September 28, 2007 2:56
Elton John and the Picture Police
Police in the British town of Gateshead have given the British press a gift of great value — a chance to put the words "Sir Elton John" and "child porn" into the same headline. Don't get excited, no one is carting away Elton's home computers. A gallery in Gateshead, called the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, is the latest stop on a tour of photographs by Nan Goldin that are owned by Elton. One of the pictures, Klara and Edda Belly-dancing, has caused a problem with the law. The Times of London on line describes it this way:
[It] shows two young girls playing together in front of a kitchen sink. One is skimpily dressed, the other is naked and lies beneath her, knees bent and legs splayed towards the camera.
It appears that officials of the gallery, concerned that the image might violate child pornography laws, called in police as a pre-emptive measure to take away the picture and make a determination.
So here we go again.
Nan Goldin is one of the best known living American photographers. If this matter ever does come to a courtroom, there will be no difficulty finding artworld professionals happy to make that plain. I've occasionally found her work to be a bit listless. And she doesn't hesitate to include sexually explicit images in the mix of what she does. (This is after all a woman who has a picture titled Bobby Masturbating.) But she's a serious and influential artist. She's not a pornographer. She's a documentary photographer who mostly documents her own life. She photographs herself and the people around her in their natural habitats.
And Elton John is well known as a serious photography collector. If anything, the sampling of his collection that I reviewed seven years ago at the Atlanta High Museum was a bit tame and conventional. (And while we're at it, you may have heard that girls are not really his thing.) The picture that has been causing a fuss in Britain is part of a large suite of Goldins that he purchased as a group from London's White Cube Gallery. I've seen it described in one British paper as part of his "private collection", which makes it sound like he keeps it hidden in a drawer. It's been exhibited repeatedly and, until now, without incident.
There is such a thing as child pornography. It's produced by a criminal industry and distributed on line. The police should go looking for it there. What they're after they won't find on gallery walls.
September 27, 2007 4:01
The Minnesota Twins
One of the big questions in the museum world in recent months was where would Kathy Halbreich go after announcing last March that she would step down as director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Now we know and it's a big next step — into the newly created position of associate director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
(This comes just a few months after William Griswold left his job as director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to become head of the Morgan Library & Museum, also in Manhattan. Look soon for Garrison Keillor to take over at the Met and Jesse "the Body" Ventura at the Guggenheim.)
The Halbreich hire is fascinating, because she brings her peerless credentials as a guide to new art to MoMA, a place that does incomparable historical surveys and late-career retrospectives — next up, Martin Puryear — but hasn't offered the shock of the new in a very long time.
Over the past several years I've chosen the artists and architects for the annual Time 100 issue devoted to the most influential people in the world. (Are they really the most influential? Hey, it's just a list. Go make your own.) The choices reflect my own enthusiasms but also a good faith attempt on my part to identify people whose work has resonated widely with other artists. For the last two years the artists I chose — Kiki Smith and Kara Walker — just happen to have been people who were also getting the big mid-career retrospective treatment from Halbreich's museum in the same year. Likewise a few years ago when I picked Bruce Nauman. His big retrospective ten years earlier had been organized by Halbreich herself.
Granted, Smith, Walker and Nauman are all sizeable names. You don't need Halbreich to find your way to them now. But her real importance has been in tracking down talent when it's still emerging. And according to today's New York Times story on her hire, she also plans to comb through MoMA's permanent collection. "I have a feeling," she told the Times. "There is more breadth there than we have seen.” Translation: the story of Modernism that MoMA has safeguarded for decades is not the only one.
The next sound you hear will be the tectonic plates of art history shifting.
September 26, 2007 4:13
More on Mass MoCA: Joe Thompson Speaks
After my post this morning about the Christoph Buchel imbroglio, Joe Thompson, the director of Mass MoCA, sent me an e-mail with a defense of his museum's actions. Thompson also wants to make clear that he does not agree with claims made by Buchel's lawyer Donn Zaretsky that the judge's ruling in the case amounts to a finding that the Visual Artists Rights Act does not protect unfinished works. Mass MoCA has taken something of a beating in recent weeks, so the e-mail is worth reproducing in full:
You should know that many of the characterizations of Judge Ponsor’s rulings – especially those being bandied about on attorney Zaretsky’s blog – are, in our view, just plain wrong. Like Zaretsky, I was in the court, but I took notes. The court most certainly did not rule that VARA (the Visual Artists Rights Act) does not apply to unfinished work. Nor, I hasten to add, did we ever argue that VARA does not apply to unfinished work. (Indeed, our counsel expressly pointed out to the court at the hearing that VARA does indeed apply to unfinished work, and that we had never disputed that.) To say the least, it’s frustrating to us to see it suggested otherwise.
What we did argue is that VARA does not prohibit all display of unfinished works of visual art, simply because they are unfinished. This makes common sense: unfinished art is frequently displayed.
The judge ruled that the Copyright Act and VARA did not bar the museum from displaying the materials in our gallery in the manner we proposed, i.e., with a notice making clear that the viewer was not seeing a finished work. The judge went further and suggested that there was almost no value to this case in determining precedent in future VARA cases because the ruling depended on facts that were in the record before him regarding the specific working arrangements between MASS MoCA and the artist. (I don't want to put words in the judge's mouth here — he indicated that he intends to issue a written opinion in the next couple weeks, and you should look to that when it comes out.)
In my view, about the only lesson one could draw from the judge’s narrow and carefully articulated ruling was that if you are an artist who agrees to undertake a complex project like this, and you take advantage of considerable human and financial resources from an institution helping you realize your intentions, and then you up and abandon that project mid-stream, leaving behind materials in a public institution, then there are consequences of that act.
