November 30, 2007 1:08
Dedicated to the One I Love
The Miami Art Museum unveiled the interim design for its new home today, a "work in progress" model by Herzog & de Meuron that MAM Director Terry Riley says can be expected to evolve over the next year or so in part on the basis of public comment.
Riley has said that he'd like the final design to provide for a few "anchor" galleries that would each hold a single work of art. That got me thinking about how powerful those can be, an impression I had again recently on a visit to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, where there are two.
Book With Wings, Anselm Kiefer, 1992 — Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
One is an oval grey concrete chamber that holds Anselm Kiefer's Book With Wings and lends a phenomenal charge of light, weight, space and semi-confinement to Kiefer's paradox of leaden wings taking flight.
Ladder for Booker T. Washington, Martin Puryear, 1996 — Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
The other dedicated gallery at the Fort Worth is a deep concrete carton that usually holds Martin Puryear's Ladder for Booker T. Washington, which is now on view at MoMA in New York as part of the Puryear retrospective. I'm sorry I missed it in Fort Worth. Based on pictures, the top lit, cell-like space would seem to dramatize both the irony and the genuine pathos of Puryear's commentary on Washington's optimistic formula for black success in America.
I still miss the small gallery at the National Gallery in London where you could sit on a sofa and commune in semi-darkness with Leonardo's cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, which was displayed by itself. Some years ago the National moved it to a brightly lit and crowded main gallery. Something may be gained by being able to see the picture closer to Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks, but something really magical was lost. And I wasn't the only one whose heart sank a few years ago when MoMA in New York took Monet's Water Lilies, which had enjoyed its own gallery in the old museum, and deposited it in its cavernous new atrium, where from a distance it looked like a mailbox slot. It's since been moved to its own space upstairs.
Museums seem to be resistant to isolating works in this way. I suspect that curators resist "privileging" one work too greatly above another, and in any event they like to have works talking to one another across galleries. I do too, but I also prefer sometimes to have them talking just to me.
You can read more about the new Miami Art Museum design here.
November 29, 2007 1:48
How Now, New Mew?
New Museum of Contemporary Art, Sejima+Nishizawa/SANAA — Photo: Dean Kaufman
I just got back from previewing the new home of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan, an eight story off kilter stack by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, the Japanese architects who call their firm SANAA. The museum is located on the Bowery, the most redolent street name in the city's still-kinda-funky-but-fast-condo-fying Lower East Side. This is the same neighborhood where 30 years ago at sunrise the derelicts would hit up the kids heading home from the punk club CBGB for spare change. Even now, with a Bernard Tschumi-designed condo rising a few blocks away, it's not yet a place to put an ivory tower, and the architects weren't working with an ivory tower budget. They've opted instead for something serviceable and unfussy on the inside, but with enough edge and panache on the outside to hold your attention.
The asymmetrical stacked box idea at the heart of their museum is in some ways similar to the one that Rem Koolhaas's firm OMA came up with a few years ago for the Seattle Public Library, with the difference that OMA then clad the irregular stack in a trapezoidal wrapper of glass overlaid with a honeycomb of structural steel. There's an exterior honeycomb at the New Museum too, this time of anodized aluminum mounted on painted aluminum panels. It's just decorative here, not structural, another of those shimmering skins that architects like Herzog & de Meuron and Frank Gehry have been favoring. But it situates the museum visually in a very shrewd way among the squat white brick loft buildings that flank it, addressing them cordially but with an extra degree of milky luminesence that says "I'm not just another building on this block, thanks."
The materials inside are neighborhood funky. White drywall and painted grey concrete floors, rows of white flourescent ceiling lights overhead. The elevators are sided in bright green corrugated plastic and mirror steel, and have metal floors stamped in the pattern of the sidewalk cellar doors you can find outside any of the local groceries. And though the elevators open onto gallery floors that are ample enough, there are spaces behind the elevator core that seem like afterthoughts. One long corridor of that kind on the second floor created a gallery intimate enough so that smaller work like Kristen Morgin's mock antiquities didn't get swallowed up. But other floors had little ells and cul-de-sacs that were effectively dead space. The upper story event space has a panoramic window wall with a view across lower Manhattan. A few blocks to the east you can see that Tschumi condo, one more portent of things to come.
The New Museum was the brainchild of the late Marcia Tucker, a former curator at the Whitney who lost her job in the 1970s after giving a show to Richard Tuttle that caused much harrumphing by conservative critics, notably Hilton Kramer. Set free, Tucker started the New Museum in a one room office as New York's only museum exclusively dedicated to contemporary art. Over the years it bounced around to ever larger locations, but this is its first free standing home. Looking it over today I even found myself wondering if there was an echo in its silhouette of the cantilivered stack that Marcel Breuer produced for Tucker's old workplace the Whitney, a remnant of her personal past now incorporated into her legacy.
The museum is opening with a show, "Unmonumental: the Object in the 21st Century", that's built mostly around flotsam-assemblage sculptors like Isa Genzken whose work has been popular over the last few years. Richard Tuttle isn't in the show, but his love of exalted ephemera hovers over it. I think Tucker would have liked it.
November 28, 2007 4:37
More Talk With: Philippe de Montebello
Let's conclude that conversation with the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
LACAYO: As you know, a number of nations have cultural property laws that effectively lay claim to anything found in the ground on their territory, or that require export permits for anything over, say, 100 years old. China has a request pending with the State Department for the U.S. to bar the import of anything from that country that's over a century old. Do you think the scope of cultural propperty laws can be too broad?
