Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Revealed: Roman Hoard, Found In France, Conserved Here

B-cupImagine being a French farmer, plowing your field near a village named Berthouville in rural Normandy; it’s 1830. And you hit something, stop and discover the first items in a trove that grew to 90 silver and gilt-silver statuettes and vessels dating to the 3rd century and before.

It happened, and now, after four years of conservation work at the Getty Museum, they went on view today at the Getty Villa. Known as the Berthouville Treasure, they appear to be an ancient offering to the Gallo-Roman god Mercury, the museum says. It’s the first time that the hoard, which is owned by the Department of Coins, Medals and Antiques at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, has been displayed in its entirety outside of Paris. The Getty has thrown in some “precious gems, jewelry, and other Roman luxury objects from the Cabinet’s royal collections” to heighten the appeal of the hoard.

But for those who have already had a peek–and I know a couple of them, though they wish to remain anonymous–the Berthouville Treasure is quite fabulous (see right here, below)

B-hoard

The Biblioteque Nationale bought the hoard for 15,000 francs, likely thwarting local plans to melt down the silver pieces. Instead, there were two additional excavations at the site, in 1861 and in 1896.

There’s a marvelous story in Fall 2014 issue of The Getty, the Getty Trust’s magazine. It tells how the pieces arrived at the Getty “dusty, grimy, darkened from tarnish, and the surfaces were mottled,” according to Eduardo Sanchez, a conservator at the museum. “We could tell different hands had done the restorations, and many of the inscriptions we later found were not yet visible.” The museum’s conservators worked with scientists from the Getty Conservation Institute.

B-MercuryUnfortunately, you will have to ask the Getty for a copy of the magazine, because it’s not online (should be!). Instead, I will have to link to the exhibition press release, which doesn’t have the details of the conservation work. And I will link to a few posts on the Getty Iris blog over the last few years, while work was being done on the Berthouville Treasure.

Here’s the “welcome” in 2011; a post about “the search” in 2012; and, also in 2012, more about the conservation. All of them have pictures, though not the ones I show here–of the hoard, of one cup (of a pair) and of Mercury.

I think it’s very interesting that France sent these treasure objects to the Getty for conservation–so hats off to the Getty on that. And on showing them to us: the Treasure will stay art the Getty until next August. So I may see it yet, in the flesh.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Getty

 

 

 

 

Tomorrow’s Museum Leaders–And A Few Of Today

Whether or not they ever become museum directors, the twelve curators who were named this week as the eighth class of fellows at the Center for Curatorial Leadership* are signalling their ambition. It’s a well-rounded group, coming from ten American museums plus two overseas museums–in Denmark and the Netherlands.

JRavenalBut before we get to them, let me link to two people who were named museum directors this week (aside fr0m new president of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Don Bacigalupi): John B. Ravenal (right), modern and contemporary curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will become director of the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Massachusetts (details here) and Amada Cruz (left), currently executive director of Artpace in San Antonio, will become director of the Phoenix Art Museum (details here).

Nine of the 12 museums have never had a participant in the program–which sometimes has looked as if big museums had an edge. A committee of “leading” museum directors chose the group, the CCL says. Two, as you’ll see, are already museum directors but are sharpening their skills.

Amada-Cruz-phoenix-art-museum.JPGSo who are they?

  • Dorthe Aagesen, Curator/Senior Researcher, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Kathleen Ash-Milby, Associate Curator, Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, New York City
  • Rene Paul Barilleaux, Chief Curator/Curator of Art After 1945, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas
  • Gudrun Buehl, Curator/Museum Director, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.
  • Carol Eliel, Curator of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California
  • Anne Goodyear, Co-Director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine
  • Toby Kamps, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas
  • Corey Keller, Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California
  • Mary Morton, Curator/Head of the Department of French Paintings, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
  • Pieter Roelofs, Curator of 17th-Century Dutch Painting, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Xavier Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, The Frick Collection, New York City
  • Sarah Schleuning, Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia

You can see the full press release here.

Since this program started in 2008, it has graduated 74 curators. As Buffy Easton, who co-founded the CCL with Aggie Gund, has said, these fellows don’t always go on to be museum directors. But they usually advance, though it’s impossible to say whether participating in the program contributed to that. The whole thing lasts only five months, and only about a month of that is time spent together, away from their museums.

But this program does create networks and sharing of expertise, so it does have a positive effect aside from recognizing and perhaps endorsing the fellows’ ambition.

*I consult to a foundation that supports CCL

Breaking News: Don Bacigalupi Leaving Crystal Bridges

BacigalupiDon Bacigalupi has been president of Crystal Bridges only since February, 2013, but now he is leaving to become the Founding President of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which George Lucas intend to erect in Chicago. It is not without controversy. The recently released design concept, put forward by MAD Architects, has been criticized. People don’t approve of its “space-mountain-like design.”

Still it has a proposed opening date of 2018.

Previously, Bacigalupi was director of Crystal Bridges, and I’m not sure anyone ever understood that reassignment. His most recent venture, which took a vast about of his time, was curating State of the Art: American Art Now.