In other words artists do have rights, but so to do the people and institutions who support them in their work. And if both artists and museums have rights, then they also have shared responsibilities. It’s actually quite simple. We were pleased that the judge declared that decisions regarding the ultimate fate of materials abandoned in our midst were up to the curatorial discretion of the museum. Having been granted that right, we tried to exercise it with the same standard of care evidenced when we preserved those materials in our gallery pending the court’s ruling (rather than taking some sort of unilateral action to display or dispose of them), and when we shielded them from public access and view during that same period.
Back to me:
Two points — First, Thompson is right that the question of just how Judge Ponsor applied VARA can only be answered when we see the judge's ruling, not just the reports about it. (Which is why I hedged my words in my post this morning. "It appears..." and "If so...." etc.) We'll be keeping an eye out for it.
For the second point, let's revisit a line in Thompson's final paragraph.
"We were pleased that the judge declared that decisions regarding the ultimate fate of materials abandoned in our midst were up to the curatorial discretion of the museum."
Where Mass MoCA went wrong is precisely in the matter of curatorial discretion. However you judge the question of whether VARA covers unfinished work, Mass MoCA would have better served the art community — and its own interests and reputation — if it had simply and unambiguously dismantled Buchel's uncompleted installation. Regardless of whether it had the right under law to display it in an unfinished state, the museum should have resisted the temptation.
September 26, 2007 7:18
Mass MoCA: Clean Sweep
Just a few days after a judge said that Mass MoCA could show Christoph Buchel's disputed installation in an unfinished state, the museum has decided simply to clean the thing out altogether. Geoff Edgers has the story at The Boston Globe. Over at the museum's website, Mass MoCA Director Joseph Thompson expresses his desire to move on and "to return to our core mission to serve as a experimental platform for art-making. " Next up: a Jenny Holzer installation, Projections, set to open Nov. 17.
But not so fast. On his art law blog, Donn Zaretsky, who was one of Buchel's attorneys, points out the enduring legal residue of this case. It appears to have created a court precedent that the Visual Artists Rights Act does not apply to unfinished work. If so, this is not a happy development. Artists have few enough protections under U.S. law. If the Buchel-Mass MoCA spat narrows the scope of VARA, then one of the most important legal safeguards they do enjoy will end up as collateral damage in this fight.
Does Jenny Holzer still do those "Truisms"? Let me suggest one for her Mass MoCA installation. "Even Well Meaning Institutions Can Sometimes Screw Up Big Time."
September 25, 2007 2:16
Marion True: It's Official
The Associated Press is reporting that, as expected, right after the Getty Museum signed its deal with Italy promising to return 40 contested antiquities, the Italians dropped their civil case against the former Getty Curator Marion True. But, say the Italians, for now the separate criminal case against True will still be going forward. For now.
Could the disposition of that case depend on whether the Getty gives in to Italian demands for the return of the last disputed artifact, the Getty Bronze? Just wondering.
September 25, 2007 7:02
Van Gogh's Letters
Sketch by van Gogh in a letter to Émile Bernard, March 1888, Thaw Collection, The Pierpont Morgan Library.
As anyone knows who has ever dipped into Van Gogh's correspondence with his brother Theo, his letters aren't just art historical documents. He talks into your ear. Each of the letters are little gems of lyrical, intimate and philosophical writing. Warm and supremely lucid, full of fine description and close attention to his own creative process, they're proof it wasn't his madness that made Van Gogh a great artist. It was his sanity. The L.A. poet Charles Bukowski had a nice line:
"Van Gogh, of course, was never insane. He simply realized the world was elsewhere."
About 800 of Van Gogh's letters survive. Of those, 22 were written to the painter Emile Bernard, who was fifteen years younger. They cover a period of roughly two years between December 1887, a few months before Van Gogh departed for Arles in the vain hope of forming a collective paradise with a few like minded painters, and November 1889, eight months before he took his own life. I've spent some time lately reading a collection of Van Gogh's half of their correspondence, Vincent Van Gogh: Painted with Words. (Bernard's half, his letters to Van Gogh, have not survived.) This morning I'm headed out to a preview of a show opening this Friday at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan that, like the book, combines the letters with drawings and paintings from the same years.
In the letters Van Gogh talks to Bernard about religion, the cost of living, weather, sex. (They had a shared interest in brothels.) But the main conversation is about art, about where it is that art must go next. Like Van Gogh and Gauguin, Bernard was searching for a way to restore to painting the weight and stability he felt the Impressionists had robbed it of. The same problem had impelled Seurat towards pointillism, a solution that Bernard rejected. Instead he had moved into what would eventually be called cloisonnism, building his pictures out of sturdy compartments of color partitioned within heavy outlines that were the antithesis of the Impressionists' feathery modeling. Van Gogh's art would be described with the same term, and largely by way of him cloisonnism would later become fundamental to the Modernist reconstruction of the painted surface.
The letters are full of that warmth that is everywhere in Van Gogh's correspondence. At one point he's advising Bernard not to intensify a spat with the pointilliste Paul Signac, but to take stock — "reflection making us see in ourselves, when there's a falling out, as many faults on our own side as in our adversary..." (You hear the voice here of the man who had tried for a while to preach the Gospels.) Van Gogh had a dream that, whatever their different directions as artists, painters should support one another. "Instead of getting at each others' throats, painters would be happier and anyway less ridiculous, less foolish and less guilty." Meanwhile, he tells Bernard, "we're sailing on the high seas in our small and wretched boats, isolated on the great waves of our time."