DE MONTEBELLO: There are scenarios that clearly are reasonable, and some outrageous. The request from China was rejected [so far] as unmanageable and unreasonable. And at some point the U.S. might say, well, wait a minute, we'll cooperate with you on this, but every time we put out a DVD, 24 hours later it's for sale all over China. so a sense of parity and fairness should prevail.
Source countries also have their role to play in safeguarding their archeological sites and prosecuting people involved in thefts — because not everything is taken from a site to sell to a wicked American museum or an American collector. A lot of these things are taken by people who are poor and who dig up gold and silver to melt it down. With American museums over the last few years being a non-existent factor in antiquities collecting, why has there been an increase in looting of sites around the world?
LACAYO: Many archeologists believe that any commercial trade in antiquities should be banned, whether that means the sale of objects to private collectors or museums. They say it encourages the looting of archeological excavations, and with that comes the loss of crucial information about an object's cultural context.
DE MONTEBELLO: Archeologists presumably became interested in archeology by visiting museums. They forget this very conveniently. They become practicing archeologists and then their only interest is in the "find spot."
One can question whether one particular discipline can arrogate to itself the right to everything that's in the ground. There are many different contexts, many different ways to look at these objects. So you have a discipline that goes too far in claiming that an object is of no merit, of no value, the moment it's out of the ground and you don't know who buried it. That's one context. It's obviously a very precious one, because once an object is out of that context the information is not retrieveable. But it's not the only context.
LACAYO: Does the Met buy in the antiquities market any longer?
DE MONTEBELLO: Almost not at all.
LACAYO: Michael Brand, the director of the Getty, told me recently that his museum will still buy, but much more carefully.
DE MONTEBELLO: Oh yes, but just a fraction of what it did before. And you pay far larger costs, because a huge premium is placed on works with secure provenance. Our acquisitions are, I don't know, less than one tenth of what they used to be.
LACAYO: Will you be vetting objects that you receive as gifts, to ensure that they meet the same acquisition standards as the museum's purchases?
DE MONTEBELLO: We apply the same standards to gifts, bequests and purchases. And now we apply it to loans as well.
LACAYO: Do you mean an object being leant to the Met from another museum?
DE MONTEBELLO: From a collector. From another museum I think it's likely to be all right.
LACAYO: Do you worry about the future of the universal museum, the ones, like your own, in which works from all cultures are gathered together? It's not hard to imagine, for instance, that China might one day become more aggressive, not just about asking other nations to impose import bans on Chinese objects, but about demanding the return of things already in foreign museums.
DE MONTEBELLO: I can't imagine mankind being so self-destructive intellectually as to do away with the universal museum. No, I don't think that's likely to happen. But those institutions that have collections should consider themselves fortunate to have what they have, because increasingly they will not be able to build their collections. The museums in Berlin, Paris, London, New York have mature collections. A few things will be added here and there, but less and less in the archeological area.
November 27, 2007 4:11
A Talk With: Philippe de Montebello
Over the past few months I've been having a series of conversations with museum directors about the controversies over "cultural property" and the demands by nations like Greece, Italy and Egypt that museums in the U.S. and elsewhere return treasured antiquities. I sat down recently with Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As you already know, in response to demands from the Italian Minister of Culture Francesco Rutelli, the Met agreed last year to return 20 artifacts to Italy, including the prized Euphronios krater.
As I usually do, I'll divide the excerpts from that conversation into a couple of posts.
LACAYO: The Met's acquisitions policy is updated from time to time. The last update was in September, 2004. Your museum's policy now is that it will not acquire any object that cannot be shown to have been out of its country of origin for at least ten years. Have you considered further changes as a consequence of your dealings last year with Mr. Rutelli?
DE MONTEBELLO: There haven't been changes and [the current policy] has been extremely effective, since it is the policy that also applies to the Association of Art Museum Directors. Acquisitions of antiquities on the part of American museums have fallen to almost zero. Out of a sense of new ethical standards and a not inconsequential fiduciary responsibility — they don't want to make an acquisition that is likely to be subject to claims — most museums have imposed on themselves standards that, as a matter of praxis, are even more stringent than ten years. And so it's been very effective on one level — if you take pleasure in the fact that antiquities are practically no longer entering American collections.
LACAYO: Should the Met have gone about things differently when it made acquisitions in the past?
DE MONTEBELLO: I don't know, should Enrico Dandolo not have taken the horses of San Marco [from Constantinople] in 1204? Everybody lives according to the norms, the ethics and the behavioral patterns of their own day. Retrospective judgments aren't very useful. There was a laissez-faire attitude then that there isn't today. Times change. And the good thing about museums is that they evolve, they respond to societal and other pressures. One is alert to the world around us. It's a different world.
LACAYO: Rutelli has made it plain that he's not interested in pursuing objects that came into the U.S., say, more than a century ago. For that reason, for instance he's not supporting the claim that the Italian town of Monteleone is trying to press for the return of the Etruscan chariot in your own collection.
DE MONTEBELLO: He's very embarassed by that claim. Because it undermines what he considers to be legitimate claims. It's completely frivolous and long antedates any Italian laws.
LACAYO: All the same, some nations, like Greece and Egypt, are still demanding the return of objects taken in the 19th century, long before their own cultural property laws were adopted.
DE MONTEBELLO: There are rhetorical claims everywhere.
LACAYO: Do you think demands of that kind can ever be valid?
DE MONTEBELLO: They are rhetorical claims. They have no basis in anything except home consumption in politics and pronounced nationalism. I am not one of these people who believes in re-writing history. Where do you stop? At what point then is Turkey going to return the Alexander Sarcophagus to Sidon in Lebanon? In the 19th century it was brought from Sidon when Lebanon was part of the Ottoman empire. Where do you stop? On what grounds should you return and not return?
