Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Two “Transformative” Gifts That Actually Are

ManetTwo lucky museums made big announcements this week–“transformative” gifts of art. And these do seem to fit that bill, no exaggeration.

In Los Angeles, a reclusive billionaire named A. Jerrold Perenchio said he would bequest “the most significant works of his collection to LACMA’s planned new building for its permanent collection.” The trove includes “at least” 47 art works, including some by Degas, Monet, Bonnard, Manet (at left), Picasso and Pissarro. They would go into the new buildings, designed by Peter Zumthor, planned by LACMA director Michael Govan–Perenchio made his gift contingent on that, as some of the museum’s current buildings need extensive work.

Just yesterday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a$125 million bond issue to help finance that $600 million-plus project, but Govan has to raise hundreds of millions before it will be built.

Here are the details of the gift. The Los Angeles Times has the backstory.

I was in LA last week (to see this), and made a stop at LACMA. The museum undoubtedly has some strengths–it’s young, remember, celebrating its 50th anniversary next year–but this gift is sorely need. Perenchio’s collection is valued at an estimated $500 million, obviously not affordable to LACMA, whose collecting priorities seem to be in contemporary anyway.

So I can only say thank you to Perenchio, whose previous gifts have generally be anonymous.

Peale-GWMeantime, the St. Louis Art Museum just accepted the bequest of 225 works of art given by the late C.C. Johnson Spink and Edith “Edie” Spink. It consists of many American works, by the likes of  John Singleton Copley, Rembrandt Peale, Norman Rockwell and Andrew and Jamie Wyeth, and some 200 Asian works of art “that range from
Chinese ceramics of the Neolithic period to works from Meiji-era Japan.”

The Spinks’ Asian art collection was developed with the intent of filling major gaps in the Art Museum’s collection and with a specific goal of allowing the museum to present a complete history of Chinese ceramics from prehistoric times to the end of the imperial system.

The museum says the collection is worth at least $50 million. Some of them are listed in this release. Peale’s George Washington is posted here.

It’s interesting that both announcements were made in this week of the big auctions in New York, where many works are selling for such high prices. These two benefactors say they bought with giving to the museums in mind. I wonder how many buyers this November are thinking the same way.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of LACMA (top) and the St. Louis Art Museum (bottom)

 

 

 

 

 

 

“National Gallery” — The Film

Oddly, so soon after I wrote here about “Mr. Turner,” the British film about J.W.M. Turner, I just learned about a British documentary called “National Gallery” about that august London institution. It, too, was shown at last spring’s Cannes Film Festival and it’s on view in New York City from today through Nov. 18. It’s at the Film Forum, which describes it like this”

NatlGalleryFilmLondon’s National Gallery…is itself portrayed as a brilliant work of art in this, Frederick Wiseman’s 39th documentary and counting. Wiseman listens raptly as a panoply of docents decode the great canvases of Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Turner; he visits with the museum’s restorers as they use magnifying glasses, tiny eye-droppers, scalpels, and Q-tips to repair an infinitesimal chip; he attends administrative meetings in which senior executives do (polite) battle with younger ones who want the museum to become less stodgy and more welcoming to a larger cross-section of the public. But most of all, we experience the joy of spending time with the aforementioned masters as well as Vermeer and Caravaggio, Titian and Velázquez, Pissarro and Rubens, and listen to the connoisseurs who discourse upon the aesthetic, historical, religious and psychological underpinnings of these masterpieces.

Now, the film is 181 minutes–very long for a documentary on one institutions, and even one by 84-year-old Wiseman, who uses a fly-on-the-wall technique, never straying into interviews, voice-overs or identifiers.

But, and this is where I learned of the film, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis on Wednesday called it “magnificent…at once specific and general, fascinating in its pinpoint detail and transporting in its cosmic reach.” And that’s just the first paragraph.