The correspondence is mostly friendly. (I love Van Gogh's chracteristic sign off: "Handshake in thought.") But his last letter to Bernard was a denunciation of his friend's latest religious paintings, which Van Gogh disapproved of because he saw them as creations of Bernard's imagination, things that had no roots in observed nature. He feared that Bernard was drifting into a world of pure invention. It's ironic that after his death Van Gogh would be thought of as the model of the artist who substituted his personal vision for the world as he found it. Nothing could be less true. As these letters remind you again and again, at the end of the day Van Gogh was Dutch. No less than Rembrandt or Vermeer — or better, painters of the countryside like Albert Cuyp or Paulus Potter — he had a Dutch painter's allegiance to the plain facts of the physical world, to whatever was actually before him, to the cows and the thatch and the mud. For all his starry nights, Van Gogh was the artist who painted his own beat up shoes.
All the same, I probably wasn't the first reader to come across that final letter to Bernard and wonder whether, because it was written at a time when Vincent felt his sanity slipping away, he might not have been insisting all the more on the importance of staying connected to reality. His own world really was moving "elsewhere."
September 24, 2007 5:45
Mass MoCA Gets to Spank Christoph Buchel
The big news over the weekend is that the federal court judge who heard the case of Christoph Buchel's complaint against Mass MoCA has sided with the museum. As you'll remember, Mass MOCA first commissioned a sprawling installation project by Buchel, then cancelled it when costs ran out of bounds. But the museum still wanted to display the unfinished work. Buchel went to a federal district court in Springfield, Mass., seeking an injuction against Mass MoCA, contending that to show his incomplete project against his will would be a violation of the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act.
On Friday the judge sided with MoCA, ruling that the Act does not cover unfinished works. John Dyer of the Boston Globe has details. One of Buchel's lawyers, Donn Zaretsky, has comments on his own ever useful Art Law Blog.
I've been sympathetic with Mass MoCA over the budget problems it faced as Buchel's requirements for his massive installation ballooned. But as I said in July, the museum's decision to display his work in unifinished state, against his will, "has always struck me as not so much a reasonable curatorial judgment call as an institutional temper tantrum."
Nothing about Judge Michael A. Ponsor's decision has changed that for me. I find it strange that Ponsor could conclude that showing a half finished work wouldn't harm the artists's reputation. That might be true of Michelangelo's Dying Slave or the fragmentary version of Manet's Execution of the Emperor Maximilian that you can see at the National Gallery in London. But that's because we all have in our minds a pretty full picture of Manet's or Michelangelo's entire output as artists. Buchel is Swiss, and the MoCA installation would have been his first major work in the U.S.
Hard as it might have been for MoCA to just suck it up and move on, that's what they should have done. That, and made sure that when they commission works in the future, their contracts with the artists lay out cost parameters in nice, bright detail.
September 21, 2007 8:01
French Connections 2
One last thing from that lunch two days ago with Henri Loyrette, the director of the Louvre. He mentioned that his museum has recently purchased a canvas by Benjamin West, Phaeton asking Apollo permission to drive the Chariot of the Sun, from about 1804. This will bring to a grand total of four the number of American pictures in the museum's vast collection. "One by Thomas Cole," Loyrette told me. "The other two by unknowns."
I'm not even sure that West, who was born in Pennsylvania but spent most of his career in Britain, entirely counts as an American. And as a mythological scene, his painting isn't exactly typical of what Americans brought to painting in the 19th century. Across the river at the Musee d'Orsay, where Loyrette was once director, they do have an Eakins, a Homer and a half dozen Sargents — to say nothing of this girl. But even at the d'Orsay there's no Bierstadt, Peto, Bingham, Church or Remington, or at least none that I could find in the directory of the d'Orsay collections.
You have to wonder what difference it might have made to French painting in the 19th century, which was on a quest in so many directions, if the French had known more about the high rhetoric of American nature painting in Church and Bierstadt, or the blunt light in Homer. As for 18th century Americans, Copley, Stuart and the various Peales, same problem — nowhere to be found at the Louvre. And now, says Loyrette — who would like to do more to correct the balance — it’s rare when good examples come on the market. And when they do, no surprise, it’s for phenomenal prices.
September 20, 2007 9:18
French Connections
I made it over to a press luncheon yesterday for Henri Loyrette, the director of the Louvre, who was in New York to talk about his museum's expansion projects in France and the U.S. (Abu Dhabi he wasn't talking about much.) Those projects include the ongoing arrangement with the Atlanta High Museum. What the High is getting principally is a series of loan shows from Paris that will extend into 2009. For the first of them last fall the centerpieces were two landmarks of Western painting, Raphael's Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione and Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego. The next one, which opens October 16, is built around Egyptian, Greek and Roman objects including a first century Roman marble, The Tiber, a ten-foot long representation of a river god.
What the Louvre got in return from the High was a fee of 5.5 million euros for the restoration of its 18th century French decorative arts galleries. (Hope the High paid it all before this happened.) The Louvre, which was once almost entirely state supported, now raises about 40% of its revenue from private sources, including ticket revenues and sponsorships.
This kind of loan-for-fee exhibition arrangement is fine to the extent that it brings important works to museums with shallow holdings in antiquities or the Old Masters. But as they become more common they open the way to a world in which museums routinely treat their collections as revenue opportunities, to be shuttled around even more furiously than they already are. The path to hell is paved with Guggenheim outposts and Boston MFA deals with Vegas casino galleries.
