February 29, 2008 2:58

More on the Guggenheim Job Search

In today's New York Sun, Kate Taylor has a round up of the most-mentioned candidates to succeed Tom Krens at the Guggenheim. As I mentioned yesterday, LACMA's Michael Govan is much mentioned among the mentioners. And Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer In L.A., who I thought I was being original in suggesting for "the short list", turns out to be, says Taylor, "on everyone's short list."

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February 27, 2008 8:10

Tom Krens Leaves the Guggenheim

Tom Krens, the man behind the McGuggenheim, the museum as global franchise, is moving on. The Guggenheim board announced yesterday that Krens would retire later this year as director of the Guggenheim Foundation, a title he took on three years ago after he stepped aside as director of the museum. That job then went to Lisa Dennison, who in turn left last summer to become an executive at Sotheby's. Since then her job has been filled by an acting director.

Carol Vogel's piece in the New York Times puts the dynamic behind the Krens resignation this way:

Curators and other museum directors have been saying privately for months that the Guggenheim has been unable to fill [Dennison's] job.... They said that candidates who were informally approached were not shy about communicating that they would not work under Mr. Krens, who is known as a difficult personality.

And this way:

In resigning as director Mr. Krens is clearly taking his cue from the Guggenheim’s board. “This is something that Tom and the board decided together,” Jennifer Stockman, the board’s president, said.

Krens' contribution to the world of museum practice was the franchise. It was an idea that had been evolving for a while. Back when Tom Hoving was director of the Metropolitan Museum he toyed with the idea of having the Met collect fees as a consultant to other museums. But it was Krens, who had an M.B.A. from Yale, who pushed the Guggenheim into the world of brand name spinoffs, talking all the while about "brand awareness". Except for the huge success of the Guggenheim Bilbao, an indisputable achievement and one of the greatest buildings in the world, most of them didn't spin off the way he hoped. Las Vegas — tanked. Mexico — didn't happen. Brazil — ditto.

Meanwhile, Krens presided over some of the most lamentable exhibitions the Guggenheim ever did, including the infamous wet kiss to Giorgio Armani in 2001, a top to bottom salesroom exercise for Armani that happened to coincide with a reported $15 million gift from Armani to the museum. But the Krens paradigm of museum expansion is now out there. It's been picked up by the Louvre — which will be branding one of the several new museums planned for Abu Dhabi — and also by the Pompidou and the Tate. And even after he leaves the foundation Krens will still oversee the construction of another Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim, also in Abu Dhabi.

Meanwhile the Guggenheim has decided to return to its former management structure, in which the foundation and the museum will both be headed by one person. It's a bad time to be looking for somebody to fill that top job. Some of the most obvious candidates are otherwise engaged. Michael Govan, whose years with the Dia Foundation gave him credibility and connections in the world of contemporary art, still has a big agenda to complete as director of the evolving Los Angeles County Museum. (If the Guggenheim offers him the job he should take it anyway. Let somebody else deal with Eli Broad.) And Kathy Halbreich, the former director of the Walker Art Center who just moved over to the Museum of Modern Art — well, she just moved over to the Museum of Modern Art. For my money, I think it's time to put Ann Philbin on these top job short lists. In her nine years at the Hammer Museum in L.A. she's been crucial in turning what once might as well have been the Hammer Mausoleum into a credible institution.

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February 27, 2008 8:51

Death and Cameras

Susan Sontag, Peter Hujar, 1975 / © THE PETER HUJAR ARCHIVE

Recently I finished Swimming in a Sea of Death, David Rieff's memoir about the final illness of his mother, the writer Susan Sontag. She was 73 when she died late in 2004 of a virulent form of leukemia. Towards the end of his book Rieff wonders whether, instead of suffering that prolonged ordeal, it might have been better if his mother had died abruptly of something like a heart attack. At least that way, he writes:

She would not have had the time to mourn herself and to become physically unrecognizable at the end even to herself, let along humiliated posthumously by being "memorialized" that way in those carnival images of celebrity death taken by Annie Leibovitz.