Dargis goes on to say that Wiseman delves into the NG’s history (including the slave-trade origins of a founder’s fortune) and, to her, the very important role played by money concerns at the NG. She concludes:

…the experience of watching “National Gallery” is pleasurable and immersive because he’s a wonderful storyteller. It is also unexpectedly moving. Because his other great theme is how art speaks to us, one he brilliantly expresses in the relay of gazes that finds us looking at museumgoers looking at portraits that look right back — at artists, art lovers and moviegoers — even as Mr. Wiseman, that sly old master, looks at all of us in turn.

Last May, the Telegraph also wrote a very positive piece, including the words:

The real joy of his film is that it never needs to strain for effect; it sits back. It’s like being lulled with intelligence. However long it is since you last climbed the gallery’s steps, you’ll watch this truly inspiring piece of work and rue the interval.

 The Guardian didn’t like it as much,

I have not seen the film, and though I hope to I’m not sure I can get to the cinema before Nov. 19. Perhaps it will move somewhere else in New York.

Meantime, here’s a short trailer.

Don’t Miss This Exhibition! (Installation Pictures Included)

_MG_5109In tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, I review an absolutely wonderful exhibition called Grandes Maestros: Great Masters of Iberoamerican Folk Art at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. It’s a massive, mesmerizing show that I visited last week–but which I had seen once before, by accident, in Mexico City. I tell that story, very briefly, in my review, headlined A New Perspective on an Overlooked Art Form: A global journey ends in an exhibition that takes folk art seriously.

My review begins–like the exhibit–with the three clay jaguars at left. And like the big, beautiful creatures they portray, which are native to Latin America, it’s a killer (of a show).

All the credit goes to Cándida Fernández de Calderón, the director of Fomento Cultural Banamex, a non-profit arm of the large Mexican bank owned by Citigroup–which makes this show, for me, all the more fascinating. Fernández started this collection, which is massive, as a social initiative. More details in the review, but she has certainly changed lives.

I am going to let my review and the photos I’m posting below speak for the exhibit.  But I do have a couple other comments. Fernández built the collection to expose it–and she is taking it to museums in Spain, in Latin America and the U.S. It’s a big show, so it needs museums with a lot of exhibition space. Still, of the museums expressing interest–which I cannot disclose because that was the ground rule–only one is a general art museum. The rest are natural history or folk art or might be called ethnographic. That’s a shame; this is art.

And there’s one more thing, which I could not get into, for lack of space (and btw, many thanks to my WSJ editor Eric Gibson, who was willing to give my review received more than the usual space): the Natural History Museum of LA did a fine job; the art looks good. But they contemporized the display–more “modern” pedastals and platforms, white walls with swaths of colors like pink and ochre, and so on. In Mexico City, the walls were all brightly colored–light orange, deep orange, deep rose–with no white in sight, except for the labeling (which was also on placards, though not screens). To my eyes, that installation was better suited to the works. The NHM believes its audience would prefer the contemporary look, and maybe so.

Unfortunately, cameras were not allowed in the Mexico City show–but I’ve snapped a picture of that installation from the Spanish catalogue, which I’ve posted at the bottom of the LA installation shots.  Still, as one museum director used to tell me, that’s just the envelope–it’s what is inside that counts.

All photos, except that one, by Edgar Chamorro, Courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. 

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_MG_5182_MG_5187And finally, the Mexico City installation:

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Burgeoning Florida Arts Corridor Gets Another Museum

The Tampa-St. Petersburg area is getting another art museum, courtesy of Tom James, chairman of the brokerage firm Raymond James, son of its founder and chairman of the nearby Dali Museum.

The other day, James, who is 72 and still active at the firm, said he would commit up to $75 million to build a museum that will house his collection–a number he calculated based on the new, $40 million Dali, which opened in 2011–plus $30 million to endow it.