So what the Louvre also got from the High deal was a first taste of the controversy that has accompanied its arrangement this year to help create the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Jean Nouvel-designed museum in the Gulf emirate, scheduled to open in 2013, that will use the Louvre's name and its collecting expertise for ten years. During that time the Louvre and a consortium of other French museums will lend works to the Abu Dhabi museum while it builds its own "universal collection". (Which, if it tries to do that by way of purchase, is going to keep the auction houses happy for a long time.) In exchange the emirate is paying about one billion euros to the French museums, of which the Louvre collects 400 million. It also collects the grief that comes from being the lead institution in a deal that has many French museum professionals and art world figures furious about selling the store and madly — if vainly — petitioning against it.
When I chatted with Loyrette for a while during lunch I asked him about a point raised recently by Jerry Saltz, the art critic of New York magazine, in a fire breathing takedown of the Guggenheim's plans for its own outpost in Abu Dhabi — namely, that Abu Dhabi does not admit anyone holding an Israeli passport or even non-Israeli travellers who have an Israeli stamp in their passport.
To put it mildly, these press luncheons are not exactly free wheeling question and answer sessions. Power point presentations would be more like it. But Loyrette answered the question fully enough to say that he was aware of the problem, and that the ban on travellers who have been to Israel is a practice true of many other nations in the Middle East that the Louvre has cooperative relations with, including Syria and Iran. (Though not relations of the kind or on the scale of the project it's embarked upon with Abu Dhabi.)
Meanwhile, as lunch went on I found myself wondering just what would be the quality of the art that the emirate would be getting for its billions. I'm not shedding any tears for the emirs, but I recalled that the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, has a revenue sharing deal of its own with the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The Hermitage sends art. Toronto sends money. I saw three of the loan shows produced under that arrangement. One was unforgettable — a selection drawn from the great early 20th century collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, the Russian merchants who bought and commissioned scores of important Cezannes, Gauguins, Picassos and Matisses before their homes and property were seized by the Bolsheviks. But the other two shows? One was "Rubens and His Age", with a lot more "Age of" than "Rubens". The third was mostly about Catherine the Great. Not what she collected — now that would be a show — but how she used art, much of it distinctly second tier, to broadcast the majesty of her throne and herself.
Not exactly blockbuster material. But maybe the revenue stream to the Hermitage wasn't big enough.
September 19, 2007 11:13
Merchandising News From All Over
Developments on two fronts in recent days.
First off, just a week after announcing that it had spent $10 million to purchase The Milliners, a circa 1898 oil painting by Degas, the St. Louis Art Museum has dropped the other shoe — it's putting up for auction at Christie's ten works from its collection. Blogger Tyler Green had the story first two days ago.
I have no problem with the general idea that museums must sometimes deaccession lesser works in order to acquire important new ones. It's a case by case question of balance between what's lost and what's gained. In this instance, though it owns pastels and sculpture by Degas, the St. Louis Museum owns no other Degas oil. And while a relatively late canvas like The Milliners may not be as ground breaking as some of Degas's earlier reconfigurations of form, his later canvases, with their increasingly abstracted figures, are a bridge of sorts between Post-Impressionism and Matisse.
What remains to be seen is how important are the works that the Museum will now be selling. It's a list with some notable names, including Renoir, Braque, Cassatt and Matisse. Hmmm.
In other news, there's this — the Washington Post has run its long-in-the-works piece on the possible sale of art from the Maier Museum at Randolph College. The story doesn't break any new ground, but it's useful for its details on the school's cash flow.
September 18, 2007 2:30
Going Dutch
Aristotle With a Bust of Homer, Rembrandt, 1653 — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/span>
The Age of Rembrandt, the big fall show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, is a bit of a strange fish. It's not just that it's drawn entirely from the Met's sumptuous collection of 17th century Dutch paintings. It's chiefly about the collection, how it grew, who the Museum's wealthy donors were, what they purchased and gave to the place since 1871. That was the year the Museum's vice president, William Blodgett, went to Paris and bought up the 174 paintings that became the Met's "founding purchase", an instant permanent collection, with a heavy emphasis on Dutch art right from the start. The show is actually organized not by artist but around the collectors who were Met benefactors, men with names like Morgan, Huntington and Vanderbilt. All of them bought heavily in the market for Dutch masters. They bought up the aristocratic art of the Catholic courts of Europe as well. But it was especially in the art of Holland, a Protestant commercial republic, that the merchant princes of New York liked to imagine they saw themselves and their own nation reflected.
They often bought well, so this is a show with a lengthy inventory of major canvases by big names — Rembrandt, Hals, Hobbema, Van Ruisdael and Vermeer. (The Met owns five of Vermeer's 35 surviving canvases.) But they also made their share of blunders, or at least of purchases that the taste of a later generation — that would mean our's — would not esteem as highly as they did. So the Met's show also has a heavy share of secondary paintings and lesser known names and of Rembrandt's demoted to "school of..." There are two entire galleries, separated some distance from the main part of the show, that consist of nothing but minor and de-attributed canvases.
So I doubt that The Age of Rembrandt has the potential to be the hit that the Met enjoyed nine years ago with a show of 15th century Dutch art that was also drawn entirely from its collection. You're never quite swept away. I found it fascinating all the same, if only for the reminder it offered that encyclopedic institutions emerge only through a process of very bumpy growth, and that the "canonical" collections they put on display grow out of a primodial ooze of less spectacular holdings.
If you want to read more there's a smart, thorough (and thoroughly mixed) New York Times review here by Holland Cotter.
September 17, 2007 12:18
Another Latin Lesson
Pintura 9 [Painting 9], Helio Oiticica, 1959 — All Images: Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
Some gallery shows aren't just a pleasure, they're a public service. That would describe "The Geometry of Hope", the survey of Latin American abstraction that I previewed last week at the indispensable Grey Art Gallery at New York University. Latin American Modernism is the chapter of 20th century art history that's still finding its way into the books. The establishment six years ago of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston was a big step in correcting the historical picture. The NYU show, which is drawn from the collection of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, is another, an excellent introduction to the major names and to some entirely fascinating work.
