A brand new Art Gallery of Alberta opened Sunday and Monday (fully booked!), and starting today the general public can visit.

How did a Frank Gehry look-alike building, with 85,000 sq. ft.(30,000 for galleries), designed by Los Angeles architect Randall Stout, costing $88 million, make its debut without much (any?) notice in the U.S. press? Edmonton is the most northern metropolis on this continent with a population over 1 million… but AGA has greater ambitions than serving the local population: As its website says, “this architectural icon will draw visitors from around the world with twice the former gallery space….”

But can Edmonton really be a Bilbao, or even close? This is not an auspicious start. 

The AGA, which dates to 1924, expects also to attract more “sought-after touring art exhibitions.” It holds a 7,000-item permanent collection, but there’s nary another word about what’s in it on the website.

The temporary exhibits now on view include Edgar Degas: Figures in Motion, drawings by Goya, photographs by Karsh, Building Art: Photographs of the Building of AGA, 2008-2010 by Edward Burtynsky, an installation by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Millers called The Murder of Crows, and a children’s exhibit called Play on Architecture that allows kids to experiment with building blocks.

Nice start. It’s hard to maintain programming like that. Maybe AGA can rely on government funding, or maybe it has a huge endowment.  

If not, I’d be worrying about those great expectations.

Photo: Courtesy Edmonton Sun 

If you aren’t tired of talking about deaccessioning, or listening to others talk about it — and I hope you are not! — please tune into to a program just posted on Rush Interactive on ArtonAir.org.

The show is hosted by Michael Rush (right), who was director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis until last spring, when he was dismissed in the mess over the university’s plans to close the museum and sell its collection. A couple of Fridays ago, he convened a very civil discussion on the subject with writer/critic/curator Eleanor Heartney, Charles Desmarais, deputy director of the Brooklyn Museum (the reward for posting comments on this blog), and me.

Here’s the link.

This gives me an opportunity to post a few more impressions, based on developments and discussions since the publication of my op-ed in The New York Times on Jan. 2.

• It’s sad, but true, that several people on both sides of the issue told me that I was “brave” to propose something at odds with the official AAMD/AAM position. It was as if I had voluntarily touched the Third Rail of the museum world.
• This sentiment was borne out at the Brodsky bill roundtable: People are afraid to discuss the very possibility. There was almost no dissent (except for objections to an unfunded mandate) until, at 1 p.m., two hours after the Committee on Tourism, Parks, Arts and Sports convened the roundtable, Brodsky satisfyingly looked around and said it was the last chance for people who differed with him to speak up. Only then did people rise to the mike to disagree or question the bill, and only then did the rumbles in the audience begin.
• More troubling still, one thing I’ve learned since Jan. 2 is precisely how little trust exists in the museum world. Directors don’t trust their trustees; trustees don’t trust one another; many trustees don’t trust their directors. I knew there was some amount of mistrust — but I didn’t know relations were this bad.
• Museum directors — even some you think are strong — fear their trustees, finding it hard to disagree with the powerful ones, ever. (I know, I know, trustees provide the money, and directors work for the board, but absolute obeisance is unhealthy.)
• While it’s no secret that trustees join boards because they contribute money or art, too many trustees have little interest in art — maybe none. If they’re there only for the prestige and the power, I blame the nominating committee and the board chairman.

 At the risk of sounding naive, I think we need to talk much more about museum governance. There are some parallels with corporate governance, about which I have written extensively, but not enough for me to make suggestions at the moment. More reporting, more discussion is in order.

Photo Credit: Dominic Chavez, Courtesy Boston Globe

 

The countdown begins: On Feb. 26, The Art of the Steal — Don Argott’s documentary about the struggle for the control of the Barnes Foundation — opens in theaters (two days after it can be seen on demand) in New York and Philadelphia. I have not seen the movie, which was shown last year at the Toronto and New York film festivals, but last week the trailer went up on IMDB — you can see it here. It calls the move into downtown Philadelphia “the scandal of the art world” and labels those who are doing it “vandals.” Clearly, it takes sides.

Argott, saying he set out to give voice to both sides, explains why it ended up where it is here, in a short video he did with The New York Times last fall.

He also recently gave a more extensive interview to Filmmaker magazine (here), in which he says:

one of the things that sealed the deal [to do the film] for me was going to the Barnes. You walk into the place, and it’s breathtaking. It’s really overwhelming — something special and beautiful. I’ve walked into that main gallery many times, and I still get chills.

