Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Albright-Knox: Making The Case For Expansion

LegerWalkingFlowerMore than one museum has gotten into big trouble by expanding. But I’d bet the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo has a better case than most of them. And last week, the museum said it plans to go ahead with a major expansion.

A little background first: I met Janne Siren, who was hired to replace Louis Grachos as the gallery’s director in January, 2013, on a visit he made to New York last week. I had last visited the museum about three years ago–though I wish I had not missed several of its recent exhibitions. And that streak seems to be continuing. Today was the last day for what looked like an excellent Anselm Kiefer exhibit, and I would very much like to get to Buffalo to see the coming Helen Frankenthaler show, which opens on Nov. 9 (Siren also showed me slides from the contemporaneous Paul Feeley retrospective, whose work I had not been familiar with).

So after a while in the doldrums, the AKG seems to have its exhibition program in gear. (Siren also showed me some recent acquisitions–have a look.)

But Siren reminded me how little of the AKG’s permanent collection is on view–and of the difficulties caused by the building’s design. The AKAG, Siren told me, is the sixth-oldest art museum in the United States. It predates the Met. Having started during the Civil War–and still officially known as Buffalo Fine Arts Academy–it has always focused on contemporary art and is renowned for the paintings acquired by A. Conger Goodyear, an early director, and Seymour H. Knox, Jr., a benefactor responsible for the AKAG’s renowned collection of Modern art (Leger’s Walking Flower and Jackson Pollock’s Convergence, both shown here, came from Knox.

Siren told me that only about 2% to 3% of the museum’s permanent collection, which consists of about 6,740 works of art, can be shown at any one time in its 19,000 sq. fett of exhibition space. At the museum’s annual meeting, last week, where the AKAG said it was going forward with an expansion, the Academy’s chair, Thomas R. Hyde, said, “Campus development is no longer an option; it is a necessity. We are, in many ways, a middleweight museum with a heavyweight collection,” according to The Buffalo News. 

Siren reminded me of another problem: when the AKAG was last expanded, in 1962, it mainly built an auditorium. The long halls around it are used to show art, but they are not idea. Furthermore, many contemporary art works today don’t fit through the museum’s doors.

Here is the museum’s full statement on the expansion.

ConvergenceBack in 2012, under Grachos, the Albright-Knox had hired Snohetta to develop a master plan for growth.

But the question is money. The AKAG made not insubstantial cutbacks during the 2008-09 recession. The Buffalo unemployment rate is a little less than the national average, but average wages are also lower. The city is said to be experiencing something of an economic rival, but as the News said last January, “In a region that has heard more than its share of grand plans over the past quarter century that ended up going nowhere – from a factory outlet mega-mall in Niagara Falls to Bass Pro and the Pataki administration’s plan to create a bioinformatics hub here – seeing is believing.”

That article went on to say that there is now an economic plan, with state investment funds behind it, and “challenges aside, the change is astounding by Buffalo standards, where for the past 60 years, economic growth has pretty much been something that happens someplace else.”

I really hope that message has affected potential donors, inspiring them to open their wallets. If real money is in place, the AKAG collection really does deserve more space.

Photo Credits: © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris (top); © 2010 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (bottom),  both courtesy of the AKG

Another Corcoran Outrage: The Archives

If you thought everything about the future of the Corcoran Art Gallery was parsed and settled, much to the dismay of its students, faculty, curators and various formers in all three categories, think again. There’s another outrage.

Grieving Canova lion by David MordiniThe Corcoran’s archives, which relate its entire 145-year history, are slated to be broken up.

Any archivist will tell you that, more important than the possibly wonderful individual items, it’s the whole of an archive that matters most to the historical record.

Indeed, the Corcoran archives contain “all institutional records, meeting notes, photographs, exhibition files, gallery publications and catalogues, architectural records, press clippings and scrapbooks, the journal of the gallery’s first curator William MacLeod, 1876-1886, records of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art 1962-1968, and records for art works,” according to Linda Crocker Simmons, curator emerita of the Corcoran. She established these archives in 1980 with the assistance of grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

Though the issue of the archives was discussed during the breakup of the Corcoran, it hasn’t had much, if any, public exposure until I raised it yesterday with Carolyn Campbell, a former PR and Events Director of the Corcoran. “Excellent question,” she wrote me back, and told me of the breakup plan.

Known as “art related materials” in the agreement, the pact says that any papers related to art works would go with those works as they are distributed. to the National Gallery of Art or beyond, to other museums. The remainder of the items, it said, would be the turned over to an executive group of some of the new, non-profit Corcoran’s board and trustees of the NGA.

Here is the court pact.

Simmons and Campbell add, rightly:

Taken as a whole the records provide a unique picture of how private museums have operated from the 19th century to modern times. Because of the growing interest in American art history and cultural history, the Corcoran Archives was begun as a service to humanities scholars and other interested parties. Ironically, a filmmaker making a documentary on the history of Washington, DC’s art scene recently asked on the “In Memory of the Corcoran” Facebook page where they could find some documentation – since there are no more Archives, she and others like her no longer have it as a resource.

I heard another rumor, unsubstantiated at the moment, that the archives were being weeded out. By whom? Don’t know. Still, in probable good news, Marisa Bourgoin, who was the last Corcoran Archivist and now works at the Archives of American Art, is consulting on the division and distribution of records.