The "carnival images" he's referring to are the pictures that Leibovitz included in her book and traveling exhibition, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005. Leibovitz was Sontag's companion for 15 years. ("On again, off again companion" is Rieff's term.) In the exhibition and book she included a number of photographs of Sontag, including some from the last year of her life, when she was being devoured by her illness. One shows her on a rolling stretcher after being removed from a private plane after a hospital stay. There's another of her in death, laid out in a pleated Fortuny gown that Leibovitz says Sontag loved. And there are others.

A little background. Over a period of about a month in the summer of 1988 I met with Sontag once a week to profile her for Time. I was almost literally a lifelong admirer, since high school, when I had come across the cheap paperback edition of Against Interpretation, her famous first collection of essays. (Yes, there was once a world in which a collection of essays on "difficult", mostly European artists and writers would be issued in a mass market edition.) She was intimidating, but also gracious, funny and patient.

Meanwhile I've never been a great fan of Leibovitz's. Most of her pictures strike me as ingenious and all too efficient in the way they wrap up a celebrity into some high pitched version of the familiar package that they are. They tell us what we already know and they tell it to a T.

All the same, the subdued black and white pictures that Leibovitz took of Sontag in illness and death didn't strike me in quite the same way that they did her son. "Carnival" isn't the word for them. It's the word for the context in which they were shown — a big museum exhibition that was Leibovitz's dual-pronged bid for status. On the one hand she was showing black and white pictures of Sontag and of her own family, including her aging parents — her father died a few weeks after Sontag — and also of Sarajevo, where Sontag had gone in the 1990s when it was under siege, and where Leibovitz followed for a time.

But this was an Annie Leibovitz show, so all around there was also plenty of her assignment work for Vanity Fair, big glossy color shots of Nicole Kidman and Brad Pitt and Demi Moore and so on. The black and white portion of the show was there to insist that she was more than Hollywood's court photographer, and in that context the pictures of Sontag in her final days felt like a career move, another part of her bid for seriousness, no matter how genuine her grief, which I have no reason to question. And it was the context that turned the pictures into images of "celebrity death". When I read Rieff's bitter words I thought of something Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor — that the worst legacy of Romanticism was the notion of "the interesting".

Leibovitz ended her show with a portrait of Richard Avedon, who was one of the great 20th century portraitists of any kind, and it was no mystery why she did. Avedon had also made his name first with fashion and glamor photography, and never put that aside, but over the years moved into another kind of picture making that operated along very different nerve paths. An artist immersed in the fashion world, he understood that we would carry our recollections of his fashion shots — all that superabundance of vanitas — over to the pitiless black and white portraits he made of celebrities and ordinary people that inspected every wrinkle and sag with a very cold eye. And Avedon also photographed his own dwindling father when he was dying from cancer.

Avedon's most glamorous and worldly pictures gave a very deliberate context to his meditations on decay and death. Leibovitz wanted her "serious" pictures to be understood in the light of his. And if they had been better — if any of her work had been better — they might have been.

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February 26, 2008 9:49

Machu Picchu: Sticky Wicket?

Over the months that I was working on Time's story this week about the antiquities wars, one thing that struck me was that last September's "memo of understanding" between Yale University and Peru to return the Machu Picchu artifacts, which was supposed to be finalized within 60 days, never was. Now we're getting a glimpse of how messy this could still get. Last Saturday the New York Times ran a stinging Op-Ed piece by Eliane Karp de Toledo, archaeologist and former first lady of Peru, who was a prime mover in Peru's campaign to retrieve the artifacts.

One of her complaints is that Peru would not be granted clear title to to the entire collection, because the tentative agreement provides for Yale to keep a portion of "non-museum quality" artifacts for research purposes for 99 years. The best reporting on this story has been coming from Paul Needham at the Yale Daily News , which last month obtained from Karp de Toledo a copy of the confidential memo between Yale and Peru. A piece he wrote last week is particularly good. One crucial passage:

The question some Peruvians familiar with the negotiations have been asking, then, is what qualifies as a museum-quality piece and what does not. The University gave Yale archaeology professor Richard burger, who co-curated an exhibit of the artifacts at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, the task of classifying the objects.