I never see a questioner asking "Isn't there value to these objects having been in the western museums, having been studied?" When Layard from England and Botta from France went to Mesopotamia, got the great winged horses and brought them back to the Louvre and to the British Museum, to describe the local attitude towards these pieces as indifferent would be generous, because most of them were being quarried to build local buildings and so forth. The whole history of Egyptology comes out of Dominique-Vivant Denon and the expeditions of Napoleon in Egypt, again at a time when there was less local interest in the subject. One has to consider the repayment in knowledge that these objects have given and that these institutions and nations have given.
November 26, 2007 4:57
National Gallery Brain Drain
A few weeks ago I posted about the drawn out process to find a replacement for Charles Saumarez Smith, who resigned way back in March as director of the National Gallery in London. Today the London Evening Standard is reporting that the job will go to Nicholas Penny, curator of sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. As I mentioned last month, Penny was on everybody's short list, not least because he was a former curator at the London museum who had been passed over for the top job five years ago.
Meanwhile, the National Gallery in D.C. can't seem to catch a break lately. Last spring its curator of modern and contemporary art, Jeffrey Weiss, resigned to become director of the Dia Art Foundation. It was only last month that the National announced that Weiss would be replaced by Harry Cooper, head of the department of modern art at the Harvard University Art Museums. Back to the head hunters for them.
By the way, in that same blogpost from London I also joked about tripping over the crack that Doris Salcedo has introduced as a temporary installation along the floor of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. I was only joking. I don't see how anybody could actually trip over the thing. But today I discover that London must be thronged with uncoordinated art lovers.
November 26, 2007 9:41
Adventures in Donor Servicing
What's more embarassing than doing a museum show devoted to a private collection that your museum hopes someday to get? Doing the show and not getting the collection. Ask the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
November 21, 2007 6:11
Serra Re-Sighting?
Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue3, Robert Irwin, 2007 — Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
Yesterday I posted about Richard Serra's 1974-75 piece Delineator. Blogger Tyler Moore got in touch to point out that for the ongoing Robert Irwin retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Irwin has produced what might just be in part an homage to that piece. Or maybe you could call it a three color conflation of Serra and Barnett Newman, who did the original Who's Afraid... canvases back in the 1960s.
UPDATE: Tyler Moore? The blogger I was referring to up there is Tyler Green. Tyler Moore, of course, is that blogger who lives in Minneapolis and is always throwing her hat in the air.
By the way, this blog will be on holiday til Monday. I plan to spend much of the next few days contending with the after dinner effects of tryptophane.
November 20, 2007 6:04
Mayne Man
San Francisco Federal Building, Morphosis, 2007 — All Photos: Richard Lacayo
Ever since I came back from San Francisco in September I've been meaning to post about the new federal building there by Thom Mayne's firm Morphosis. While I was out there I got a tour of the place from Brandon Welling, the project architect, and Maria Ciprazo, an executive of the General Services Administration — the agency that commissions and manages government buildings, and that had the taste (and hey, the daring) to go with Mayne's firm for this building, with gratifying results.
As you may have heard, San Francisco is a beautiful city. But as far as contemporary architecture goes, until recently it's been mostly a backwater. The new federal building is a pretty smashing addition to the skyline. To give almost everyone working in the 18 story tower portion access to direct sunlight, Morphosis came up with a slim wafer of a tower just 65 feet wide. To minimize the need for air conditioning, the building relies mostly on natural ventilation. Many of the windows can be partly opened. Vertical translucent glass fins shield offices on the northeast side from afternoon sun. On the southeast facade that steel mesh scrim acts as a sunscreen that cascades in accordion folds across the street level plaza, a sculptural touch that it repeats at the roof by curving up and over it. And at night the three story sky garden — that's the square void you see about midway up the tower, which brings to mind Arquitectonica's Atlantis Condominium in Miami — is lit by a James Turrell neon installation.
Federal building lobby
Morphosis also arrived at something impressive in the lobby, with its combination of diagonal concrete piers, steel walls and projecting lanterns. It manages to feel both august and lively.
So I was thinking about that building when I came across this piece by Blair Kamin, the architecture critic of The Chicago Tribune (and my onetime post-grad fellowship co-fellow at the University of Chicago.) Last year the GSA almost chose Thomas Gordon Smith, the former dean of the school of architecture at Notre Dame, as its chief architect. (He ended up instead in an advisory position.) Smith is an all too dedicated classicist. If he had gotten the top job at the GSA, the Thom Maynes of the world wouldn't be getting much work out of that place.
In 1994, thanks to the New York senator and architecture buff Daniel Moynihan, the GSA started a Design Excellence Program that led to the selection of some first rate architects in the same decade in which the feds were also embarking on a courthouse building boom. Like the Richard Meier federal courthouse out on Long Island, or Henry Cobb's courthouse in Boston, what the San Francisco building proves is that sometimes even the federal government gets it right. Meanwhile Kamin's article is a reminder of just how easily it can all go the other way.
November 20, 2007 11:23
Serra Sighting
In Greece last month I had a kind of deja vu experience that it took me a while to trace to its source. I would find myself underneath the architrave of some ancient temple — this doesn't happen to you much in Manhattan — and feeling I had had this experience before. (Don't worry, I'm not going to go all Shirley MacLaine here and start blathering about past lives.)
It was a simple enough sensory experience I kept having under those architraves — the feeling of a heavy rectangular weight overhead — but also a pretty powerful one. I realized that it was in some way important to the means by which classical (and neo-classical) buildings impart authority, through a sensation of overhead weight that registers on you almost subconsciously, as a peripheral awareness, as you cross the threshold to enter. But where had this happened to me before?
