It was just about a year ago, at the end of February 2009, that the Las Vegas Art Museum closed its doors. A metropolis of nearly 2 million people was left with no art museum — generating not much more than a little hand-wringing, which was little surprise once you learned the size of its membership: “just over 1,000,” according to the Las Vegas Sun.

The name still exists as a website, but with nothing more than a home page.

Last week, the Sun reported a new development:

UNLV’s College of Fine Arts, with a growing art collection of its own, is in talks with the financially beleaguered and homeless Las Vegas Art Museum about placing the museum’s permanent collection on campus.

Which sounded like a solution until you read further into the story and the comments. It turns out that the university has an abysmal history as a steward of art. Among other things, a large William Wareham steel sculpture “disappeared” from campus, Chinese scrolls had to be removed from view because they were deteriorating, and a commissioned mural was damaged in storage and returned to the artist.

Have things changed? Hard to tell. One good sign is that the Vogel’s “50 Works for 50 States” gift to Nevada, originally earmarked for the Las Vegas Art Museum, went instead to the College of Fine Arts at UNLV. I’d hope the National Gallery of Art, which helps administer the program, did due diligence about conditions at UNLV.

On the other hand, as one commenter on the Sun site noted,

Perhaps until economic conditions are more favorable the community could invest in adequate, secure and environmentally stable storage facility. Which would also require an investment in adequate staff person(s). Then loan works to a various existing display spaces. The current Governor is asking the Univ. system to cut its budget 22%.
A “new” museum seems disconnected from that situation.

If he’s correct about that budget cut, I’d agree with him.

Late Friday afternoon: email arrrives from the White House Press Office, with subject line “President Obama Announces More Key Administration Posts.” I open it up, with expectations.

But the key appointments turned out to be six nominees to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Not so key. Still, here they are, with capsule descriptions:

• Chuck Close, “visual artist noted for his highly inventive techniques used to paint the human face, and is best known for his large-scale, photo based portrait paintings. He is also an accomplished printmaker and photographer…”
•  Fred Goldring, “co–founded the prominent California-based entertainment law firm Goldring, Hertz and Lichtenstein which represents numerous global superstar recording and performing artists, and is also co-founder of entertainment strategic consultancy, MemBrain…”
• Sheila Johnson, “founder and CEO of Salamander Hospitality; co-founder of Black Entertainment Television; a documentary film producer; and the only African-American woman to co-own three professional sports teams.  A classically trained violinist…”
• Pamela Joyner, “Founder of Avid Partners, LLC.  Her other business experiences include holding senior positions at Bowman Capital, LLC and Capital Guardian Trust Company. Ms Joyner is a former Co-Chair and current Trustee Emeritus of the San Francisco Ballet.  She is a Trustee of The MacDowell Colony, The School of American Ballet…”
• Jhumpa Lahiri (above), “a fiction writer whose debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, received the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Addison M. Metcalf Award, and the New Yorker magazine’s Debut of the Year. Her novel, The Namesake, was a New York Times Notable Book, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was selected as one of the best books of the year by USA Today…”
• Ken Solomon, “chairman of Ovation TV, a national cable and satellite network focused on bringing art, culture and personal creativity to all Americans.  He is also chairman and CEO of Tennis Channel, the only 24-hour network dedicated to both the professional sport and tennis lifestyle…”

Here’s the committee’s charter:

The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) has served each Administration since 1982, advancing the White House’s arts and humanities objectives by working directly with the three primary cultural agencies – National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) – to initiate and support key programs; to recognize excellence in the fields of arts and humanities; and to encourage private-public partnerships around those disciplines.

Too bad the cultural budget had to be cut in President Obama’s new budget, including Save America’s Treasures, one of PCAH’s key programs…

Most of the time, Fargo, ND, isn’t even on the art-world’s map, but this week an anonymous donor put it there, with help from James Rosenquist (see him at work below).

Rosenquist hails from Grand Forks, ND, and in 2005, when he visited Fargo, the Plains Art Museum there commissioned a mural by him to “celebrate the plains region.” But, last April, his work on it was lost in the fire that raged through his home, studio and storerooms in Aripeka, Fl, destroying 30 years of work. Rosenquist was away, and unharmed physically. (Refresh your memory of what happened in an article in the St. Petersburg Times.) 

