Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

It’s A Masterpiece!

Yes, I wrote another Masterpiece column for The Wall Street Journal, which published in Saturday’s paper, headlined Folding Culture and Politics Into Art. Can you guess what it is? I’ve already mentioned it here, in 2012.

Mexican Screen-battleI was enamored of the object, a folding screen made in Mexico at the turn of the 18th century, from the first I heard of it, when it was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum.* And when I saw it last year in Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492–1898 there, I wasn’t disappointed. What’s more, the screen has a great backstory. So, Saturday’s piece.

Here’s an excerpt:

…Stretching some 18 feet in length and 7 1/2 feet tall, this biombo enconchado blended Asian, European and American influences: It borrowed the traditional Japanese folding-screen form known asbyobu; bore images inspired by Dutch news prints and French and Italian tapestries; and was inlaid with concha, which means shell in Spanish, using a technique invented in Mexico by local artists.

Very rare, possibly unique, in its day, this multicultural hybrid—now split in half, alas—is the only surviving specimen of the genre…

MexicanScreen-Hunt-detailThe backstory is very complicated, and I won’t attempt to summarize it here. It involves a splitting in two of the original screen, its “disappearance” for centuries, it resurfacing at auction years ago when only a Mexican dealer recognized it and got it for a steal, and the Brooklyn Museum’s digging to discover its true subject.

One comment on the WSJ website is on point.  John Beauregard wrote:

Lovely story, tx.

The next logical step would be to (temporarily) reunite the two halves either in Brooklyn or in Tepotzotlán, or have them displayed successive in each city.

Good idea.

Photo Credits: Battle scene (top); hunt scene detail (bottom), Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Brooklyn Museum

Early Word On “Mr. Turner”–Movie, Good; Art, Bad

Not too long ago, I was in a movie theater when up came a preview for a film called “Mr. Turner,” which would be J.M.W. Tuner to RCA readers. I checked it out and discovered that it was set to open today (Oct. 31) in Britain (after being shown at at Cannes) and in the U.S. on Dec. 19. Early word: it’s good.

2014, MR. TURNERThe movie focuses on the last 25 years of Turner’s life, up until his death in 1851. Rated R, it’s described this way:

Profoundly affected by the death of his father, loved by a housekeeper he takes for granted and occasionally exploits sexually, he forms a close relationship with a seaside landlady with whom he eventually lives incognito in Chelsea, where he dies. Throughout this, he travels, paints, stays with the country aristocracy, visits brothels, is a popular if anarchic member of the Royal Academy of Arts, has himself strapped to the mast of a ship so that he can paint a snowstorm, and is both celebrated and reviled by the public and by royalty.

Turner is played by Timothy Spall; other art world luminaries in it include John Constable (James Fleet), John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire) and Sir John Soane (Nicholas Jones). Here’s the trailer.

I checked the British papers, and the Telegraph gives it 5 stars, saying:

…Leigh’s film is a supremely enjoyable biopic of the English artist known as “the painter of light”… Timothy Spall…gives the finest performance of his career to date… beyond the troughfuls of fun tics, Spall makes Turner tenderly and totally human, which has the effect of making his artistic talents seem even more God-given.

And here’s a teaser about the art:

The painting process, though, is very different: Leigh shoots it in a way that it sometimes resembles an occult ritual.

 The Guardian also gives it 5 stars.

…Timothy Spall is JMW Turner! He is the triumphant star of Mike Leigh’s richly and intensely enjoyable study of the great artist’s final years.

…Mr Turner is funny, humane and visually immaculate, hitting its confident stride straight away. It combines domestic intimacy with an epic sweep, and a lyrical gentleness pervades each scene, tragic or comic. Every line, every detail, every minor character, however casual or apparently superfluous, is absolutely necessary.