Simmons and Campbell believe that at the very least be digitally copied before being broken up. That could  be expensive. Perhaps they should stay together, given to the Archives of American Art, with the papers related to individual works of art copied for the new owners. (Or, Campbell suggests, to the George Washington University Gelman Library).

Photo Credit: A grieving Canova lion, outside the Corcoran, by David Mordini 

Art First: A New Start in Cincinnati

CKitchinI’ve never met Cameron Kitchin, who began his job as director of the Cincinnati Art Museum today. He is making an interesting start: today, in the museum’s Great Hall, he met the public from 4 to 6 p.m., over light appetizers and a cash bar. Presumably, he walked the museum and met staff earlier in the day. Those are the right gestures to make.

Kitchin, you’ll recall, isn’t a first-time director (He came from the director’s post at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, and has other interesting experience, which you can read about here), and it shows. His meet-and-greet, inside and outside the museum, is especially important because the Cincinnati museum was roiled by its last director.

There’s another reason I am hopeful about him, and it came in a piece by him that the Cincinnati Enquirer published on Sunday. The headline was not particularly promising: New director sees you at museum’s center. But it was not quite on target, thankfully–he said the beneficiary of museum activities was you, the public, and that’s different. Here is more (boldface mine) from his article:

Among the traditional fundamental responsibilities of an art museum, collecting and preserving the community’s cultural heritage is most certainly at the forefront; the 60,000 objects in CAM’s collection make it one of our nation’s most important museum collections. This work will continue with vigor and energy. As we look forward, the work of the art museum has grown in exciting ways, always mindful of our practice, scholarship and purpose. We now have the opportunity and call to integrate more deeply the strength of our collection, exhibitions, staff and the sublime power of great art with the city’s advancement and well-being.

Art first, in other words. And he sees the purpose of the museum as bringing people and art together, which is in fact in the mission statement (or used to be, I think–I can’t find it on the website), and that’s fine. He didn’t say bringing people to the museum, or making the museum serve the community, or any of those other popular mantras. Those goals are fine, but they be predicated on art at the center of initiatives, as the driver of attendance, education, conservation, etc.

So I’m hopeful about Cincinnati. No more, I hope, shows about things like wedding dresses. Or at least a preponderance of more serious, more art-centered scholarly exhibits.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Cincinnati Art Museum

“Sculpture Victorious,” Yes, But In What Way?

DameAliceI was recently at the Yale Center for British Art, where Sculpture Victorious: Art in the Age of Invention, 1837-1901, is on view through Nov. 30. It’s a fascinating exhibition in many respects, bringing together a very diverse assemblage of objects from a very diverse group of lenders.

Looking at one piece, an idealized, imaginary portrait of the first earl of Winchester borrowed from the House of Lords, Michael Hatt, an art history professor at the University of Warwick who is one of three curators of the show, said to me: “It is a mix of history and fantasy, as almost everything in this exhibition is.”

In fact, a few sculptures–defined for this show quite broadly (to include medals and coins, for example) are so quirky they could almost be called follies. (See, for example, “A Royal Game,” an imaginary game of chess between Elizabeth I and Phillip II of Spain, by William Reynolds-Stephens from the collection of Tate Britain.)

But the point of this exhibit, as I write in a review published in today’s Wall Street Journal, was that these artworks served the British empire:

Co-organized by Tate Britain, “Sculpture Victorious” demonstrates how the British used sculpture—as public monuments, in public institutions, at exhibitions like those in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, and in coins, medals and other popular reproductions—to proclaim their political power and industrial prowess.

And so Sculpture Victorious is less about art and more about history, invention and craft.

That does not mean, however, that some of these pieces aren’t fascinating to look at. In fact, the exhibition serves as a reminder that exhibitions can, and often do, have more than one function.

That’s Dame Alice Owen (detail), 1897, by George Frampton, above.

Photo Credit: Courtesy, YCBA

My Verdict On The Met’s New Fountains

I’ve been hearing a lot of complaints about the new fountains at the Metropolitan Museum of Art*; sadly, most are about their funding–with money from conservative David Koch, whose name, naturally (if belately) enough, is on them.

MetFountainsI wish that was the real problem, because that can be batted away as foolish talk. Who cares who paid for them? Koch is a Met trustee. If there was a mistake here, it was the museum’s promise at the outset that the plaza was not going to be named.

But the real problem is that the fountains are ungainly, at best.

I reached that conclusion after two visits, the second only reaffirming my initial impressions.

  • For a start, they are out-of-proportion–too big for the space they occupy.
  • Second, they are misplaced–too close to the steps and too close to the street. The should have been smaller and set back a bit further, closer to the museum building.
  • Third, their minimalist style clashes with the architecture of the Met. I wasn’t expecting a Trevi fountain, but couldn’t they have nodded somehow to the Met’s Beaux-Arts facade?
  • Fourth, the water spouts are underwhelming, even pedestrian. There’s no grandeur and they aren’t entertaining either. They were supposed to dance, in a “variety of water patterns,” but that doesn’t seem to have materialized; if it has, the patterns are fairly indistinct.

Met director Tom Campbell, announcing the project in early 2012, said the project would produce “majestic” plazas. That, they certainly are not. And we are stuck with them for decades.

How could this have happened?

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met