Northeast corner of the Erectheoin, the Acropolis, Athens, 421 - 406 B.C.
Then I realized that what I was relating back to was a kind of sense memory of Delineator, one of the pieces that was in the Richard Serra retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this year.
Delineator, Richard Serra, 1974-1975 — Image: MoMA
Serra has frequently used architecture as a jumping off point for his work. He's spoken repeatedly of how his Torqued Ellipse series grew out of his encounter with the elliptical interior of Borromini's Church of the Four Fountains in Rome. So I wondered if the column and pediment forms of Greek architecture might have had anything to do with the origins of Delineator.
It turns out the answer is no. After I got home I tracked down this podcast in which Serra explains that in 1974 he had herniated a couple of disks in his back and been laid up for weeks on a mattress looking up at a cross rafter on the ceiling. He began to think about himself in relation to the space he was occupying. Meanwhile he was also looking a lot at the black cross paintings of Kasimir Malevich. From those inspirations he started to conceive a sculpture that would use perpendiculars to define — delineate — the rectilinear room it occupied.
But Serra's inspiration and intentions for the piece don't limit how it resonates with me or anyone else. (Which, as he said to me a few months ago, is fine with him.) Through Delineator I got a sense of overhead form defining space, which I carried with me subliminally to Athens, where it snapped into place underneath a pediment and led me to understand something about how buildings can literally impress their meanings into you.
Class dismissed.
November 19, 2007 12:14
Duplicated Duplicates
Brillo Boxes, Andy Warhol, 1969 — Norton Simon Museum © 2005 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
The Moderna Museet, Stockholm's modern art museum, has determined that six Andy Warhol Brillo boxes in its collection are fakes. They were turned out by carpenters three years after Warhol's death, at the request of the late Pontus Hulten, the Museum's famous director in the 1960s, who needed them to promote a show in Russia in 1990. The Museum now claims that Hulten later sold some of the boxes with the false claim that they had been made in 1968 and donated several to the Museum. Bad Pontus.
When I read this story I immediately thought of Arthur Danto, the well known philosopher and critic, because it was his encounter with Warhol's Brillo boxes in a New York gallery in 1964 that led him to the speculations that produced his famous first book, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. What obsessed Danto was that the Warhol boxes were perfectly indistinguishable from actual Brillo boxes. If that could be art, he said to himself, then art needed to be radically redefined, which is what he set about doing.
The Duchampian paradox of today's story is that what Hulten appears to have made are Brillo boxes identical to Warhol's Brillo boxes, which were themselves identical to actual Brillo boxes. All three categories look the same, but only the second one, Warhol's, qualify as art. But what if Hulten had claimed that his Brillo boxes were not duplicates of Warhol's boxes but were, like Warhol's, duplicates of the original Brillo boxes? Would that have made them original Hultens? They would not be all that original of course, since they would be copies of Warhol's idea. But Warhol's idea had something to do with the power of copying. So Hulten's copies could be seen as a further application of Warhol's idea.
For good measure, the Brillo boxes in the picture above, from the collection of the Norton Simon Museum, are themselves duplicates, but ones that Warhol himself had fabricated — apt word, that — in 1969, which makes them "real" copies.
I could go on, but this is making my head hurt.
November 19, 2007 8:58
Can Coin Collectors Make Change?
Three organizations that represent coin collectors and dealers have joined to sue the U.S. State Department in federal court in Washington. Collectors were very put out this summer when State approved a request by Cyprus to ban the import of ancient coins from that island. Italy has made a similar request. Now the collectors want to compel the department to provide documents that would shed light on its decision making.
This is a suit that American museum professionals who have anything to do with ancient art, not just coins, will be watching closely. They've been unhappy for a long time with the willingness — sometimes it looks to them like the eagerness — of the U.S. government to side with nations that claim almost all antiquities found on their soil as part of their "cultural heritage" and that ask the State Department to ban all import of that material. For three years China has sought an import ban — without success so far — on practically every kind of Chinese art and artifact from prehistoric times to the early 20th century. That sweeping request in particular has Asian art curators and collectors worried.
Artworld professionals suspect that the U.S. is too quick to sacrifice the interests of American museums to help secure the cooperation of foreign nations in matters like drug trafficking and the war on terror. If that's true, the coin collector suit won't transform policy overnight. But it could force the government to open up a bit on how policy is made, and for American museums that alone would be a useful step.
November 16, 2007 3:10
More on Maier: Ship Being Held in Port
Men of the Docks, George Bellows, 1912 — Maier Museum
The fight over whether Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia should be allowed to sell four paintings from its Maier Museum — a bad idea — has started to seem like one of those silent movie cliff hangers. Today's episode ends with a victory for opponents of the sale.
First the backstory. The paintings are scheduled to be auctioned at Christie's in New York City on two dates, Nov. 19 and 29, though today's court action puts the sale in doubt. The four canvases include George Bellows' Men of the Docks, which has a pre-sale estimate of $25 to $35 million — serious money. A few weeks ago a group dedicated to keeping the paintings at the Maier got Lynchburg Circuit Court Judge Leyburn Mosby, Jr. to grant an injunction against the sale. But Judge Mosby also wanted the sale opponents to post a $10 million bond, which wasn't exactly the kind of money they had lying around. The logic behind the high bond was that the art market appears to be cooling off, which means that any delay in the sale, should it ultimately be approved, could mean that Randolph College gets lower prices for its paintings. The college would then be compensated for its losses from the bond money.