Doble transparencia [Double Transparency], Jesus Rafael Soto, 1956
For most Americans, Latin American art is still defined by the Mexican muralists and Frida Kahlo, lots of monumental toiling peasants, personal drama, monkeys, fruit and mono-brows. Even people reasonably well versed in art history don't always know that South America had a multitude of thriving art centers in the 20th century. Rio, Sao Paolo and Buenos Aires were full of men and women making tough minded and original abstraction while fanning the air with their manifestos.
Physichromie No 21, Carlos Cruz-Diez, 1960
The show now at NYU was organized by Gabriel Perez-Barreiro, curator of Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas at Austin, where it first appeared earlier this year in a somewhat larger version. The Blanton version, which I did not see, was organized chronologically, which would have pointed up how often the Latin Americans were not merely aware of work by artists in Europe and the U.S. but ahead of it. In hard edged geometric abstraction, kinetic art and work that predicts the Op Art of the 60s, the Latins were sometimes experimenting in materials, procedures — and more than that, in understandings — first. American museums can leave you with the impression that after the death in New York of Mondrian, hard-edged geometric abstraction moved across the Atlantic only when Ellsworth Kelly came home from Paris. Guess again.
Ocho cuadrados [Eight Squares], Gego, 1961
Let's be clear. Many of the Latin artists, like the Venezuelan Jesus Rafael Soto and the Uruguayan Joaquin Torres-Garcia, had spent parts of their career in Europe and the U.S., and their work can show the plain influence of everyone from Malevich and Mondrian to Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely. (And also sometimes of lesser figures like Victor Vasarely. Remember him?) But there was no trace in their work of anything folkloric. Or for that matter, with the exception of Torres-Garcia, even of anything representational. They frequently worked in a restricted pallette of black, white, grey and beige, the better to focus on their investigations of pure form. And when they used color it was typically to construct or to emphasize form, or to look into the power of adjacent pigments.
Dibujo sin papel 76/4 [Drawing without Paper 76/4], Gego, 1976
The NYU version of this show is organized by geography, to show how artists in each of the major cities responded to (or squabbled over) shared concerns. Over the past year we've seen some major exhibitions devoted to artists who turn up at the Grey Gallery. There's one still traveling dedicated to the Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica — it's presently at Tate Modern in London. There was another for the endlessly inventive Gego, the self-chosen name of Gertrude Goldschmidt, a German-Jewish emigre to Venezuela. And also a MoMA show devoted to Armando Reveron, a less interesting figure in my book but also another neglected Latin.
I noticed a few months ago that a Gego has also popped up in the galleries of MoMA's permanent collection, which also contains three Sotos, though don't expect to always see them on the walls. Now that I think of it, for years there's been a good Soto sculpture on an office building plaza just across the street from MoMA, as though it were waiting to be summoned inside. Which, in a way, it is.
UPDATE: And Asleep-at-the-Wheel Critic Alert. On my way to MoMA this afternoon I ambled past the "Soto" sculpture, as I do several times a week. But this time I checked the name plaque at its base, something I hadn't done for years. Uh oh. It's not a Soto. It's by the Texas-born granite sculptor Jesus Bautista Moroles. Soto is still an interesting case for further study. And that Moroles is still a great piece.
Concreto 61 [Concrete 61], Judith Lauand, 1957
September 13, 2007 10:57
The Rape of Europa
I caught an early look at The Rape of Europa. It's a documentary of roughly two hours drawn heavily from the 1994 book of that name by Lynn Nicholas that won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Nicholas told the story of the Nazi plunder of European artworks and architecture during World War II. The film has been making the festival circuit for a while and will start turning up in theaters this month.
Nicholas' book was an adroit telling of an important story — how the Nazis looted or demolished European treasures in a campaign of unprecedented theft and deliberate destruction. So I wish I could say that the documentary, by Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen and Nicole Newnham, was equally impressive. It's a lucid and instructive film, and sometimes a moving one, but with very much the tone and tempo of a PBS doc that's been inflated to movie screen size. Everything about it, the talking heads, the even tempo, the subdued narration by the actress Joan Allen, makes it feel like a project that was made for a small screen but has escaped for a while on to larger ones.
All the same, it weaves its way through some crucial episodes in the history of delusion, greed and hubris. No doubt because of the young Hitler's thwarted ambition to become an artist, as Fuhrer he developed grand ideas for the cultural dominance of the Third Reich and the subjugation of other nations. His campaign against degenerate art, the "hit list" of works he wanted to take from other nations, his plan to make his hometown of Linz into a grandiose European culture capital — it all followed from that.
The Nazis' taste in 20th century art ran to Aryan kitsch, or at most to the attenuated Modernist stylings of an Arno Brecker, but they knew a Vermeer when they saw one and they knew how to snatch and grab on a scale that Napoleon, an art thief of the first magnitude, could only dream about. It became common for party leaders to emulate the Fuhrer by amassing their own art collections. One easy route of course was the outright theft of art from Jewish families. The film builds a framing device around Maria Altmann, whose aunt was Adele Block-Bauer, the woman encased in a golden forcefield in Klimt's famous portrait of 1907. That's the one that Ronald Lauder spent $135 million on last year after an Austrian court returned it to Altmann, who had campaigned for decades it get it back from the Austrian National Gallery, where the Nazis had long ago handed it off.
