As I’ve watched museums over the past several months as they curate shows from their own collections and sometimes from private collections nearby, I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that there’s a big downside to this as well as an upside.

The upside, of course, is that many visitors go to museums only — or mostly — to see the special exhibitions, leaving permanent collection galleries empty of visitors. Exhibits curated from permanent collections will expose those works to more people and perhaps entice visitors into permanent collection galleries on a regular basis.

The downside, which I confirmed this week, is that many exhibits are going without the preparation and publication of catalogues.

Consider an exhibit that the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, opened in December: Object, Image, Collector: African and Oceanic Art in Focus. According to the press release, the exhibit

traces the ascent of African and Oceanic objects from artifacts to works of art in the 20th century, drawing on 20 Boston-area collections and on the collections of the MFA. Besides presenting some 60 three-dimensional works and textiles of excellent quality, the exhibition also examines the role of photography and photographically illustrated books in promoting this shift in appreciation of pieces from Africa and Oceania.

But it has no catalogue — just a color brochure.

The Metropolitan has not published a catalogue for 5,000 Years of Japanese Art: Treasures From the Packard Collection and small, exhibitions built around a masterpiece or two, like The Milkmaid, aren’t getting catalogues either.

These are just a few examples. So I ask, are we losing scholarship here? Without catalogues, will those people who buy catalogues learn less? Will we lose permanent records of these exhibits?

We may well. Catalogues are expensive – $50,000, $60,000, and sometimes often (usually?) much, much more. (See comment, below.)

On the other hand, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is probably blazing a trail for its coming exhibit, Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris. There’ll be no “hardcopy” catalogues — but the museum responded to my query today by saying it will publish an online catalogue, “including all of the works in the museum’s permanent collection.” (More details as I get them.)

Auction houses and some galleries have been using very good technology for online catalogues for ages now, of course. For just one page-turning example, take a look at Jill Newhouse’s digital catalogue for Wolf Kahn’s Early Drawings.

UPDATED, 1/8: I asked Jill about the costs for the Wolf Kahn digital catalogue, which she put at about $3,500 plus a small monthly fee. She also referred me to her designer, Larry Sunden, who adds that all one has to do to use PageGangster, the site that published the Newhouse catalogue, is create a PDF and upload it. PageGangster does the rest for $200 and a monthly fee ($10 or so) to add the page-turning and other features and to store the catalogues on their server. Pretty simple. Newhouse is also doing one for her coming Master Drawings exhibit.  

And here’s a tale: Some scholarly publishers have learned that online publication actually led to an increase in demand for hardcovers. Once people had perused contents, they wanted their own copies.

Photos: Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts (top); Metropolitan Museum (bottom)

 

Sometimes the goings-on the the art world are absolutely mystifying — especially to outsiders. Here’s a little example, from the world of art fairs.

A press release popped into my emailbox the other day announcing that David and Lee Ann Lester, owners and organizers of several art and antique fairs, were launching a new marketing initiative to “bring targeted American designers and collectors to Olympia in June 2010.”

The Lesters’ organization, International Fine Art Expositions, will pick up the tab for 30 to 50 Americans to travel to the fair (and their hotels as well, as implied in the press release).

The Lesters took over co-management of this fair last summer, partly to raise its standing and profile, comparable — Mr. Lester boasted in an article in The Art Newspaper — to Maastricht. He’s rebranding it as the London International Fine Art Fair at Olympia; you can see the list of exhibitors (and costs of exhibiting, in the application) here.

But would you not think that people who are able to buy the arts on offer at a Maastricht-like fair would also be able to pay their own way there? Would they want to apply — compete even — for free travel? Or maybe the Lesters will simply extend invitations to the chosen ones. Either way, how would fair-goers feel if they weren’t chosen — like too small fish?

Yeah, I know Las Vegas operates, and maybe that’s the theory here — but somehow this doesn’t feel right at a time when so many arts groups, not to mention regular people, are struggling.

Note to self: lighten up! 

Photo: Courtesy London International Fine Art Fair 

 

The post I wrote over the weekend, about my Wall Street Journal Masterpiece column describing Albrecht Altdorfer’s Battle of Issus, prompted a few readers to write to me about other Altdorfer paintings. American museums (Cleveland, the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among them) own only drawings, prints, woodcuts and etchings by Altdorfer — no paintings (a few examples of which below).

Then today, I read the Washington Post‘s article about a fantastic rumor that the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, may be in possession of a painting by Leonardo da Vinci. The museum is said to be in the process of authenticating it.

Which reminded me of a tidbit I did not use in my Altdorfer article: according to Christopher Wood, the Yale professor whom I quoted on Altdorfer’s role as a founder of the Danube school, there may be an Altdorfer painting in the U.S. afterall. Here’s what he told me:

The National Gallery of Art in Washington owns a strange work very close to Altdorfer consisting of a panel of the Fall of Man (Adam and Eve) with panels representing “The Reign of Bacchus.” It has never been properly explained. Actually the Fall of Man panel was once two panels, now glued together. Complicated. Anyway, scholars are bothered by it and prefer to attribute it to a follower or workshop associate, but I am open to the idea of Altdorfer as author.