Right after Mosby issued his injunction, Randolph sought an expedited appeal with the Virginia Supreme Court. This afternoon it was that court that had its say. Not only did it refuse to lift the injunction, the court lowered the bond to $1 million, which the opponents can attempt to cover through something called a "surety bond", a more feasible proposition at the $1 million level.
For now the opponents are elated. But this cliff hanger isn't over yet.
November 16, 2007 9:21
More Talk: With John Richardson
Let's finish that conversation with Picasso biographer John Richardson.
LACAYO: You make it plain in your book that you don't agree with people who believe that Picasso had an affair with the wealthy American expatriate Sara Murphy. But for several years Picasso was infatuated in some way with Murphy and her husband Gerald, who were at the center of a social circle in the south of France that included F. Scott Fitzgerald. What was the attraction for him?
RICHARDSON: Compared to all the other people who were giving big parties and heading the social life in Paris, the Murphys had this wonderful American openess and frankness and lack of formality. That's what attracted him. When you think of what the Etienne de Beaumont balls were like, terribly pompous and formal and very louche, with shrieks coming from the changing rooms as they all dressed up as Louis XIV or whatever. The Murphys, down to earth Americans, were a godsend after these rather grotesquely decadent people.
LACAYO. What was the most difficult part about producing Volume III? You've been thinking about Picasso's art for more than fifty years but as a biographer you have to go in search of letters and papers and surviving acquaintances.
RICHARDSON: The first thing, which I've said more than once, is that whatever you say of Picasso, most of the time the reverse is also true, and you have to allow for that. I didn't want to limit myself to one interpretation of him or his work. Picasso liked it when people came up with some absolutely lunatic idea [about his work] and he hated it when professor x or y came up with an idea that they insisted was the one true interpretation.
As a practical matter one of the problems was that I couldn't get access to any of the correspondence with his mother and father. All of that is blocked.
LACAYO: You describe Picasso several times as sadistic. You mention that he liked his women to read de Sade and that part of the appeal for him of his young mistress Marie-Therese Walter was that, as you write, "she was very submissive and that, far from questioning her lover's sadistic demands, she did her best to comply with them." Do you mean to say that he was sadistic in his sexual practices?
RICHARDSON: We don't know exactly what they did in bed. I think the sadism was a matter of control rather physical beating up or whips.
LACAYO: Even if he wasn't literally sadistic, Picasso could be very hard on the women in his life.
RICHARDSON: Remember that Picasso is someone who was brought up in what was then the most misoygynist area of Western Europe. He was remarkably unmisogynistic compared to other people from the same background. But it's true that he demanded so much of women and that they sacrificed themselves on the altar of his art. After he died his wife committed suicide. Marie-Therese commited suicide. Dora Maar went slightly mad. Many of the women in his life were completely in love with Picasso until their dying day.
November 15, 2007 9:21
Big MoMA
Proposed Manhattan Tower by Jean Nouvel — Image: Jean Nouvel
Earlier this year, New York's Museum of Modern Art, which just underwent a big expansion three years ago, sold a parcel of property adjacent to the museum to the global real estate development company Hines. The idea was that whatever Hines built there would also include additional gallery space for MoMA. Today we learn that Hines will be putting up a 75-story hotel/apartment tower designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel.
As the Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff points out, the three floors of gallery space that the building will also house will give MoMA a chance to rethink the layout of its permanent collection and maybe also its architecture galleries, which right now definitely have the feel of afterthoughts. The Modern is still trying to make out the best ways of using its new Yoshio Taniguchi building. Having the Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi doodle the walls of the big atrium earlier this year finally brought some life to that space. The installation of a few large works by Martin Puryear that's there now works even better. I like the teasing way the topmost part of the slim tree trunk that sprouts from Puryear's Ad Astra pops into your vision like a cartoon tentacle on the museum's upper floors. Walk past one of Taniguchi's atrium apertures and suddenly there's this skinny tree top at eye level. It's just like Rilke said: "Oh tall tree in the ear!"
MoMA installation view. At right, Ad Astra, Martin Puryear, 2007 — Photo: Richard Barnes
Speaking of Puryear, as soon as a I saw the pattern of irregular diagonals on the exterior of Nouvel's tower, I was reminded of a Puryear that's on the top floor of MoMA right now.
Thicket, Martin Puryear, 1990 — Seattle Art Museum — Photo: Richard Barnes
No doubt this is not an important visual correspondence, but I can't seem to get it out of my head, so I'm passing the problem on to you.
November 13, 2007 8:43
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Rosetta Stone, Ptolemaic Period, 196 BC — The British Museum
Just two weeks ago Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, was telling me that Egypt's loan request to his museum for the Rosetta Stone, which it wants temporarily for the opening of Cairo's Grand Museum in 2012, was made in precisely the right way. (This in contrast to Greek attempts to borrow the Elgin Marbles, which get sticky because the Greeks won't acknowledge first that the Trustees of the British Museum are the marbles' rightful owners.) Let the record show that MacGregor wasn't prepared yet to say that his museum would say yes to the Egyptians either. Now Zawi Hawass, Egypt's very high profile culture minister, is complaining that the Brits are stalling.
I think this is called conducting negotiations in public.
November 13, 2007 7:36
Quick Talk: With John Richardson
Picasso with Olga in London, 1919 — Image: Popperfoto
I've been posting in recent days about Volume III of John Richardson's Picasso biography. Here's part of a conversation I had last week with Richardson himself. I'll put this up in two installments.
