Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

A Museum Merger That Seems Sensible

From time to time, especially in times of economic uncertainty, the word “merger” gets bandied about as as solution to museum problems. In reality, art museum mergers are rare. I think (though I don’t have statistics on that). And they probably should be rare. But sometimes they make sense, and I was pleased recently to read of a merger that does.

Demuth_museumLast Tuesday, the Lancaster Museum of Art in Pennsylvania, which has a local-artist focus, and the Demuth Museum, dedicated to Charles Demuth (a native son) and also in Lancaster, said they are merging. The two locations will remain, but they will become “one museum with one mission.” The two have worked on this for two years, they say, which bodes well–even if it’s necessary ecomonically, it’s not a shotgun marriage. And it involved pre-announcement due diligence and discussion. Lancaster’s mayor, Rick Gray, and Sam Bressi, the president and CEO of the Lancaster County Community Foundation, were there at the announcement, showing local support.

Anne M. Lampe, currently the Demuth’s director, will become the executive director and chief curator of both museums.

I’ve been only to the Demuth, not the Lancaster, but from afar this union makes sense economically–there should be a fair bit of savings in administrative costs.  They may sometimes collaborate on exhibitions, but they intend to remain separate identities and curatorial programs.

Both are small places–the Demuth’s annual budget is $500,000, while the Lancaster’s is $750,000, according to local news reports.  Do they need separate adminstrations? Doubtful. Should they waste effort competing for donors? No. Can there be synergy between educational and outreach programs? I think so. Joint ticketing? I hope so.

Here’s more in the press release and in last week’s article on LancasterOnline.

 

Mission Accomplished: Another Delaware Deaccessioning

calder.black.crescentYesterday, the Delaware Museum of Art said it would retire the debt it acquired imprudently (my word), for an expansion, by the end of this month.

In part, that’s because it succeeded in deaccessioning its second work of art, Calder’s Black Crescent (at right), which it sold privately. The museum did not disclose the purchase price or the purchaser, but the Wilmington News Journal estimated the take at $10.6 million “based on the auction results and [Board chair Gerrit] Copeland’s estimate of the investment fund withdrawal.”

The paper added:

As for the third work selected for sale – Winslow Homer’s “Milking Time” (1875) – the museum is holding off for now after rejecting several low bids, Copeland said.

“Basically, there’s no interest in Homers,” he added.

Huh? American art, including Homer, has obviously not seen the large leaps that contemporary art has, but there’s a market for Homer.

Just to cite one quick example, a far less interesting painting called Peach Blossoms sold at Sotheby’s in 2010 for nearly $2.9 million. Milking Time is a much better picture.

It makes one wonder whether the officials running this museum are competent. Why would they sell a Homer if there’s no interest in his works?

The same could be said for its first sale, William Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil, which fetched £2.5 million, hammer price, against a £5 million to £8 million presale estimate. 

When they do retire the debt, and recruit a new director, I hope they also repair the governance of this museum.

A Question to Nobelist Kandel Reveals A Big Gap At the Met

Last week, I was honored to sit opposite Nobel-prize winner/neuropsychiatrist Eric Kandel at a small dinner. Kandel, seeking to understand how memory works, figured it out by studying its physiological basis in the cells of sea slugs. For that, he won the Nobel in 2000. More recently, he has turned some of his attention to art. In 2012, he published The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present.

Munter_BlueMountainKandel and his wife, Denise, go to museums a lot. “I would say art is our greatest passion,” he told Science Friday in 2013.

So I asked him, to make conversation, which department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art* he would go to first if he had just one hour and could go to only one. His answer surprised me. He wouldn’t go to the Met, he said, because his favorite kind of art is German and Austrian Expressionism. So he would go to the Neue Galerie, he said.

Ouch. I was reminded of that conversation today when I received a press release from Everard Auctions in Savannah. In a sale now on the internet though Oct. 7 are two paintings by Gabriele Munter (1877-1962), whose work I like (the best trove I’ve seen is at the Milwaukee Art Museum). Now, the two up for sale at Everhard probably are not museum-quality (Der Blaue Berg (The Blue Mountain) [top], from 1908, is estimated at $200,000-300,000, while Im Uhrmacherladen (The Watchmaker’s Shop) [below], from 1916, has a presale estimate of $100,000-150,000), and I am not suggesting that the Met run out and buy them. But the release sent me to the Met collections database to see if Kandel could have gone to the best, even for a less-rich experience. 

Here is a sampling of what I found:

  • Munter: 0
  • Franz Marc: 0
  • Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: 5 works on paper, none major
  • August Macke: 2 works on paper
  • Wassily Kandinsky: 1 work on paper
  • Gustav Klimt: 2 paintings (yeah!) and more than a dozen works on paper or textiles
  • Egon Schiele: some 3 dozen works on paper (none major?); no paintings
  • Alexej von Jawlensky: 3 works on paper
  • Max Pechstein: 8 works on paper, none major
  • Oskar Kokoschka: more than 3 dozen drawings, lithos, etc., none major 
  • Otto Dix: 14 works on paper, one painting (not on view)
  • Max Beckmann: about 4 dozen drawings, two paintings, one on view

I suppose the message here is a simple one: even the glorious Met has big gaps, and Austrian and German art is one of them. Perhaps I/we knew this intuitively, but a tally makes it really clear.Munter-Watchmaker

Should it actively acquire in this area, when it already has so many riches, or leave it to the Neue Galerie? I think the former; there’s no gallery for this work and that’s a shame. But then again, like Kandel, I’d call this area is a favorite.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Everard Auctions

* I consult to a foundation that supports the Met

ArtPrize Matures: The People Vs. Experts

In its sixth incarnation, ArtPrize–the open competition in which the public chooses the winners–is trying a new tack. Not only will experts also weigh in separately–as they have in the past–but also their choice will receive a grand award prize of equal size, $200,000, the same as the public. This is good, more about which in a minute.