Evelyn Yaari, a member of the Friends of the Barnes, which is still trying to stop the move despite the recent groundbreaking on the new site, notified me of the trailer: The group doesn’t seem to have organized plans to use the film to rally people to their side, but Yaari (who has written about the Barnes’ situation), at least, is hoping it will “change the chemistry around here, at least for a little while.” 

Hard as it is for me to believe, she said “The vast majority of people around here have no idea what has or is going on. The fact that a movie has been made about it, changes people’s perceptions about its importance, putting the Barnes story in a totally new light just because of the way it’s made, the music, etc. And because it’s cool, it might make people slightly aware of things before their eyes glaze over again. It’s not just the cranky nut jobs from the suburbs after all. Now, there’s a cool, young director and his brilliant and beautiful producer saying this is important.”

It is, she adds, “an unbelievably powerful piece that makes the Parkway Barnes look toxic.”

 

Sotheby’s had a spectacular Old Masters week (compared with Christie’s), and the sales of La Belle Ferronnière by a Follower of Leonardo da Vinci for nearly $1.54 million, about three times its presale estimate (including the premium), and of Francisco Zurbarán’s full-length picture of Saint Doroty Holding a Basket of Apples and Oranges for a record $4.22 million, rightly made the biggest splash.

But the Old Master paintings sale held some other surprises, including a mini-mystery (not as good as the record-setting American silver punch bowl story, which I wrote about here last Saturday).

This is a mini-mystery that set no records and involves a little (7.5 inch by 5.5 inch) painting by Lucas Cranach the Younger. Called The Ill-Matched Lovers, it sold for $410,500 (including the premium) against a presale estimate of $50,000 to $70,000.

Why? The painting had once, apparently, been attributed to Cranach the Elder, a better painter, but was downgraded. Maybe someone thinks that was wrong? It came from descendants of Seymour R. Thaler — nothing special there — so I doubt provenance drove the price.

All it takes is two determined bidders, of course, to push a price to extremes. But still, I always wonder.

Results for the entire sale are here.

Photo: Courtesy Sotheby’s

As I mentioned here last October, The New Republic planned to start a new web page called The Book to “rush in and fill the vacuum in book criticism that is being left by the carnage in American newspapers.” Now it has. The Book made its debut on Jan. 11. Have a look.

In the visual arts, Jed Perl has led off with a joint review of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov and The Journals of Grace Hartigan: 1951-1955 in which he discusses the realm of books about the Abstract Expressionists and their near-contemporaries/next-generation artists.

I can’t say I’m going to run out to buy these books, but that has nothing to do with Perl’s review: He liked them. And I enjoyed Perl’s observations on them, including (verbatim):

• There is a fine passage in Tworkov’s journal, when Elaine de Kooning has commented that Léger’s work “makes everything done here look neurotic,” and Tworkov begins to worry that his own work “seems very neurotic,” and then reflects that the same can be said of “Cézanne, Soutine, El Greco, Watteau, Giacometti.”
• It is clarifying to read the takedowns of Clement Greenberg by Tworkov and Hartigan, who remind us of the healthy skepticism with which his imperious statements were often received. “The influence of Greenberg’s criticism,” Tworkov writes in 1959, “hurts the position of every artist who believes in painting, who believes that a work of art is something lived thru and not merely perpetrated.”
These books give a startlingly immediate sense of all the local infighting and backbiting, as when Greenberg is quoted by Hartigan saying of Alfred Barr, the brilliant director of the Museum of Modern Art, that “everyone knows Barr is a fool and knows nothing about art.”
What emerges [from Hartigan’s journals] is a complex portrait of a woman in the New York art world in the 1950s, a time and a place when, so we have all too often been told, women were little more than helpmates and accessories. Hartigan was anything but a victim….she was a rising star, exhibiting at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, albeit initially as George Hartigan, apparently less a subterfuge than a gesture that mingled a salute to George Eliot and George Sand with an element of “high camp” disguise.
In February 1959, Tworkov had dinner with Mary McCarthy and a number of other people. “Mary,” he writes, “…holds [that] artists ought not to write, that they are inarticulate as she said, ‘Artists can only point.’ ” …After you have read a few pages by Jack Tworkov or Grace Hartigan, there will be no doubt in your mind that painters are among the most articulate people on earth.

I’ve seen evidence of that myself.

Read the review here.