LACAYO: Volume III opens in 1917, just before Picasso met Olga Khokhlova, the Russian ballerina who became his first wife. You say that he fell in love with Olga, but soon after you're referring to his "ambivalent tenderness" towards her. And after their marriage in 1918 he seems to tire of her after just a few years. Was he ever really in love with her, or did he just feel it was time to marry? Not long before his courtship of Olga he had tried to marry his previous mistress, Irene Lagut, but she turned him down. Then suddenly he took up with Olga.
RICHARDSON: I think he was really in love with her, but in love in a diffferent way from the pre-1914 mistresses, which was a whole sort of Bohemian erotic thing. He'd fallen in love with the woman he wanted to be his wife and the mother of his children. The fact that she was respectable and wouldn't go to bed with him until they married was, in his mind, in her favor. Olga was a nice, ladylike, suitable wife.
LACAYO: Olga usually gets the blame for tempting Picasso out of Bohemia and into the world of the rich and famous, where she could play the role, as you write, of "a glamorous ballerina married to a charismatic celebrity". Plainly Picasso missed his old buddies, like Max Jacob, but was he such an unwilling participant in Olga's vision for him, with the big apartment, the servants and the tailored clothes? It seems that at least for a while he fell very willingly into the life she made for them.
RICHARDSON: He all too willlingly fell in with her bourgeoise approach to married life and to being the wife of a famous man. They both fell into this path. Picasso was always apologizing, saying he liked pork and beans and she liked caviar and pastries. That was not altogether honest on his part. He loved having a butler in white gloves and leading this comme il faut life in Paris.
LACAYO: What do you make of Picasso's move to classicism in these years. What was he looking for?
RICHARDSON: It was two or three things. I think he wanted to distance himself from Cubism because during World War I it had been a dirty word. I mentioned in Volume II that "Kub" was the name of a German soup concentrate and that lunatic chauvinists in France thought they [cubist paintings] were signs to the German army about where to invade. Cubism became such a dirty word during the war that he [Picasso] felt he had better get out of it. But of course he couldn't get out, because it was very much a part of his whole vision.
But also, the most avant garde thing he could do was to turn on his tracks and adopt classicism. It was a huge shock to his followers and I think he reveled in that. Also never forget that Picasso grew up in Malaga and when he was young there was a Spanish classicism, which Maillol, who a Basque, was also part of. So this was a way of going back to the world of his forefathers.
LACAYO: It's also interesting that the classicism Picasso had in mind was much wilder than the French idea. It wasn't classicism as Puvis de Chavannes understood it, as serene white marble. It was, as you say in your book, a Dionysian classicism, full of sex and violence.
RICHARDSON: Yes, it was a sort of Nietzschean idea — which also enabled him to express his erotic feelings, to eroticize his work.
LACAYO: So this wasn't John Ruskin's sedate Victorian idea of classicism.
RICHARDSON: It certainly wasn't.
November 12, 2007 1:58
Richardson on Picasso: Part III
Let's look briefly at a few other dimensions of the new third volume of John Richardson's ongoing biography of Picasso:
I think it's a safe bet that Richardson will be the last of the line of Picasso biographers who knew him personally, a line that includes Roland Penrose, Pierre Daix and even Francoise Gilot, Picasso's companion from 1944 to 1953, who wrote a best selling memoir. Richardson first met Picasso in 1953, when the artist was 72 and Richardson was living with the British collector and critic Douglas Cooper not far from Picasso in the south of France. He was in periodic contact with him until Picasso's death in 1973 and afterwards remained friends with Picasso's widow Jacqueline. Even in the first three volumes of his biography, which cover a period of Picasso's life before they met, Richardson writes about Picasso with the sweep and confidence that come from personal acquaintance.
No surprise — Richardson is constantly illuminating on the sources of Picasso's art. He may not solve the mystery of why Picasso was compelled in these years to shuttle among styles, but Richardson knows where to look for the sources of inspiration. Though Picasso continued all his life to deploy the Cubist language he had developed with Braque, his neo-classical phase in the 1920s puzzled a lot of his admirers. Richardson sees Picasso's encounter with the Farnese marbles in Naples as a crucial moment in that move, more important that Picasso's study of classical sculptures at the Louvre.
The giganticism of the Farnese Hercules, and the disproportions of his limbs....
Farnese Hercules, Roman copy of 4th century B.C. Greek original — Museo Archeoligico Nazionale, Naples
....would plainly work their way into Picasso's art years later.
Large Bather, Picasso, 1921 — Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris
Richardson also points to the 16th-century Mannerist sculpture by Jean Goujon and his workshop that Picasso encountered in Fontainebleau when he was spending a crucial summer there in 1921. Again, massive, disproportionate limbs and figures squeezed into confining spaces. Picasso was looking for a classicism with coiled energies, and he found it in those places.
Jean Cocteau, 1930 — Photo: George Hoyningen-Huene
Lastly, the strange case of Jean Cocteau. For most of this volume Richardson is much more negative towards Cocteau than he was in the Introduction to Volume I. In the new volume he treats Cocteau as vain, shallow, scheming and dilettantish, all of which he was, but also genuinely gifted. I like Truman Capote's catty five word judgment of Cocteau, delivered in the early 1950s: "vastly imaginative but vivaciously insincere."
And it was after all Cocteau who gave Picasso the crucial commission to work on his ballet Parade, an opportunity that enormously furthered Picasso's career and circle of contacts. Richardson uses the words gimmick or gimmicky no less than five times to describe the real world sound effects Cocteau wanted to add to Erik Satie's score for Parade, though it has always seemed to me that they would have predicted the noises-as-music in John Cage and even the Beatles. (Some "real" sounds, like the tapping of typewriter keys, survived in the score that was performed.) For anyone sufficiently interested in Cocteau, Francis Steegmuller's 1970 biography takes a more balanced view, still very skeptical towards Cocteau — it seems to be the only safe position to take on him — but more comprehensive in his acknowledgment of the man's gifts.