The film makers are scrupulous in acknowledging the Allied actions that led to the destruction of major sites, especially the bombing that detroyed the medieval abbey at Monte Cassino and the frescoes in the Camposanto in Pisa. But they also make plain that, unlike the Germans, the U.S. and Britain were not conducting a deliberate campaign of cultural obliteration. And you have to have a soft spot for any film that manages to find so much unflattering archival footage of the always dreadful Hermann Goering, the blowsy looking and drug addled Luftwaffe chief who piled up an enormous art collection consisting almost entirely of stolen goods.
But really, the only good picture I know of him is the one taken after he self-administered that fatal dose of cyanide.
September 13, 2007 2:28
That San Francisco Tower Competition
A few weeks ago I mentioned the now-in-progress competition to design what will be the tallest building in San Francisco — or for that matter anywhere on the West Coast — a new tower alongside a new bus and railway terminal being built by the Bay Area's Transbay Joint Powers Authority. The three contenders are designs from the firms of Cesar Pelli, Richard Rogers and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The vote by the five-member Transbay board to choose the winner is still two weeks away, but the Pelli design, made in conjunction with the developer Hines, got a big boost earlier this week when a jury advising the board released a report strongly favoring the Pelli-Hines proposal. (The jury report, with lots of pictures, is here. The San Francisco Chronicle also has details.)
The jury seemed especially taken by Pelli's idea to put a five-acre rooftop park above the terminal. But I'm guessing that they probably liked even better the fact that the Hines-Pelli team bid $350 million for the right to build the tower — more than twice what the other teams offered.
September 13, 2007 9:48
Alice in "I Wonder" Land
As in — I wonder how long it will be before Alice Walton has her way with the Stieglitz Collection at Fisk University? Actually, while we've been talking about 9/11 this week, there's been movement on two Walton-related artworld dramas.
One of them involves Walton and Fisk. Earlier this week a Tennessee judge disallowed a deal worked out between Fisk — usually known here at "Looking Around" as "Financially Troubled Fisk" — and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. As you'll recall, the deal would have allowed the museum to purchase O'Keeffe's Radiator Building — Night, New York from Fisk for the bargain price of $7.5 million. Fisk wanted to sell the painting on the open market, where it could be counted on to fetch much more than $7.5 million. But the O'Keeffe Museum, as handler of the artist's estate, brought suit against Fisk to prevent the sale, then suggested, ahem, that Fisk sell the painting to them at that bargain price.
That was the deal Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle disallowed, pointing out that there was a better deal being proposed by the very acquisitive Wal-Mart heiress Walton, who surprised absolutely nobody a few weeks ago when she stepped forward. Walton has offered $30 million if she can have a 50% share in all 101 works in the Stieglitz collection, with the art being shuttled back and forth on an equal time basis between Fisk and Walton's forthcoming Crystal Bridges Museum in Benton, Ark.
Museum directors I've spoken with tell me that earlier in the game they were advising Fisk to seek out a sharing arrangement as an alternative to selling any of its works. But finding a partner museum with deep enough pockets is no easy job. Now that the Fisk-O'Keeffe Museum deal is scuttled — and the Museum has withdrawn its lawsuit — Ms. Walton, and her very deep pockets, has a has a very clear path.
And in other Walton-related news, 11 people filed suit in a Virginia court earlier this week to prevent Randolph College — generally known here at "Looking Around" as "Financially Troubled Randolph" — from selling works from its Maier Museum. One of the plaintiffs in the suit is former Randolph art professor Laura Katzman, who I talked to about the Maier last week. As you'll recall, the Maier is another campus museum that Walton is reported to have set her sites on.
September 12, 2007 2:19
9/11 Art
Tumbling Woman, Fischl, 2002 — Photo: AP
Over the past couple of days, Blogger Tyler Green has had a series of posts about art produced after 9/11 that tried to come to grips with the event. Interesting idea. Let me throw in one candidate not mentioned by him so far, especially because it's very effectiveness caused it so many problems. Five years ago Eric Fischl showed a sculpture called Tumbling Woman for less than a week in the underground arcade of Rockefeller Center. (Jerry Speyer, the chairman of the board of trustees of the Museum of Modern Art, is one of the two founding partners of Tishman Speyer, the real estate holding company that owns the Center, so for years now contemporary art has been a regular part of the public program there.) It was supposed to be there longer, but a few complaints from the public and a nasty and opportunistic column in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post led to its being removed on the grounds that it was too disturbing.
Was it? Or was it just disturbing enough? Plainly, it was meant to suggest a figure falling through the air, like one of the many people who jumped to their death that day. Fischl said repeatedly, as if it needed saying at all, that he meant the work as a tribute to the thousands who suffered and died. As a work of art, it was in some ways a conventional figure, a bronze that even seemed to refer deliberately by its pose to the Aristide Maillol's The River, a statue from the early 1940s that reclines voluptuously just a few blocks away in MoMa's sculpture garden.
The River, Maillol, 1938-1943 — Photo: MOMA, © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
The difference of course is that Maillol's woman is a symbol of contentment. She luxuriates in the sun. Fischl's woman simply plummets. She's a figure of anguish, and she's upside down, a posture that our body tries instantly, and uncomfortably, to connect to. An inverted human figure is universally understood in our very nerve endings as a sign of something wrong. That's one reason they're so rare in art, and when you do find them it's likely to be in a work like Rodin's Gates of Hell, where one of the damned tumbles backward and out from the door.
The Gates of Hell (detail), Rodin, conceived 1880-1917, cast 1928 — Rodin Museum
By itself, Fischl's statue would never be an adequate monument to 9/11, but it was never intended as that. It was intended as an attempt to capture one important aspect of the day, which was human suffering, and it did that in a representational, irony-free visual language that a broad public could understand and respond to. If it made some people uncomfortable, it was supposed to do that too. Pain is something art can speak to, but sometimes it has to do it in the language of pain.