Still, he had to start again to create the mural. Meanwhile, the Plains museum had to find funds to pay for the $1.2 million work, which is to measure 13 by 21 ft.

This week, that nameless donor pledged $600,000 to pay for the mural, and Rosenquist “matched” it by giving the materials and labor and lowering his fee, according to the Forum of Moorhead-Fargo.

Win-win for the museum.

Kudos to Rosenquist for remembering his roots.

If you go to the museum’s website, take a look at its collection and current exhibitions, which include a Warhol show and Individual to Icon: Portraits of the Famous and Almost Famous from Folk Art to Facebook, including this work by Alec Soth:

Photos: Courtesy Plains Art Museum

 

Who’s got the most popular museum website in the world?

According to a website called Kunstpedia, which describes itself as “curators of art knowledge,” The Museum of Modern Art takes the blue ribbon, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art not far behind.

Kunstpedia analyzed more than 680 museum websites worldwide, and ranked them thusly:

The scores are determined by comparing ranking data such as those of Google Page Rank, Alexa Ranking and Compete Ranking. Furthermore the number on-line references in the form of incoming links and references in user generated content have been analysed. The end score was determined by the sum of each individual score, given on basis of the position within the different data source which were analysed.
 

UPDATE: Please see comment below from Dana Mitroff Silvers. As she points out, this study has problems that undermine its accuracy and were not explained on the Kunstpedia site.

Here’s the top ten, with their scores:

1 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) USA — 11

2 Metropolitan Museum of Art USA — 14

3 Musée du Louvre France — 34

4 National Gallery of Art USA — 35

5 Victoria and Albert Museum United Kingdom — 37

6 J. Paul Getty Museum USA — 40

7 Deutsches Historisches Museum Germany — 50

8 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) USA — 51

9 State Hermitage Museum Russia — 53

10 Brooklyn Museum of Art USA — 58

 

The entire list is here.

Kunstpedia also broke down the list by country, which you can read here. The top ten U.S. sites are:

1 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

2 Metropolitan Museum of Art

3 National Gallery of Art

4 J. Paul Getty Museum

5 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

6 Brooklyn Museum of Art

7 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

8 Philadelphia Museum of Art

9 Minneapolis Institute of Arts

10 Indianapolis Museum of Art

 

Most popular doesn’t necessarily mean best, of course, but it’s something — something big. 

The long-separated Saint Julian (below) and Saint Anthony Abbot (right) belong together, and right now they are living just a couple blocks apart.

The two works are by Taddeo Gaddi, a student — the best? — of Giotto. Gaddi (1300-1366) painted the gold ground paintings (tempera on wood) in the 1340s, during his mature period — but they took diverse paths. Saint Julian, holding a sword, hangs in Gallery 3 of the Metropolitan Museum‘s European paintings galleries. Saint Anthony Abbot, staring soulfully, currently resides at Moretti Fine Art, on East 80th Street, just off Fifth Avenue. Moreover, it appears they are both part of an altarpiece in Italy, which will be revealed below.

Saint Anthony Abbot, Moretti says, had “long escaped the attention of art historians” and when it surfaced in Berlin in 1928, at the Lepke sale, it was labelled “Florentine school, 14th Century.” Only in the 1980s did it gain the Gaddi attribution. That’s about when experts  first noticed that Saint Anthony Abbot has comparable measurements, similar punch-work and the same design as Gaddi’s Saint Julian.

Saint Julian, which remained in Italy until at least 1949, found its way into the Heineman collection here and was bequeathed to the Met in 1996 by Lore Heinemann, in memory of her husband, Dr. Rudolf J. Heinemann (and accessioned in 1997). The Met describes the “well-preserved” work as “a cut-down lateral work from an altarpiece.”

Saint Anthony Abbot, meanwhile, has been in Europe. It’s for sale now for $1.5 million, and has attracted some serious interest. One potential buyer was allowed to take it home for a trial.

But wouldn’t it be great if….someone bought it for the Met?

The story wouldn’t end there, though, for Moretti believes that the two panels belong to this altarpiece:

 

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