I caught up with Richardson by phone last week. I'll start posting that conversation tomorrow.
November 12, 2007 8:47
Norman Mailer: 1923 - 2007
Norman Mailer in 1948 — Photo: Library of Congress. Photographer: Carl Van Vechten
I don't regularly review books at Time or discuss writers on this blog, but I don't think anyone needs to wonder why I would make an exception for this guy.
November 9, 2007 4:26
Last Talk: With Neil MacGregor
Scenes from east frieze of the Parthenon, circa 438-432 BC — Elgin Collection/The British Museum
Let's finish up that conversation with the director of the British Museum.
LACAYO: Do you worry about the future of what's sometimes called the universal museum, the museum, like your own, that features objects from as many cultures as possible? It would seem that such museums would be threatened as more nations demand the return of artifacts that were taken from their territory in the past. It's not just the Elgin Marbles. For instance, the Egyptians have said they would like your museum to return the Rosetta Stone.
MacGREGOR: The Egyptians have never questioned the Trustees' ownership of the Stone. The Trustees have received a letter from the Egyptians asking the museum to lend the Stone for a number of months. So it's a perfectly ordinary loan request, of exactly the sort that has never been received for the Parthenon sculptures. The Egyptians have started from the position that legal title is absolutely clear and that they want to borrow it like anything else and then return it.
As for the universal museum, is it endangered? No, I think the need for a museum where the world can look at itself as one is greater than ever. The British Museum was the first great museum to aim at bringing to the world things from all over the world. It's an 18th century ideal, an Enlightenment ideal — a pre-imperial ideal. The museum was founded in 1753, before the British Empire really gets going. The idea of having, in one building, things from the whole world, there for free, for the whole world to study, is just as important now as it was 250 years ago.
It's very interesting that the French government, in their discussions with Abu Dhabi — [about French museum involvement in the culture complex planned there] — is using exactly the same language. What they want to offer Abu Dhabi is a universal museum. And that is what Abu Dhabi wants. When they opened the new Capital Museum in Beijing, they opened it with "Treasures of the World's Cultures", an exhibition from the British Museum showing the cultures of the world other than China. Museums in China have very little in them that was not made in China, so for most Chinese it is very hard to see things made outside.
LACAYO: You're often mentioned as a posible successor to Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, whenever Philippe retires. You've said you wouldn't want the job because you have things still to do at the British Museum. What are those?
MacGREGOR: I would like to make the museum a place where the world can tell its histories, to allow the whole world to think about its oneness, how it interconnects. Over the next five years, in the run-up to the Olympics, we want to embark on a series of projects about the histories of the world as told through the objects in the British Museum. One aim is to make the museum more available on line. We now have about 300,000 objects in photographs documented on line. We want to make it usable throughout the world, to make the museum what Parliament set it up to be, a resource for the studious and curious of all nations.
Until about the 1960s, when air transport and packing changed, the question for most objects was where should they be. That's not now the case. The fact that Assyrian sculptures can travel to Shanghai, and allow the Chinese for the first time ever to see the civilization of the Mesopotamia, and then come back, changes the assumptions of that argument very profoundly. [Developments in] the technology of transport mean that those old discussions about whether an object should be in place A or place B are old discussions. Objects can be, over time, in many places.
LACAYO: In that case, would you agree to an actual sharing arrangement with Greece for the Elgin marbles?
MacGREGOR: We already have a sharing agreement — we each have about half.
November 9, 2007 9:37
The Art Market Blues
Diamond (Blue), Jeff Koons, 1994-2005 — Photo: Christie's
That big blue Jeff Koons diamond, the one that's sitting outside of Christie's this week as a kind of carnival barker for their upcoming postwar and contemporary sales — is it looking just a little ironic today? As you may have heard, everybody in the art marketing business is a little nervous right now about where the business is headed. Christie's had an okay Impressionist and modern sale on Tuesday, but Sotheby's equivalent sale the next night was a loser, with 20 of its 76 offerings failing to move. Those included a Van Gogh for which Sotheby's had given the sellers a guarantee, meaning the auction house buys the painting if no one else does, an increasingly common practice and one that can get inconvenient to the house if a whole lot of guaranteed merchandise doesn't move. The Van Gogh, for instance, had a low estimate of $28 million. (Exactly how much Sotheby's guaranteed the seller is something we don't know. Auction houses don't disclose things like that. For a publicly traded company like Sotheby's that doesn't seem quite sporting.) In any event, Wall Street, which has been jumpy lately, took a dim view of all this. Yesterday Sotheby's stock dropped by more than 28%. Think of it as a one percent drop for each million the Van Gogh didn't get. I quickly rummaged through my 401(K) to make sure I wasn't invested in Sotheby's. What a relief — nothing in there but blue chips like General Motors.
All of this as background to the piece in yesterday's New York Times about the Louis Vuitton boutique that's smack in the middle of the Takashi Murakami show at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. It's a place where anyone can buy one of those Vuitton handbags with Murakami doodads on it, or anyone with a thousand or so dollars to spare. In another of those counter-intuitive high/low marketing moves, Vuitton also has a new deal now with Richard Prince. Can we look forward to calfskin clutch bags appliqued with big ta-ta biker babes?