About the Lucas: A group called Friends of the Parks on Thursday has filed a lawsuit in federal court against the plan.

According to Reuters:

The museum was to be located on the same area on Lake Michigan as Soldier Field, Field Museum and Shedd Aquarium. The proposed site currently is used for parking lots.

The lawsuit seeks to block the transfer of the land from the city to the museum. By allowing the development, the suit said the nation’s third-largest city will interfere with the right of citizens to “use and enjoy property held in trust by the state of Illinois as a natural resource and pristine physical environment.”

…”The structure will interfere with keeping the lakefront clear and free,” [Cassandra Frances, president of the Friends of the Park] said.

Bacigalupi, who joined Crystal Bridges in 2009 from the Toledo Museum of Art, will remain a member of the Crystal Bridges board.

Mass MoCA Closes In On Its Original Promise

“It’s really exciting to see a lot of the promise of that project being realized,” Michael Govan told me the other day. I was telling him that, tomorrow, the Massachusetts Museum of Contempory Art plans to announce six new partnerships with artists and artists’ foundations that will fill 90,000 square feet. That’s a huge chunk of the new space being renovated in the expansion that I wrote about in August for The New York Times.

TurrellMass MoCA’s new partners are big names: James Turrell, Laurie Anderson, Jenny Holzer, plus the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Easton Foundation of Louise Bourgeois, and Bang on Can, which is handling the late instrument maker Gunnar Schonbeck. And Govan, now director of the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, was there at the creation of Mass MoCA, along with Tom Krens, who usually gets credit for the idea, and Joe Thompson, its first and only director.

I write much more about tomorrow’s news in an article posted a short time ago on the website of the Times, headlined Vast Space and Art to Fill It: Mass MoCA Partners With Major Contemporary Artists. It will be in tomorrow’s paper.

With these partnership, Thompson has taken Mass MoCA a turn away from its early years–when it curated its own exhibits and usually commissioned or helped create new artworks on site. But these partnerships, which are not common and may be unique, or close to unique, seem a sound way for Mass MoCA to expand at low cost.

For its first two partnerships, with Yale Art Gallery and the Hall Art Foundation–for exhibitions of art by Sol LeWitt and Anselm Kiefer, respectively–Mass MoCA incurred little added costs, mostly things like security. The YAG and the Hall picked up the other costs.

Mass MoCA is cost-sharing on three of the new deals–with Rauschenberg, Easton and Bang on a Can. Turrell will donate one or two works–they are site-specific. But Mass MoCA plans to raise money for the Holzer and Anderson installations, and most of Turrell, too.

The slight danger here for Mass MoCA in displaying such masters is that it loses its identify as an “art factory,” as the headline on my summer article put it so well.  It will still curate its own exhibitions–in fact, that aprt of the museum is gaining space too.

“It was always posed as an alternative place, not trying to be a regular museum,” Govan said. On the other hand, he added. “Mass MoCA was always supposed to be flexible and to be changing with the times, and it is.”

 

Detroit: Time To Put Artists On The Spot?

Supporters of the Detroit Institute of Arts have been celebrating for almost a week now–it was last Friday that the court ruled in favor of the Grand Bargain, which buys freedom for the DIA. But with a catch: the museum still has to raise more than $10 million to reach its $100 million mandated contribution to the deal. And then it must raise about $300 million over the next eight or so years for its endowment, to replace the money it is receiving from the millage tax–which ends after 10 years from its inception.

WarholDollarSignPlus, it always has to raise something on the order of $8 million a year for operations to balance the budget.

At this stage, every little bit helps. Last Saturday, according to the Detroit Free Press, the museum rejoiced in the fact its (accidentally) well-timed celebratory gala raised more than $1 million. That’s its largest annual fundraising event.

Which got me thinking. Michigan is wealthy, and there is still more money to tap there. But the support from national foundations, some–like the Getty–with no connection to Detroit, highlighted the fact that the DIA is more than a Detroit institution. With its fantastic collection, it’s a national treasure.

Wouldn’t a joint effort by artists and artists’ foundations be a headline-grabbing move that might inspire others beyond Michigan’s borders?

I found this list of the world’s 15 richest artists (I cannot verify it accuracy; in fact, I think it may be missing people like James Turrell)–their fortunes range from $1 billion (for Damian Hirst) to $20 million )for Georg Baselitz). It is true that the DIA’s contemporary art collection isn’t full of their works; it’s a universal museum. But,as I said, every little but helps now and the donor circle must widen.

Artists’ foundations may be even more helpful, if they wanted to be. In 2011, in The Art Newspaper, András Szántó called them “a sleeping giant of philanthropy.” There were, he said, about 300 at the time with $2.7 billion in assets.

I know that many artists are generous–frequently donating works of art for auction, for example, and to museums. Some are regular donors in other ways; Alex Katz, for example, gives artworks by contemporary artists to museums or money to buy such works, I’m told.

It seems to me that a joint gesture by artists and artists’ foundations, following the lead of the foundations in the Grand Bargain, would be an inspiration that could have a ripple effect, perhaps even to the collectors who this week have proven that they have plenty of capacity to help out a national treasure.