September 12, 2007 11:21
9/11 + 6 + 1 Day
My long commentary yesterday on the state of reconstruction at the World Trade Center site brought in a number of passionate replies from readers. One of the most typical? That the powers that be should simply have re-built the towers as they were. (Or as one reader proposed "but taller, much taller!") Even now, when it's plainly not going to happen, this is not an uncommon opinion. My own brother shares it, or he used to.
I can understand the sentiment, but I can't agree. September 11 has given the towers a retroactive place in people's hearts. This much I can understand. It's the feeling I wrote about yesterday when I described seeing their ghostly resurrection in the tribute of light that goes up every year at this time in lower Manhattan. But before they went down, the Towers were anything but beloved by the New Yorkers who had to live with them. Within just years after it was completed, the World Trade Center had become an architecture school case study of what not to do. A general revulsion at the problems epitomized by the Twin Towers helped bring on the decades-long effort to find a way out of the dead end of glass and steel box Modernism, a struggle that has led to some interesting new outcomes in recent years.
First lesson of the old World Trade Center— forget Le Corbusier. Don't build a tall tower — or two! — on a big, windswept empty plaza — a super block as it was called, because it covered over several older New York City blocks and even the streets that once ran through them. By day it was a lifeless plaza, even when filled, just a place to hurry through. And by night? A lifeless plaza, only darker.
There are many others lessons. Suffice it say that to rebuild the Twin Towers would have been a disaster. There's no point in repeating an ancient blunder.
But there's also no point in wandering into new blunders, which is the pitfall of so much of what's planned for the Trade Center site now. This is especially true with the three towers planned for the eastern edge of the 9/11 memorial site. My objection to those is not so much with any of the individual buildings. It's with the very notion of three more tall towers being shoe horned into the WTC site, which was once envisioned as a mix of high and lower buildings, somewhat along the lines of Rockefeller Center, one of the most agreeable urban ensembles anywhere in the world.
Any of the individual towers, taken on its own terms, might be acceptable, or even more. Over the past decade or so there's been a thorough re-thinking of the interior space of office towers — how to make them more agreeable places to work than the typical stack of rentable floor plates, how to open out the ordinary office corridor into new configurations that encourage more human interaction, and that provide light and window access to every worker on a floor. Some of that thinking has even been breaking out of the architecture school classrooms and making it into new buildings. And two of the architects who have been at the forefront of that rethinking are Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, each of whom is designing one of those three proposed towers. From the images we've seen so far it's not easy to tell what they have in mind for the spaces inside, but based on their earlier work it's reasonable to hope.
But no building can be "taken on its own terms" if it's smack in the middle of a crowded city. It's part of an urban fabric that it helps to create — or destroy. Three skyscrapers along the edge of the memorial park is two too many. But to arrive at a human scale grouping of structures at the Trade Center site we would have to have someone in charge who cared more about the human experience of the place than about how to maximize rentable office space. Great cities — great nations — can rise to that challenge. What's happening to our's I wonder?
September 10, 2007 2:05
9/11 + 6
So here it is, the sixth anniversary of that morning. Last night I was walking down the Hudson River boardwalk near my apartment in Jersey City, N. J., which is directly across the water from where the World Trade Center used to be. Every year, there's a memorial at this time produced by scores of floodlights positioned some blocks south of where the towers used to be. They shoot two broad columns of light into the sky.
I've read complaints that the columns of light remind people of the vertical spears of floodlight that Albert Speer contrived for the outdoor Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, the one that Leni Riefenstahl made infamous in Triumph of the Will. Noted. But the Nazis do not own verticals of light against the sky forever. Last night, which was cloudy in New York, the columns of light were filled with changing formations of mist that reminded you, if you were there on the first 9/11, of the smoke that filled the air that day. From where I saw the lights last night, standing in roughly the same place I stood on parts of that day six years ago, they operated very powerfully, like a Light Art work by James Turrell or Robert Irwin, but one that intersected with a specific historical memory.
So when it comes to 9/11, there's always a lot to talk about. (You have heard, no doubt, of the Iraq War?) Just a few weeks ago, two New York City firefighters died fighting a blaze at the Deutsche Bank headquarters, a skyscraper on the south edge of the Trade Center site that was badly damaged on 9/11 and which is now being slowly dismantled. A few days later two more firefighters were injured when a forklift plunged off an upper floor of the same building and through the roof of a ground level shed where they were sitting. You get the picture. This is an unlucky location.
But let's just take a look at what things have come to at the endlessly contested site where the Trade Center once stood. For a long time I've been mostly discouraged about the direction of developments there. Earlier this year I set those feelings out. Not much has changed since then.
To begin with, there's One World Trade Center, or the Freedom Tower as its sometimes called.
Work has been underway for a while on the subterranean portions, where a hugely complicated nexus of railway tracks, including the PATH commuter system that comes in from New Jersey and several New York City subway lines, will link up. Don't expect to see structural steel rising much above ground level before next spring. The design of the Freedom Tower is now credited to David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, though the New York City police department should probably get shared billing. They were the ones who came into the design process at the last minute to insist that the base of the tower had to be almost literally fortified to withstand truck bombs. The tower now promises to be a Roman candle held in the grip of a steel candle holder.
Childs' design is a tower with its sides chamfered (that mean sliced at the corners) so that its roof is turned at a 45-degree angle from its base. The top of its antenna will still rise to 1776 feet, a sentimental Yankee Doodle gesture that is about all that remains of the earlier (very rough) conceptions of the building by Daniel Libeskind, who has long since removed his name from the project.