The museum doesn't share in proceeds from the shop — that could endanger its non-profit status — and LAMOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel has been assuring everybody for months that the boutique is an essential aspect of the Murakami experience. Which has always left me wondering if that means the complete Murakami experience is only available to people who can spend nine hundred on a handbag. Should the rest of us just sort of press our noses up against the window? Will Murakami end up as the 21st century equivalent of Bouguereau, once the favorite painter of the 19th-century beau monde, now an art historical joke? Just asking.
In any event I thought Simon Doonan, creative director of Barney's and all purpose wit, had the best take on it. Artsy bling like those Murakami/Vuitton bags are just a way of signifying that your mindless consumerism is more interesting — you know, more ironic — than everybody else's mindless consumerism. As Doonan told the Times: “They say: ‘I’m not just a shopper. I’m a super groovy shopper.’”
Since I'm throwing in a lot of links today, here's one more that's relevant, from the British paper The Guardian — Rick Woodward's very astute reading of the big Dutch painting show at the Met in New York, the last word in donor servicing.
November 8, 2007 9:46
Richardson's Picasso: Part II
Girl Before A Mirror, Picasso, 1932 — Museum of Modern Art, New York
Yesterday I laid out the broad themes of the new third volume of John Richardson's ongoing biography of Picasso. Over the next day or two I want to look at a few of his topics a little more closely.
It's a truism of Picasso studies, and also a truth, that his art and life were inseparable, and that much of his art can be divided into periods that coincided with particular women in his life. In Richardson's third volume, which covers the years from 1917 to 1932, those women were Picasso's first wife Olga and the great infatuation of his middle age, the very youthful Marie-Therese Walter, a relationship that was kept secret for decades, even after she gave birth to his daughter Maya.
How youthful? That's the question. Picasso, who had married Olga in 1918, met Marie-Therese in the late 1920s. The controversy is over just what year that was. For a long time the official story was that he encountered her outside the Galeries Lafayette department store in January 1927. That would have meant he was 45 and she was seventeen and a half. This is the version that Marie-Therese herself provided to Life magazine in 1968, four years after her name had become public for the first time in the memoirs of Picasso's former companion Francoise Gilot. In the 1970s Marie-Therese repeated the same story twice to art historian interviewers.
Marie-Therese hanged herself in 1977. One year later her older sister Jeanne came forward with the claim that in fact Marie-Therese had met Picasso not in 1927 but in 1925, when she was still fifteen. That would have made him not just an adulterer but a pedophile. In 1988 the sister's claim found its way into a book that caught the attention of scholars, who then began to find what they thought might be images of Marie-Therese in Picasso's work as early as 1925. Even Jack Flam, one of the best known experts on Matisse, supported the 1925 date four years ago in his book Matisse and Picasso.
Richardson isn't buying it. He insists that Jeanne was motivated by sibling rivalry. (She and Marie-Therese disliked each other.) He tells us that Diana Widmaier Picasso, the grand daughter of Marie-Therese and Picasso, has also confirmed that in January 1925 Marie-Therese was away at school in Germany. Then there's the letter Marie-Therese sent to Picasso in July 1944, when she was 35, to celebrate "the 17th anniversary of your birth in me." (You do the math.) And finally there's also a Marie-Therese scribble in the margin of one of Picasso's poems. "Just to say that I have loved you for nine years..." It's dated January 8, 1936.
Does it matter? Certainly it matters to whether we think of Picasso as a pedophile, or merely as a standard issue horny middle aged man. Older men chasing girls on the brink of 18 may look silly. But older men chasing 15-year-olds look sinister. I find Richardson's evidence persuasive, but I'll be interested to see how other Picasso specialists respond.
The Dream, Picasso, 1932 — Steve and Elaine Wynn Collection
November 7, 2007 4:18
More Talk With: Neil MacGregor
Marble metope from the south face of the Parthenon/circa 440 B.C. — Photo: Elgin Collection/British Museum
Let's continue that conversation about the Elgin marbles with the director of the British Museum.
LACAYO: Your museum has repeatedly taken the position that it will not discuss even the possibility of a temporary loan of some of the marbles unless the Greek authorities will acknowledge that the Trustees of the British Museum are their lawful owners. What if the Greeks were suddenly to surprise you and do just that? Would the museum then agree to enter into some kind of talks?
MacGREGOR: No Trustees in the Anglo-Saxon legal system could lend to people who didn't recognize their title. This is the duty of Trustees. The Trustees have always made it clear that they regard the collection as being a resource from which they like to lend and they want to lend. There are interesting examples in just the last year of loans of major parts of the collection — of Assyrian art in Shanghai, an exhibition now going to Boston, and then "Treasures of the World's Cultures" in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
But there has never been a request [from Greece] for a time limited loan for part of the Parthenon sculptures. The Trustees have said they would not consider the removal of all the marbles at one time, just as they would not consider the removal of all the Assyrian sculptures at one time. But their position is absolutely coherent. They would consider a request, and it would then be a question of how long the request was for, whether the objects were fit to travel, all those things.
LACAYO: If the Greeks do not budge on that central question — acknowledging ownership by the Trustees, then presumably there can't be any movement forward.
MacGREGOR: Trustees are obliged to behave in a certain way. The conversation cannot even begin until that has happened.
LACAYO: Other than conversations with Dimitrios Pandermalis, who heads the New Acropolis Museum project, have you had contacts with the Greek side on this question?
MacGREGOR: Some years ago Dr. Venizelos, who was then culture minister of Greece, came to the museum to speak to the then-chairman of the Trustees and myself. We raised the point that a precondition for a temporary loan of some objects would have to be the recognition of title. We put that to him and he then formally published a letter in the Sunday Times saying that the Greek government does not recognize that the Trustees are the legal owners. We were trying to find a middle ground on which some kind of discussion could be had, but we can't, a