I went straightaway to the NGA website, where I found this: 

Here’s how the NGA describes the work: “Workshop of Albrecht Altdorfer — German, 1480 or before – 1538. The Fall of Man [middle panel], c. 1535. oil on hardboard transferred from panel. middle panel: 39 x 31.5 cm (15 3/8 x 12 3/8 in.). Samuel H. Kress Collection
1952.5.31.b — Not on View.”

The NGA also attributes the left side panel — The Rule of Bacchus, c. 1535 — and the right side panel — The Rule of Mars, c. 1535 — to Altdorfer’s workshop. Their accession numbers are 1952.5.31.a and 1952.5.31.c, respectively (thus all from Kress).

I’m no expert, but I certainly wouldn’t rule out Wood’s opinion. The earlier end of that date estimate is troubling, though: Altdorfer was born around 1480 and died in 1538.

Here’s another interesting fact: In 1980, when London’s National Gallery acquired Christ Taking Leave of His Mother for an undisclosed price, UK newspapers speculated the number as $12 million, which would have made it the most expensive painting known to have changed hands at the time, according to Art + Auction. In today’s dollars, that sum would be about $31.5 million.

Finally, a few examples of Altdorfer’s paintings. 

[Read more…] about Altdorfer: A Mystery In The U.S., Pun Intended

Can a 15-year-old singer save jazz? A 15-year-old Canadian? (No disrespect intended; I’m just noting that jazz is an American art form.)

I would love to see it happen. As I’ve written before, jazz audiences are shrinking and aging: The median age of jazz consumers jumped from 29 in 1982 to 46 last year, according to the National Endowment for the Arts.

So I was amazed when I heard a wonderful jazz voice coming from NBC Nightly News last week, which I had on in the background while I checked my email. I looked up to see Brian Williams interviewing a youngster named Nikki Yanofsky, interspersed with clips of her singing like Ella and Billie. Can her voice, and her enthusiasm for jazz, draw others of her generation?

NBC posted the interview online (here) as well as a much longer version (here). In them, Nikki says she wants — no, she will — sing other genres (like pop and R&B) as well, but that jazz is her first love.

Yanofsky debuted in Canada at the Montreal International Jazz Festival in 2006, and she released an album there in 2007. But her first album in the U.S. will come this year, possibly in the first quarter. She has already performed at Carnegie Hall, in a Marvin Hamlisch program last February, and in another Hamlisch program at the Kennedy Center last May.

It’s a big task that I’ve given her; but listen to her voice and her interviews — you’ll see why I think she’s up to it. And she’s still just a kid. 

UPDATE, early Feb: The unofficial word is that Yanofsky has been asked to sing at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

UPDATE 2, 4/20/10: I’ve heard the album, spent time with Yanofsky at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola and written about her for New York magazine, which you can read about here.

 

 

Museums’ financial difficulties aren’t going away in the near future, and neither are deaccessioning controversies, and that’s why I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, which published it in Saturday’s paper as “The Art of the Deal.” (It was published on the web late on Jan. 1.)

Some people — directors, trustees, maybe even curators who fear they’ll lose their jobs in the next round of cutbacks — will want to solve their cash problems by selling art. As everyone interested in art must know by now, that practice is forbidden by museum rules.

So in the piece, I propose that museums establish an orderly process for considering it — before the next crisis hits.

My solution is this: museums that propose to sell art from their storerooms for purposes other than buying art should submit their cases to an independent arbitrator. And if they make a convincing case, they must also give other public collections two chances to buy the art — once, in a right of first refusal; a second time, after a public auction, when they all have an opportunity to match the winning public bid.

Yes, this is cumbersome — but it beats the messes we’ve had at museums ranging from Brandeis’s Rose Art Museum to the St. Augustine Historical Society to the Blanden Memorial Art Museum in Fort Dodge, Ia.

But maybe we are maturing: I expected to be flooded with complaints about violating sacred principles. Instead, all of the feedback I’ve received has been positive. One friend made a great addition to my solution, which proposed using neutral parties familiar with art, art law and nonprofit regulation. To her, that spelled lawyers, and she suggested that retired, disinterested museum professionals could also arbitrate.

Lest you think I’ve gone over to the dark side, however, let me post the final line of my piece:

…de-accessioning shouldn’t be impossible — just nearly so.

I hope that the Association of Art Museum Directors, the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries and the American Association of Museums take up this subject in the very near future. If they don’t, I fear others will try to do it for them, as we have already seen in a few instances (the Brodsky bill in NYS, to name one).