Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Coming On Sunday: Frank Gehry’s Colorful Museum

Biomuseo, Panamá, septiembre 2014. @Fernando AldaIn this week’s Sunday New York Times, you’ll find annual fall Fine Arts and Exhibitions section. It’s full of stories about galleries, art and history museums, technology and the auction business. I didn’t write any of them. I was more fascinated by the new Biomuseo in Panama, designed by Frank Gehry, which I mentioned here once before.

It’s Gehry’s only building in Latin America and–seems to me–the only one in which he deploys bright colors as part of his design. They are crayon colors, and signal–to me at least–that this museum wants to attract families, which it does.

But my article (online now), Biomuseo Showcases Panama’s Ecological Diversity, doesn’t focus on Gehry’s design. I was more interested in what Panama would do to build a 21st Century natural history museum. Rightly, it focuses on the biodiversity Panama enjoys, which I think will be a surprise to most people:

Just a bit bigger than Ireland, it has more species of birds, amphibians and animals (if insects are included) than the United States and Canada combined, according to George R. Angehr, a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

Biomuseo, Panamá, septiembre 2014. @Fernando AldaAs Biomuseo’s director, Victor Cucalón Imbert, says:

…the most important part of the project is the chance to make them look at life with new eyes.” The week the Biomuseo opened, he said, the World Wildlife Fund announced that since 1970 the world has lost 52 percent of its biodiversity.

“We need to make people fall in love with our environment again, to have new eyes for our surroundings, that we have grown blind to,” he added. “This is urgent.”

InsideBiomuseoThere’s more about all of this in the article, which I hope you will read. And more about the inside than the outside.

There’s also a six-slide show, which I also hope you’ll take a minute to view. I’ve posted different photos here, btw.

Photo Credits: @Fernando Alda (top two), ©Victoria Murillo/Istmophoto.com (bottom), all courtesy of Biomuseo

Neuberger Museum Changes Directors–Fast

When Paola Morsiani  became director of the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College in summer 2012, she told The New York Times, referencing the 2010 death of Roy Neuberger: “The principal visionary originator of this institution has passed the baton on to us. On one side, we will continue his legacy, but it is my role to find the courage to initiate new ideas based on new needs.”

Paola MorsianiIt looks as if she could not find the right way to change, at least in the eyes of the Neuberger’s trustees. Today, after I inquired about rumors that she had been dismissed, I was told that she is being replaced by Tracy Fitzpatrick, Chief Curator of the museum, on Nov. 1.

Morsiani, “at the request of the Purchase College Provost, is now working to develop key strategic initiatives involving the museum’s external partners in New York City and Albany,” the museum said in a press release emailed to me.

Morisiani had been curator of contemporary art at the Cleveland Museum of Art before taking the Neuberger job; she was also a 2008 fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, which trains curators to take on larger roles (hopefully, becoming directors).

In a feature for LoHud website of The Journal News in May, she said that the Neuberger, which completed a $10 million renovation in May 2013, was “doubling down on its commitment to living artists, including multimedia work,” the paper said, and quoted her as saying: “I’d like for us to become a little more experimental and engage a younger generation,” she says.
 I had heard that whatever she was doing did not please the trustees, and that their relationship with her was not good. Of course, rumors don’t always capture the whole truth.
Here is the Neuberger press release.
Photo Credit: Frank Becerra Jr./The Journal News

A Very Ambitious, Private, New Museum For Miami

Get ready for another real estate deal museum, this one in Miami. Somewhere on Biscayne Boulevard, art collector Gary Nader plans to build a museum for Latin American art. It doesn’t yet have a site, but it has a design by Mexican architect Fernando Romero, a collection (600 modern and contemporary pieces Nader owns), and an exhibition program:

The first year of programming will feature a retrospective of works by Fernando Botero and a Brazilian art exhibit, along with individual shows of works by Latin American masters Roberto Matta, Wifredo Lam, Frida Kahlo and her husband, Diego Rivera.

That’s according to an article published about a week ago in the Miami Herald: Miami Art Collector Unveils Plans for Latin American Art Museum.

I wish Nader well, but wonder about a few assumptions. For example, the cost of the “90,000-square-foot museum, expected to open in early 2016,” was given as “about $50 million.” That seems somewhat optimistic to me, as does the timing. Nader is still assessing three sites. Getting all the paperwork and construction work done in a little over a year? Well, it wouldn’t happen in a lot of big cities, that’s for sure.

NaderMuseumRenderingAnd btw, there’s another complication: Nader told the Miami Herald he’s still talking to three potential development partners. (He owns a gallery in Wynwood.)

Nader has taken the route that the Museum for African Art in New York, now called  The Africa Center, tried (among others): he plans to pair the museum with condominiums in a $300 residential tower. The units, perhaps 300 in all, will go for $2 million to $20 million. If they can subsidize the museum, great!

Fernando Romero is, as you’ll recall, the son-in-law of multi-billionaire Carlos Slim, for whom he designed the Soumaya Museum–which when it opened in 2011 was set to be an anchor for a development intended to include offices, apartments and shops. I’m not sure what happened to that.