But the larger context here is all about nationalist electoral politics, the crucial context for understanding many antiquities disputes, however legitimate the source nation's claims may be. The negotiations to return the Machu Picchu artifacts began under the presidency of Karp de Toledo's husband Alejandro Toledo, who made issues of Peru's indigenous peoples a priority of his presidency. But the memo of understanding wasn't concluded until Peru's current president, Alan Garcia, came to office in 2006. In her Times Op-Ed, Karp de Toledo takes a swing at Garcia, saying he's "frankly hostile to indigenous matters." Peru's constitution bars its presidents from serving two consecutive terms, but they can run again after their successor concludes his or her term. So what we're seeing here isn't just a dispute over Incan artifacts. It's a warm up for Toledo's next presidential run, no?

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February 25, 2008 9:48

The Maysles Brothers and The Gates

The Gates, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005 / PHOTOS: RICHARD LACAYO

I caught an advance look at The Gates, a documentary about the 2005 Christo and Jeanne-Claude project in New York's Central Park. It has its television premiere on HBO on Tuesday, Feb. 26, at 10 p.m. Then it's repeated on various dates and times through March.

The credits on this film get complicated. Albert Maysles and his late brother David are credited as co-directors with cinematographer/editor Antonio Ferrera and editor Matthew Prinzing. But it's very much a film with the Maysles stamp, that narrator-free cinema verite style that's now so universal we forget how much of it can be traced back to them and their early films like Salesman and Gimme Shelter. And their connection to Christo and J-C — gee, I just noticed, that's quite a messianic pairing of names there — goes back to a film the brothers made about the Valley Curtain project in Colorado in the early 1970s.

I first met the Maysles on the Cornell campus a few years later, when they came up to preview Grey Gardens, their documentary about the Beales, the phantasmagorical mother and daughter shut-ins. (Running into daughter Edie one night on a disco dance floor — she was wearing a headscarf and earmuffs — remains for me a cherished memory of Manhattan in the late '70s. I'm not sure why.) The Maysles invited me to visit them in New York. Somewhat to their surprise, I think, I actually showed up at their door one day, and they were kind enough to let me watch them edit their next film. It turned out to be Running Fence, about the Christo-J.C. project that stretched a fabric barrier across 25 miles of rolling hills in northern California.

What I realized even then was that Christo and Jeanne-Claude were a perfect Maysles subject. They've always insisted that the social processes involved in getting their work approved and built — all the bureaucratic hassles, community forums and press conferences — were an integral part of their art. And the Maysles love all those processes. What else after all is the whole middle section of Gimme Shelter about? The scenes where the Rolling Stones and their attorney Melvin Belli struggle to get permits for the outdoor concert that eventually ended up at Altamont are as crucial to the film as the concert segments. More crucial actually, since you hardly see any of the Altamont performances.

In The Gates there's also a well connected lawyer, the eminent Theodore Kheel, who shepherds Christo and J.C. though the New York power structure in the same way that Belli works the phones in Gimme Shelter. We first see Kheel at a kind of launch party for The Gates in 2005. But the film then does a fade back to a much younger Kheel meeting Christo and J-C for the first time in his offices in the late 1970s, when the pair made their first abortive attempt to get The Gates approved. It's the rare documentary that can dissolve back 25 years and still be showing you footage shot by its own creators, but the Maysles started following the Gates project that long ago. (David died in 1987; Albert, who's now 81, went on to make many more films.)

The Gates, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005

The other thing that makes the Maysles style perfect for The Gates is what you could call their gift for quiet lyricism. They were always good at those moments of vagrant beauty that a lot of documentaries don't have time for — think of any of the offhand shots of cats padding around in Grey Gardens — but which are essential to communicating the strange power, the sheer enigmatic pageantry, of The Gates. In their beckoning but impenetrable Other-ness, their aloofness from whatever meanings we would try to attach to them, The Gates always reminded me of that jar in the Wallace Stevens poem, the one that "did not give of bird or bush/like nothing else in Tennessee." They came down three years ago this week. The Gates — which ends with a deadpan funny New York joke — commemorates them in just the right way. It's a work of art about a work of art.

