Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Menil Collection Starts Drawing Center

Nearly 40 years after the creation of The Drawing Center in New York, the Menil Collection in Houston has broken ground on The Menil Drawing Institute (pictured below)–and I haven’t seen any national publicity. Could it be that the subject is “drawings?” Not very sexy to most editors.

It will be interesting to watch the Menil’s trajectory.

The two, New York and Houston, are a little different, as follows:

image006The Drawing Center is the only fine arts institution in the U.S. to focus solely on the exhibition of drawings, both historical and contemporary. It was established in 1977 by curator Martha Beck (1938-2014) to provide opportunities for emerging and under-recognized artists; to demonstrate the significance and diversity of drawings throughout history; and to stimulate public dialogue on issues of art and culture.

While in Houston:

Funded through the $110 million Campaign for the Menil, which to date has achieved 70 percent of its goal, the MDI will be the first freestanding facility in the United States designed expressly for the exhibition and study of modern and contemporary drawings.

Still, I don’t think the Drawing Center, located in Soho, has always had an easy time of it–either raising money, balancing its budget or attracting crowds. That’s despite the fact that it has had excellent exhibitions over the years. Recent attendance is about 55,000 a year, the Center says. At one time, the Drawing Center was a candidate for moving downtown, one of the non-profits mentioned in reconstruction of the area around the World Trade Center. It reconsidered (or was forced to) after concerns arose about its programming: namely, would they be sensitive to the hallowed ground at the 9/11 site.

Instead, the Drawing Center decided to stay where it was (for now). According to The New York Times,

“The economy made us re-evaluate what scale of project we want,” said Brett Littman, the Drawing Center’s director…“We’re like a nice small jazz club — the scale of what we do is intimate, drawings tend to be pretty small. The board leadership and myself have come to the conclusion that maybe the Drawing Center shouldn’t be 30,000 square feet. It’s not in the cards for us.”

Its current place is 2,500 sq. feet.

Interestingly, the Menil facility IS 30,000 sq. feet. More details, from the Menil Press Release:

The 30,000-square-foot, $40 million MDI building, designed by the Los Angeles-based firm of Johnston Marklee, will provide unprecedented access for both the public and scholars to the Menil’s outstanding collection of drawings, which has grown rapidly in recent years through major gifts from donors including Louisa Stude Sarofim, William F. Stern, Cy Twombly, and David Whitney. The landscape design for the MDI, which is integral to the project and creates a new parklike space for Houston within the Menil campus, is by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.

David Breslin was named chief curator earlier this year and he took up his post this month.

The MDC is expected to open in 2017.

I can’t not mention another drawing institute–that of the Morgan Library and Museum.  It’s a research center, but of course the Morgan itself focuses on works on paper, including drawings. The Menil’s current exhibition is Becoming Modern: Nineteenth-Century French Drawings from The Morgan Library & Museum and the Menil Collection. 

Breslin made an interesting comment in the release:

Drawing privileges research and discovery and gives a material trace to the slipperiness of thought. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that drawings are so frequently the objects of art that artists themselves choose to live with and work around. Drawings invite dialogue; they ask you to talk back to them; they compel you to take your own work further. As a medium that transcends discipline—it is as valuable to the choreographer, composer, and archaeologist as it is to the architect and artist—drawing gathers up what is frequently kept separate and offers a way to look at creative culture more as a whole.

I certainly can agree with the first half of that quote. But I think that all kinds of works “invite dialogue” etc. Soon it will be Breslin’s challenge to draw in the public to drawings, to help them understand why they are so special.

Crystal Bridges Reshuffles PostWar Galleries With 2014 Acquisitions

The postwar and contemporary art galleries at the Crystal Bridges Museum have always been the weakest part of the collection, but steadily the museum has been filling out the collection. Sixteen acquisitions in this category, all made in 2014, were announced on Friday–I broke the news Thursday evening in a small item in The New York Times (scroll down; it’s the last of four items)–valued at about $20 million.

Sobel-HiroshimaThe works include Robert Rauschenberg’s The Tower and three paintings and two works on paper by Helen Frankenthaler, including Seven Types of Ambiguity from 1957. The full list is below.

Just as interesting, the museum is reinstalling those galleries, a project led by curator Chad Alligood, who co-curated the museum’s big State of the Art exhibition. State of the Art was so big that it took over some of the museum’s postwar gallery space–and led to the addition of walls in those galleries. The deinstallation of that show provided the opportunity to weave in several of the new works and rearrange some of the others.

Based on my conversation with Alligood, it’s not an installation that would be done at any other U.S. museum, imho. Aa can be seen elsewhere at Crystal Bridges, it continues, at moments, to link a piece of art with American history. So the first art one sees coming round the corner, out of the American Modernists gallery, on a large wall in the center once occupied by a Joan Mitchell, will be Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter alongside Janet Sobel’s Hiroshima (at left). Once inside, you’ll have to do almost an about-face to see Rothko’s No. 210/No. 211 (Orange).

Frankenthaler’s painting, which demonstrates the bridge she created between Abstract Expressionism and color field painting, will hang between Adolph Gottlieb’s Trinity and a red-white-and-blue Kenneth Noland painting.

Rauschenberg’s The Tower will hang near a painting by him and near a John Chamberlain and another new piece, Nancy Grossman’s Car Horn–all three of which use everyday materials, at the time unconventional in art, that refer to America’s rampant consumerism at the time.

