to be a Guggenheim Bilbao. As the St. Petersburg Times recounted the cautionary tale, the cost had skyrocketed to $76 million as time passed while the board and the mayor (the city owned the museum then) wrangled over finances and location. Eventually they chose a more fiscally responsible path, changed architects and locations, and now,

The museum is no longer a city department and trustees control its destiny; city subsidies have been reduced and a new director heads it. The building is named the Cornelia Corbett Center in recognition of the lead gift of $5 million from the Corbetts. Her term as board chair is over.

So the ending is happy, happier than such vast compromises and differences would have portended. The trustees have a park setting on the river with good architectural provenance. The mayor has a smaller, fiscally responsible building.

This is an area to watch. As the Miami Herald reported yesterday,

The Tampa museum is part of a flurry of construction in arts venues along Florida’s west coast. Across the bay in St. Petersburg, The Salvador Dalí Museum’s new $35 million home is expected to be completed by December. In 2008, the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts doubled its gallery space by adding the 39,000-square-foot, $21 million Hazel Hough Wing, which enabled the museum to stage larger shows and exhibit monumental sculptures and paintings.

In Sarasota, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art is undergoing a $7.5 million expansion, adding a 24,000-square-foot wing. As with the St. Petersburg and Dalí museums, the architect is Yann Weymouth, who designed the Frost Art Museum at Florida International University.

Sounds as if it’s worth a visit.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Tampa Museum of Art