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February 22, 2008 9:31

Antiquities — The Next Chapter

Victorious Youth/ J. Paul Getty Museum — Villa Collection

The disputed Greek boy up there seems to be puzzling over where he's headed next. With the return of scores of antiquities from U.S. museums, the Italian campaign to retrieve smuggled artifacts may have reached, to use an Italian word, its crescendo. But the wider struggle among source nations, archaeologists and museums goes on. Just this week the Italians showed off about 400 more looted artifacts that they've recovered. And Greece announced that it finally has a rough opening date — this fall — for the New Acropolis Museum that I previewed in Athens last October, the latest bid in its effort to retrieve the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum.

The whole fight is also evolving, as museums try to formulate new responses to a bristling new world. So this seemed to me like a good time to review where things stand now, and to synthesize some of the conversations I've had over the past year with various players. Here's a link to my piece in the new issue of Time.

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February 21, 2008 8:49

News, Notes and Blogroll Update

A lot of the art news this week is in courtrooms.

The slow motion trial of former Getty antiquities curator Marion True and dealer Robert Hecht trundles on in Rome.

And Fisk University is back in Davidson County Chancery Court. Having failed to sell part of its Alfred Stieglitz Collection, which was a gift to the school from Stieglitz's widow Georgia O'Keeffe, Fisk is now defending itself against the Georgia 'O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.

Some recap — the O'Keeffe Museum had sought earlier to A) block Fisk's attempted sale of O'Keeffe's Radiator Building — Night, New York and then B) tried buy the painting itself from Fisk at an under market-value price. Now it's arguing that the entire Siteglitz Collection should be handed over to the museum because Fisk has repeatedly violated the conditions of O'Keefe's bequest. The trial is expected to end today, with a ruling a few days from now. UPDATE: Fisk President Hazel O'Leary told the court yesterday that her school now has the money to renovate its Carl Van Vechten Gallery, where the collection — presently in storage — is usually kept.

I've said before that Fisk should not sell any of the Stieglitz Collection. Campus museums aren't piggy banks for a school's general revenue flow. All the same, if the O'Keeffe Museum gets its way, it seems to me it will be a Pyrrhic victory in public relations terms. Does the O'Keeffe really want to be known as the museum that seized an entire collection, an important teaching resource, from an historically black university?

Antiquities, trials, lawsuits — all of this reminded me that I've been meaning to add a few more links to the blogroll. I'll have them up by the end of the week, but meanwhile here they are:

At a time when it helps to have a law degree to follow developments in the art world, the always well informed and readable Donn Zaretsky just happens to have one. His Art Law Blog is an alert and knowledgeable guide for the perplexed.

On antiquities, there are two indispensable defenders of the archaeological position. Looting Matters is the commentary platform of David Gill, a professor of archaeology at the University of Wales, Swansea and former curator at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Illicit Cultural Property is run by the vigilant Derek Fincham, who is completing a doctorate at the University of Aberdeen, researching the illicit trade in cultural property. Whenever there's a controversy over antiquities — this would be just about every day — those are the sites where I go for a better understanding of how the archaeologists are seeing it.

The museum world, which is still a bit shell shocked by the successful reclamation campaigns of the last year or so, doesn't seem to have a blog site that represents its views in the same way. Maybe that's because museum directors and curators are still reformulating their responses to the world they now find themselves operating in. A book like Who Owns Antiquities?, the forthcoming volume from Jim Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, is part of that process. But if any museum has woken up to the usefulness of a daily blog that reacts quickly to the news in these areas, I haven't found it yet.

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February 20, 2008 9:07

Sex and the City

One other thing that happened while I was away last week. The people who run the London Underground — that's subway in American — reversed themselves and decided to lift a ban they had imposed earlier on an ad for an upcoming exhibition of work by Lucas Cranach the Elder at London's Royal Academy. The ad caused problems because it featured a nude Venus that Cranach painted in 1532. Full frontal nudity, even on a woman who's close to 500 years old, is a violation of London Transport guidelines for advertising imagery.

Want a peek?

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February 18, 2008 7:35

Back at the Job

A few things happened while I was away for a week. I'll comment on two.