RaymondJamesartJames reportedly owns about 2,500 works of art; he has been buying since he was a student at Harvard; his collection is described this way by the Tampa Bay Times:

Though his collection includes other genres, it’s best known for its Western and wildlife art and about 400 of the best examples in that genre would make up the permanent collection that he would give to the museum. Assessing the value of art is always a moving target, but James estimates that the group would probably be valued between $20 million and $25 million….

…He continues to collect art but with an eye toward a museum collection. Much of his Western and wildlife art is modern and contemporary so he is rounding it out with examples from the 19th century when the West became better known through artists who traveled there and created mythic, romantic images of it. No big names — Albert Bierstadt, for example — but he’s monitoring the auction houses and galleries for possible sales.

James is looking at sites in downtown St. Petersburg, near the Dali, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Morean Arts Center; says he’ll decide the location by next June 30.

The Tampa Bay Business Journal said the museum “would be about 35,000 to 40,000 square feet and house about 400 museum-quality works of art from the James collection.”  Some of it is now being shown at the Raymond James headquarters, as pictured.

We’ll see what the collection has, but this area is certainly strengthening its visual arts scene.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Raymond James via the Tampa Bay Business Journal

Hirshhorn: Ageism At It Worst

Some things in the museum world are truly shocking, and what happened this summer at the Hirshhorn Museum–which is now just coming to light–is truly a shame. The museum, it seems, decided it no longer needed its docents. Why? Because they’re generally older women, and they “are for the most part being replaced with younger volunteers who are interested in museum careers,” according to an article in the Oct. 30 Washington Post.

Hirshhorn MuseumThe article continued:

Hirshhorn officials say the change was needed to keep up with the times. Visitors don’t want formal tours anymore; they want casual interactions with staff who can talk about the work and ‘help them understand it better. And guides need to be in the gallery frequently to do this well.

Kristy Maruca, the museum’s manager of education, described the change as a merger of the docents and “interpretive guides,” a group of four younger volunteers who work 12 hours a week, some for college credit. She received 20 applications for the first four-month Gallery Guide cycle, which requires volunteers work 15 hours a week. Ten were accepted, including three students earning college credit. So far, three have dropped out.

“It’s the best thing for our visitors,” Maruca explained, adding that she no longer has the time to run both programs.

But here may be a rub:

“It was done in a very rude, very uncouth way,” said Florence Brodkey of Arlington, a docent for 12 years who said the volunteers were called to a meeting in August and told of the changes that would go into effect the next month. “It was disrespectful and insensitive.”

“There are women who are still there from the first class of docents, lots of old-timers who love the collection and love the museum,” said Laurie Nakamoto of Arlington, a docent for 35 years.

More details at that link. The volunteers don’t seem to be completely blameless here. Maruca said that they averages just a few hours of volunteering a month. That is too little. Most volunteer opportunities that I know of require a half-day a week, sometimes more.

Back in 2009, I heralded the work of volunteers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, some of whom seemed to exhibit an almost cult-like devotion. At the time, the Met very much appreciated its volunteers, and I can only hope it still does. They were required to work one day a week, however. The commitment was real on both sides.

Meanwhile, the Post offered this for comparison:

Many other Smithsonian museums continue to have docent programs… The National Air and Space Museum is recruiting for a docent class that will begin training in the fall of 2015. After completing 11 weeks of training, volunteers must agree to sign on for two years of at least eight hours a month in the galleries. The Freer and Sackler Galleries just recruited a new docent class that will train from September until next June. After passing a qualifying tour next summer, docents must commit to two years of at least 24 tours a year, as well as attending two-hour training sessions several times a month. The National Museum of African Art asks docents to give 60 hours a year; the National Postal Museum requires 20 hours a year and a two-year commitment. The National Museum of American History offers weekday and weekend docent programs that require a year commitment and one 90-minute shift each week or two weekend shifts a month.

Whatever went wrong at the Hirshhorn, it could, perhaps should, be fixed–though with more commitment from the volunteer docents.