At the same time, Alligood says that the Donald Judd will stand where it has in the past, and so will the Neil Welliver–among others. When I asked what was going into storage to make room for the new works, Alligood said “very little.” The new installation takes advantage of the new walls and is hung more densely that the previous hang. It incorporates 71 works all, told.
Here’s the list of the rest of the new postwar/contemporary acquisitions:

  • Frankenthaler’s Untitled (1951) and Pink Bird Figure II (1961), plus two of her works on paper, The Bullfight (1958) and Untitled (1980);
  • Ruth Asawa’s Untitled, (ca. 1958);
  • Allan D’Arcangelo’s My Uncle Whiskey’s Bad Habit (1962);
  • Vija Celmins’s Untitled (Ham Hock) (1964),
  • Alma Thomas’s Lunar Rendezvous—Circle of Flowers (1969),
  • Roni Horn’s When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes No. 859: A Doubt If It Be Us (1993),
  • Mark Tansey’s Landscape (1994)
  • Charles LeDray’s Rainbow (2012-2014)

Plus, two gifts:

  • Brice Marden’s For Carl Andre (1966) from an anonymous donor
  • Nancy Graves’s Fayum-Re (1982), gift of Agnes Gund.

Notice anything else? I did, and the museum confirmed it: Alice Walton, the museum’s benefactor, continues to be interested in redressing the prejudice against women artists prevalent in the art market and museum world. More than half of these works are by women, and the press release emphasizes the Frankenthaler purchase, even though the Rauschenberg on its own undoubtedly cost more. It was, as I said in the Times, once owned by famed collectors Victor and Sally Ganz but failed to sell when put up for sale at Christie’s in 2011, with an estimate of $12 million to $18 million.

Here’s what I like about this news and the installation: By aligning the art with history, the installation tells a story that’s a bit different from other museums and, possibly, more tailored, more accessible to people who live in areas without many rich museums–like Arkansas. I say this sight unseen, of course, and reserve the right to change my mind if I get there and find the execution wanting.

Here’s what I don’t like: Crystal Bridges seems to be on something of a name-check exercise–one Marden, one Pollock, one Thiebaud, one Mitchell, one Rauschenberg plus a minor painting, etc. There are exceptions–five Frankenthalers, for example. But there’s little depth in any of the myriad strains of postwar art. Granted, Crystal Bridges is young and its collection came together quickly. But I do wonder if there is a strategy beyond checking names off the list of must-haves.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Crystal Bridges

Exhibitions To See This Spring

vmfa2-ManetAs usual for the past few years, I also compiled a list of about 30 exhibitions at museums around the country that are on view now or will be on view this spring and summer for The New York Times‘s Museums special section.

That’s not so easy. I look at hundreds of exhibition descriptions and images, and I strive to choose a balance to appeal to many tastes. So there’s always a mix of Old Masters (though few this year), 19th Century European, American, Asian and modern and contemporary art. Sometime I throw in a manuscript exhibit if there’s a good one.

Here’s a link to the list this year.  It’s accompanied by a well-worth-seeing slide show of sixteen images.

I’ve pasted one more here that’s not in the slide show, a Manet that goes on view in Richmond at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts tomorrow.

Courtesy of the VMFA

What’s Up With The Met’s Lauder Center?

Rabinow-Rebecca-webThat was the question on my mind when I proposed a story on it for the annual New York Times special section on museums, which was part of today’s paper. The result is headlined A Gift That Could Rewrite Art History in the paper (it’s different–and too “newsy” a headline on the web–bt that’s journalism today. Interestingly, the Times usually shows the writer the print head, but not the web head).

In any case, here’s the link to the article.

The Lauder Research Center for Modern Art has an enviable $22 million endowment of its own and is headed by curator Rebecca Rabinow (pictured). I won’t go into the details of the center’s components here–they are all in the article. The most interesting thing for RCA readers will be to watch for results. One project in particular, in which a scholar named Verane Tasseau is trying to compile the inventory of Daniel Kahnweiler’s gallery and trace where those artworks went, has great potential to fulfill that headline.

In the meantime, you may want to peruse the Center’s microsite, which contains a lot of information and databases that are growing by the week.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Met

 

It’s Official: A New Director For National Gallery

GFinaldiAs I predicted here on Jan. 4, the National Gallery in London has chosen Gabriele Finaldi to succeed Nicholas Penny. The NG made the announcement this morning, saying:

Dr Finaldi will take up his new position 17 August 2015. Current Director, Dr Nicholas Penny announced his retirement in summer 2014.

Dr Finaldi, a British citizen, is currently Deputy Director for Collections and Research at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid where he has been since 2002. He was formerly a Curator at the National Gallery, London between 1992 and 2002 where he was responsible for the later Italian paintings in the collection (Caravaggio to Canaletto) and the Spanish collection (Bermejo to Goya).

Finaldi, who is 49, was born in London; he studied art history at Dulwich College and then at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Here’s a link to the press release.

My sources say he has done a superb job running the Prado–his job as deputy director is essentially the director, who is a political appointee, I believe. Finaladi oversaw the Prado’s expansion and a staff reorganization, raised its international profile, boosted research and conservation and presented many rewarding exhibitions.

I don’t know him personally, but I hope to meet him at some point.

Photo Credit: Photo © Sergio Enriquez-Nistal