Romero, who apprenticed with Rem Koolhas, made an interesting exterior statement with the irregular, sloping, lopsided Soumaya. But it got mixed reviews as a museum. His idea for Nader’s museum is at left.

If you are going to Art Basel Miami Beach this year, you can get a look:

During Art Basel and through January, Nader will display the rendering and a model of the museum at his gallery, 62 NE 27th St. Guests can also see a preview of some of the Latin American art in Nader’s collection on the second floor of his gallery until the museum opens in 2016.

Please report back!

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Gary Nader via the Miami Herald

Once More Into the Storerooms >> Discoveries!

1016728-1-669x1024Now it’s the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh’s turn to find fantastic art works in its storerooms, as many other museums have done. Among the newly discovered pieces: a hand-painted enamel bowl with roundels of butterflies from the Yongzheng period, a “bizarre googly-eyed dragon bowl” and cinnabar lacquer panel (below right) from the Qianlong period, a ritual bronze from the Western Zhou period, a Gupta period Buddha head (at left), a gilded bronze Thai Buddha head and a Bamana Boli figure.

Many are going into a reinstallation of the Carnegie’s “Art before 1300” galleries, which will open next year. The museum says it discovered strengths, like Chinese ceramics, Buddhist and Hindu sculpture from South and Southeast Asia and African masks, that it didn’t know it had.

1019076-1024x689The Carnegie does not have a dedicated curator for either its Asian or African collections.

So, in this case, “As part of an ongoing effort to strengthen visitor engagement with the museum’s permanent collection,” it hired outside consultants to review its collections: Philip Hu for the Asian works and Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers for the African collection, which is quite small. The museum also, of course, contacted curators at other museums, who–as is practice–“generously shared information and advice,” a spokesman said. The process has been going on for four years.

From the press release issued about these discoveries, I’ve pasted a few images here.

Also, there’s this wonderful Nkisi Nkondi figure, below.

Nkisi

I have just a little sympathy for museums that don’t know what’s in their storeroom–but not always that much. This case is more understandable. And also credit museums for announcing discoveries like these, rather than just putting them out there, as if they knew all along. Transparency on this matter is the way to go.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Art

The Perelman-Gagosian Brawl

You may not be avid readers of the business section of The New York Times, so you may have missed an article in Sunday’s paper headlined The Feud That’s Shaking Gallery Walls. In it, Ron Perelman says, “Art is such a beautiful thing. But it’s been sullied by an ugly business. It needs to be fixed.”

ronald-perelmanDo you find it strange that a man who’s been buying and selling art for a very long time suddenly decides he’s had enough or that he was had? After all, he willingly entered into the transaction he has now gone to court to protest.

Here’s the gist: One day in 2011, Perelman wanted to buy a Cy Twombly painting called Leaving Paphos Ringed With Waves, which happened to hang in Larry Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery. Gagosian told him it would cost $8 million; Perelman offered $6 million. There was no deal. (The two had been doing business together for years; Perelman “had bought or sold nearly 200 works of art through Mr. Gagosian,”  the piece says.)

Perelman still wanted the picture so he went back “with another offer” (undisclosed). Gagosian said it’s no longer available, but that he could get it back for him at $11.5 million. Meantime, the Mugrabi family had bought it for $7.25 million “paying in part with their ownership stake in artwork also co-owned by Mr. Gagosian.”

Perelman Perelman ultimately buys it for $10.5 million. So the Mugrabis made “a quick $2 million profit and Mr. Gagosian a $1 million commission.” (I know the numbers don’t quite add up, but I’m quoting the article, which by the way makes no mention of sales tax, which could have been, no, should have been, substantial.)

Then they both sued: Gagosian said Perelman never paid the $10.5 million, and in part offered art that wasn’t wanted or worth what he had claimed. Perelman said the whole transaction with the Mugrabis was a “sham,” serving only to get more money out of him.

Gagosian has withdrawn his suit, but Perelman has spent some $3 million pressing his.

…his desire to shine a light on the market went far beyond his Twombly purchase….His lawyers have sent subpoenas to some of the biggest players in the business and sent art experts to galleries and dealers and even to visit artists. He subpoenaed members of the Mugrabi family. …He has also submitted subpoenas to the auction houses Sotheby’s and Phillips, according to court filings.

He’s even enlisted a former F.B.I. agent who is well versed in the art business to interview big collectors and dealers, according to two gallery owners. Major artists close to Mr. Gagosian have also been questioned, these gallerists say.

Neither party is sympathetic in this case. But Perelman was no babe in the woods here; he entered into the Twombly transaction of his own free will. One can’t help but think that he is playing some sort of grudge match against Gagosian.

And sadly, the courts have to waste  time on this.

I’m all for more transparency in the art trade, but I don’t think this is the way to get it. Ron Perelman, carrying the torch for other people? Please. When has that ever happened before?

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Forbes