And he adds:

Since Mr Turner first appeared, the Late Turner exhibition at Tate Britain has established a new context for watching the film, encouraging us to see his later canvases as something other than proto-modernism, or a late Victorian variation on a Romantic theme. Their almost narcotic grandeur is Turner’s own: a transcendental refinement of the natural world, somehow existing in both the age of steam and the medieval world’s cloud of unknowing….

But Andrew Wilton, chairman of the Turner Society and a trustee of the Turner’s House Trust. has quibbles. As a movie, he thinks Mr. Turner is “a deeply moving and beautiful film… but it’s not quite the Turner I know.” He later says:

Spall went to great lengths to get his drawing and painting right, and sort of succeeds. He misses the crucial point, though: that Turner was a miniaturist by temperament. He made innumerable watercolours on a tiny scale, compressing astonishing amounts of topographical and atmospheric detail into them, and the sketchbooks he took with him on tours usually function in the same way. If you look closely at his oil paintings, you find them equally detailed.

Wilton may be right–we can all judge in December–but I do think that’s asking a lot of a movie made for general audiences.

Turner has never been a favorite of mine, but I still want to see this movie and I still hope it bring more people to art.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of AllStar via The Guardian

Museums “Adapt To the Digital Age” But…

All in all, I thought the lead article in Sunday’s NYTimes special section on the visual arts–Museums Morph Digitally–was good (it was written by my friend, Steve Lohr), though I wasn’t crazy about the line that “ museum curators and administrators …talk of …the importance of a social media strategy and a “digital first” mind-set.” Maybe digital is second, but surely not first, except perhaps to promote their actual collections.

Whitney-KoonsPlus, the whole article did not once use the word “selfie,” a bane of museums, imho. Except at the Whitney.

According to an article in last week’s Observer, The Whitney Begged Teens to Take Jeff Koons Selfies in Pro-Selfie Propaganda. 

As writer and artist Aaron Krach revealed via Twitter (right, right) the Whitney had been passing out pamphlets through its Youth Insights propaganda arm that instruct teens exactly how to share their love of the Whitney with the world. “KOONS IS GREAT FOR SELFIES” the bolded message reads. The museum goes on to do away with any respectability. “Take a selfie and post it on Instagram! Use: @whitneymuseum and #Koons #ArtSelfie”

Boldface mine. But when a paper like the Observer, which aims to be hip, mocks you, isn’t it time to rethink your actions?

Anyway, back to the Times article:

The museum of the future will come in evolutionary steps. But some steps are already being taken. Digital technologies being deployed or developed include: augmented reality, a sort of smart assistant software that delivers supplemental information or images related to an artwork to a smartphone; high-definition projections of an artwork, a landscape or night sky that offer an immersive experience; and 3-D measurement and printing technology that lets people reproduce, hold and feel an accurate replica of an object.

None of that threatens the purpose of museums, though attempts might suffer from poor execution, which would. But you can’t blame technology–not even for making selfies possible!

What I liked about the article in particular was the tone–there was none of the “rah, rah, technology rules” mindset. In one section, Colleen Stockmann, assistant curator for special projects at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, talks about augmented reality technology. The point, she said, “is to ‘give you more points of access into the artwork, so that it keeps you in the moment of looking, almost as if someone is guiding you through the painting or sculpture.’ ” That’s great.

You can read other examples in the story.

I’m going to give the last word here to Carrie Rebora Barratt, deputy director for collections and administration at the Met, which has had it rah-rah moments and its misfires in technology use, as well as successes. She said,

…there should be a range of viewing choices, guided by the principle…of “letting the content determine what we do, instead of letting the technology and devices lead the way.” Those experiences, she said, will run from “no tech” to “high tech.”

Agreed.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Observer

Brava to Two Brave Curators

My hat is off to Susan Leask, formerly curator of art at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, and to Helen Molesworth (below), new chief curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and formerly with the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Both had the courage to speak publicly–in fact, in Leask’s case, to act publicly–to protest what some art museum directors are doing to undermine their jobs and, more important, their institutions.