This year, ArtPrize has 1,536 artist entries, drawn from “51 countries and 42 U.S. states and territories, exhibiting work in 174 public venues throughout the city.”  (That’s down a bit from last year, which had 1,805 artists, coming from 47 countries and 45 states and territories and showing at 168 spaces.) The competition, for $560,000 in prize money, is open to any artist, and anyone who visit Grand Rapids to see the art may vote.  

031000-000003.LI first wrote about ArtPrize in April, 2009, when hardly anyone at the national level was paying any attention. I stopped, moving on to other things or covering it only sporadically, when it got much more attention, possibly too much. The prize size had a lot to do with that, at first. Later, when the expert jury was added, the fact that “the people” had very different views about art than the jury of experts caught attention (and sometimes flack).

So this year is another departure. ArtPrize opens tomorrow, with 19 days of voting to come, and a new “voting structure.” According to the release,

For the sixth edition, winners of the Grand Prizes for the Public Vote Award, decided by ArtPrize visitors, and the Juried Award, chosen by a panel of judges, will receive equal prize amounts, increased this year to $200,000 each. In addition to the Grand Prize awards, artists can also win in 4 categories: 2-D, 3-D, Time-based and Installation. The category winners are also selected in dual juried and public votes, with winners receiving $20,000 respectively for each category. A 5th category award will also be given to a curator for Outstanding Venue, decided by jury. In making the cash prizes equal across each category for winners of the public vote and juried vote, ArtPrize hopes to amplify and expand the conversation about the differences and similarities in the public’s and experts’ opinions.

It’s that last sentence that, I think, makes this a good move. In a way, a similar dynamic–though with experts alone doing the choosing–is playing out at Crystal Bridges Museum, where State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now has focused attention on artists outside the usual art-world centers like New York, LA and Chicago (though they were not excluded). So far, I’ve seen just two reviews (though there may be some local ones), which is disappointing.

But back to ArtPrize: As regular readers know, I am not a fan of crowdsourcing the choices of what to hang in an exhibition.  But I do think it has some validity when it is done side-by-side with experts, as when the Walter Art Center in Minneapolis did so with an exhibit called 50/50: Audience and Experts Curate the Collection. That was December, 2010.

We’ve come a long way since.

Last year’s ArtPrize winner, shown above, was Sleeping Bear Dune Lakeshore, by Ann Loveless, a quilt depicting a Lake Michigan scene.

You can see the members of the jury for 2014 ArtPrize and the voting schedule here.

What’s It All About, Jean Nouvel? A Pace-Setting Museum?

Of course he wants it to be one: he’s an architect. But the project announced by Jean Nouvel last week, plans for a National Art Museum of China, won’t just be innovative in design; it seems–from the announcement and resulting press coverage–that the Chinese, with Nouvel’s help, will be out to establish new practices in museums, or at least to confirm what other museums have been trying, as standards.

NouvelNAMOCNAMOC, as it has been dubbed, seems to be aiming for upending the museum world a bit. Aside from gallery spaces, a research and education center, an auditorium, NAMOC will have many public spaces plus an interior garden. All told, it will be 1.4 million square feet. By comparison, the Louvre has 652,300 square feet; the Metropolitan Museum of Art has 2 million square feet. NAMOC’s collection will extend from the Ming era in the 14th century to the present, and it seems they will be mixed together.

From the Nouvel press release (a bit jargon-y, but I wouldn’t dare “translate”):

…The museums should become lively places, resonating with invention where exhibits prove that sensations and emotions triggered by art are amplified by time, by the complicit juxtaposition of works from various times, and all the eras of invention. The most sincere inventors of our time must absolutely find in these moments a place for expression. It is our responsibility to invite the creators into a place where they can dream, in which they can be recognized, and offer the artists the means to express themselves better than ever, to reveal themselves more clearly and intensely than anywhere else.

The NAMOC represents an incredible opportunity for the most ambitious materialization of a place for expression, of communication and attraction, a place that witnesses the vitality of a civilization, the civilization of the greatest people on earth. Our proposal is the result of one year of catalysis, of immersions, of dialogs and explorations to translate, synthetize, symbolize and materialize the spirit of the Chinese civilization… our goal is to protect the miracles created with ink throughout the centuries, to reveal the force of a living art… to welcome the artist of tomorrow. The museum is a milestone that now establishes architecture as a civilizational medium, as the memorial symbiosis of nature and human expression. These exceptional conditions are able to elicit this rising attitude, this symbiotic response, and goes beyond being just a traditional competition of established styles. Today, the role of architecture is to catalyze, to precipitate the spirit of a situation should it be individual, plural or civilizational.

 A few pictures might help; from them, it seems somewhat attractive. I like the perforated facade, and the internal garden, especially in fall–as shown above. 

Here is a longitudinal.

Longitudinal

The Summer  Hall, with its gold ceiling:

SummerHall

The Grand Terrace:

GrandTerrace

 

Notice anything odd? I did. Why no pictures of the galleries? Where the, um, art goes. There wasn’t a one in the press release. It seems, alas, that this is another example of a starchitect museum that will be far more about the building than about the art inside.

The Beijing Institute of Architectural Design is collaborating with Nouvel on this 21st Century museum; neither a cost nor a timeline for completion was disclosed. 

Photo Credits: © Ateliers Jean Nouvel