One building has been completed at the site, 7 World Trade Center. Also designed by Childs, it replaces a squat office tower that also fell on 9/11. The good news is that the new, taller building — 52 stories — sits on a smaller site, making it possible to re-open a Manhattan street that the old building had blocked off for decades. As a LEED's gold-rated building — LEED is the body that recognizes eco-friendly design and construction — the new 7 WTC is also one of Manhattan's greenest new towers.
The building is unusual because its first ten stories are taken up by a Con Ed substation and two floors of mechanicals. What that means is that except for its glass fronted lobby, its first ten floors are windowless. Childs did what he could to turn that into an advantage by cladding the substation levels in stainless steel arranged in patterns of alternating vertical shafts that glimmer in daylight. At night a complicated lighting program plays various games behind them. There's also a Jenny Holzer electronic wall installation in the lobby.
So it all could have been worse, but in its overall vertical-carton silhouette 7 WTC remains a standard developer's box. And in that it's a sign of the general failure of imagination that rules at the Trade Center site. (Except in the case of the Santiago Calatrava-designed train station, which is still just a glimmer on the horizon.) Is "could have been worse" the best we can do? And this problem only gets worse, much worse, when you consider the trio of towers now planned for the eastern edge of the funerary punctures that will form the 9/11 memorial.
The first of them is a skyscraper with a canted roof by Norman Foster's firm, Foster Partners...
The next is by the firm of his fellow Brit Richard Rogers....
....and the third is by the Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki...
And the problem here? It's not so much the individual towers, it's their collective impact. Daniel Libeskind's original master plan for the Trade Center site envisioned a collection of high and lower rise buildings — an urban ensemble, not a wall of near-identically scaled behemoths. For Larry Silverstein, the private developer who still has influence over the site, recruiting Foster, Rogers and Maki, all three of them Pritzker Prize winners, as the architects for this Murderer's Row of towers was a shrewd move. It adds cultural cachet to a flagrantly overbuilt street plan. When I look at it these days I'm reminded of nothing so much as the way Walter Gropius was brought on in the 1950s as the architect of the grossly overscaled Pan Am building, now the Met Life building, in New York. As the founder of the Bauhaus, Gropius brought Modernist street cred to a dreadful project, which to this day sits astride Park Avenue like the Hoover Dam.
As I said about the WTC triplets on "Looking Around" last February:
"at its heart the problem those buildings represent is one that mere architecture cannot solve. It's a question of urbanism, or rather the abandonment of urbanist principles when they get in the way of maximizing floor space."
Is it impossible to build an an ensemble of beautiful and powerful buildings in New York anymore? The core dilemma is that the Trade Center site is a civic monument in an age when there is no civic life, when private interests trump every other kind— and yeah, Trump is a good word for it — and when it's easy to misthink that the best we can do is a tight bundle of tall compartments dedicated to rental income. Maybe a project so bound up in coils of sentiment, sanctimony, cynical politics and raw commerce never had a chance of coming to any satisfactory conclusion. For now at least, it's plainly not headed for one.
And while we're at it, anybody who thinks of their office building as a Freedom Tower, raise your hands.
September 10, 2007 9:23
The Barnes Picks Its Architects
And the winners, if that's the word for it, of this controversial commission are Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Tod and Billie, a husband and wife team, are two of the most gifted and thoughtful architects I know. Their American Folk Art Museum in New York is on my short list of the great jewel box interiors anywhere in the U.S. It manages to combine a grand stairway, wonderfully crafted galleries and really delightful circulation paths, all within a relatively narrow site, and all with the beautifully thought out combination of materials that's been the hallmark of their practice since they opened for business in the 1970s.
And they're good at sensitive assignments. Their brilliantly subdued Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California is just a very short distance from the Salk Institute, one of Louis Kahn's masterworks, which made it a commission that called for a particular kind of tact. And in a profession full of thundering egos, they're also two of the most agreeable and least self-regarding people I know. There's a nice summary of what makes them suited to this project in the Philadelphia Inquirer today by Inga Saffron, the Inquirer's architecture critic.
So I wish I could say that their selection as architects for the new Barnes, if it ever happens, makes it any less of a bad idea to move the Barnes collection to Philadelphia from its home in Merion, Pa. The Friends of the Barnes Foundation, a group opposing the move, has filed a court petition hoping to block it. It's a long shot. But even a great new building, which is what Tod and Billie can be counted on to produce, is no substitute for the Barnes as Barnes intended it.
September 7, 2007 1:18
Anatomy of an Art Scam?
I'm still travelling around on assignment, but couldn't resist taking note of the latest speculation about Damien Hirst's $100 million — or is it? — skull. When I posted a few weeks ago about news of the sale, I wondered out loud if the details of this "sale" would ever be made fully public. Today both the Washington Post and the New York Times have pieces that pick up on the questions about just what it means that Hirst retains some kind of unspecified interest in the piece. One theory: that the unidentified "investment group" that supposedly purchased the skull for the full asking price might actually consist of Hirst, his dealer and his business manager.
As I mused when the "sale" was first announced, Hirst's skull is essentially a Conceptual art joke about the mindless art market. It's a pure commodity, it's value as a work of art entirely a consequence of its market value. And if it didn't score the $100 million that Hirst loudly proclaimed its market value to be? Well, then maybe the joke is on him.
September 5, 2007 11:15
On the Road Again, Again
For the rest of the week. There are times when the art critic life is like being a pony express rider. But I expect to be checking back in a day or two.
September 3, 2007 8:42
Let's Talk About Sales (Or More on Maier, Part II)
I had a brief talk recently with Laura Katzman, who was formerly an associate professor of art at Randolph College and the director of its museum studies program. In April, as it became apparent that Randolph was thinking about selling so