Yes, it’s the latest discussion of the way some museums are trying to “engage” or “interact” (or choose your own verb) with the “community,” and it came in an article in Friday’s Wall Street Journal  headlined Everybody’s A Curator.

No, everyone’s not a curator.

Helen web largeThe article this time was mainly about crowdsourcing, though that was a proxy, in some ways, for the wholesale abdication by some museums of their responsibility to be education institutions, to promote the care, understanding and appreciation of art, and to help people find meaning in art. Instead, they’d rather get big attendance numbers, no matter how they get them. The Santa Cruz museum, in this case, is exhibiting art related to the ocean “alongside works by local residents.” Notice the well-chosen word “works” not art–perhaps that’s because the “museum” encouraged people by soliciting “your two-year-old’s drawing of the beach” and “that awesome GoPro footage you took while surfing.” And so on.

Let me say at the outset that I am not against all crowdsourcing; occasionally it’s even thoughtful. But it often goes hand-in-hand with other measures that pander to the public, as if they could not understand great art. Leask quit the Santa Cruz institution last year because it offered a program that “invited a mix of outside professionals to live at the museum for 48 hours and build a new exhibit from the permanent collection.”

“Something about the power of art and the sanctity of the public trust had been compromised,” she told the WSJ. Later, she posted this on Facebook, as background to the comment:

I have spent my entire museum career supporting artists and their works because I believe artists are among the most important members of our society. The best of them bring insight, beauty and truth into our lives, and they all offer perspectives that may help us understand ourselves and our world better. I also support, and have included, participatory activities in exhibitions that help audiences engage with art and with each other.

As a curator, it is my responsibility to research, select and present works that have aesthetic excellence and authentic meaning, to ensure the physical integrity of those artworks, to honor the artist’s intention, and to add to scholarship that will deepen and advance the understanding of why art is crucial to all of our lives. When these responsibilities are not upheld, by the curator or by the institution, no one wins.

Amen to that.

Molesworth, meanwhile, made another point in the WSJ, in response to an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in which the public voted on 30 artworks, selected from 50 Impressionist paintings pre-chosen by a curator there. It was called Boston Loves Impressionism.

“You’re left with 10 paintings that may or may not make sense together, or may or may not be interesting together, or may or may not teach anything about the history of art—it’s not the stuff of knowledge or scholarship,” Ms. Molesworth said. When museum crowdsourcing is raised privately among curators, she said, the subject prompts a reaction of “silent dismay.”

I also agree with Molesworth on the last points, which I’ve said here before: Curators have told me privately that they are distressed by these moves that disregard knowledge and scholarship, but they fear speaking up to their directors. Of course, they could be playing to my well-known feelings about these issues, but I doubt that all of them are so calculating. I have nothing to offer them, after all.

A final note: I regret to say that I will not publish comments on this post, either in agreement or disagreement.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of ICA/Boston 

 

AAMD On El Salvador: Let’s Try Licit Antiquities Market

Temple at Cihuatan ParkFull of frustration that a 27- year-old U.S.-El Salvador Memorandum of Understanding to stop looting of antiquities isn’t working, the Association of Art Museum Directors recommended against renewal recently. Instead, the Association advocated the formation of a “licit” market in antiquities there. It would be taxed, and the proceeds would be “used to protect cultural sites and to encourage related employment by the local populations and the scientific exploration, storage and conservation of objects from those sites.”

That’s the gist of an article I wrote earlier this week, which was published on the website Art-Antiques-Design: MUSEUM DIRECTORS:  LICIT MARKET MAY SAVE EL SALVADORAN ANTIQUITIES. 

The statement, which is worth reading in full–there’s a link at the bottom of my article above–was filed with the U.S. State Department’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee, which met October 7 through 9 to consider the renewal.

AAMD criticized the El Salvador government harshly.

There’s no word on when the Committee will decide, but the five-year pact was last renewed Mar. 8, 2010.

That’s a temple at the Cihuatan Park in El Salvador above.