First — I don't think I'll need to read another word for a while about the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum in L.A., which debuted to middling reviews for both the opening exhibition and for the Renzo Piano building. All the same, one related controversy stayed with me. The Guerrilla Girls — indispensable artworld watchdogs — denounced the opening show for being overwhelmingly white (97%) and male (87%) in its selection of artists. (Which is another way of saying only three of the 27 artists are women — Jenny Holzer, Susan Rothenberg and Cindy Sherman — and just one, Jean-Michel Basquiat, is black.) The Broad Foundation, which supplied most of the works in the show, replied that if you count individual works instead of artists, 33% were by women, though that's thanks mostly to a hefty sampling of 49 Sherman photographs in a show with a total of 180 works. Here's the breakdown.

Okay, but I'm still confounded by that 87% number. Parity is no issue in historical survey shows and never will be. There are only so many Artemisia Gentileschis. But in the realm of contemporary art, not only is there no shortage of important women, but a good case could be made that most of the best artists are women. What should we make of a show that has room for David Salle, but not for Elizabeth Murray, Cecily Brown, Kiki Smith or Kara Walker? (Who are all collected by the Broad Foundation.) Or for Magdalena Abakanowicz, Ghada Amer, Janet Cardiff, Sophie Calle or Vija Celmins? (Who aren't but probably should be.) The only way to get to an imbalance like 87% in a show of contemporary art is to turn the thing into a strenuous exercise in male affirmative action.

Then there's the big theft at Zurich's E. G. Buehrle Museum, which appears to be headed for a happy ending. Everyone has already trotted out their pieces on art thieves. They don't steal on assignment, they're dumb, etc. I trotted mine out four years ago when Munch's The Scream was stolen. As always when there's a big art heist, a lot of the media stories referred back to the massive and still unsolved 1990 robbery of Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. That gave me an excuse to revisit Martin Scorsese's The Departed. Why? Because Frank Costello, the state-of-the-art wack job played by Jack Nicholson in that film, is based largely on Whitey Bulger, the Boston-area felon who's been mentioned as a suspect in the Gardner case. All I can say is, if Bulger was behind it, I hope he didn't do to the Vermeer what Nicholson did to Leonardo di Caprio's hand.

Does this mean I can write off that two-disk DVD as a business expense? I'm sure Whitey would have.

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February 14, 2008 12:57

Rose How'd You Get So Red?

The Gray Fort, Jim Dine — Karolyn Sherwood Gallery

As I mentioned just before heading out on vacation, I'll only be posting once this week, today, to repeat a Valentine's Day post from last year about the color red. I figured it would be a post that wasn't really on the news, but as it turns out the religious authorities of Saudi Arabia have made my color newsworthy this week by banning red flowers and red gift shop items in an attempt to crack down on Valentine's Day. I guess that's what happens when you let something with a name like the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice get the upper hand.

Anyway, on to the post from last year. And don't let that Commission know anything about this:

Here it is Valentine's Day, which inevitably got me thinking about the color red and the pictures that were burned into the collective memory by way of that color. (Love being what it is sometimes, maybe it's appropriate that cadmium red, the richest variety, is classified in chemical terms as a toxic heavy metal.) I started to flip back through my internal image bank to call up pictures that deploy red to maximum effect..

Once you start moving down this road, you can go on pretty much forever, which is why I decided to limit myself here to ten examples. So this is a Valentine's Day shout out to my partner Jeff and an all purpose appreciation of red's redness and of all things red, including Prince's Little Red Corvette the third and best part of Krzysztof Kieslowski's great film trilogy and my good old alma mater, Big Red.

Let's start with van Eyck. While it's not true, as they once taught in art history classes, that he invented oil painting, he brought it to its first great fulfillment by learning how to build up thin layers of oil glaze that gave his colors the power of deep saturation. That's why the red of this turban, when you see the actual picture, imprints itself so powerfully into your sense memory.


Man in a Red Turban, Jan van Eyck — National Gallery, London

The techniques of oil glazing were brought to Italy by the Italian painter Antonello da Messina, who learned them from van Eyck. That development catalyzed the move from tempera to oil among Italians, who needed heavy supplies of red to paint all those ecclesiastical garments.

Cardinal Pietro Bembo, Titian — National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Samuel Kress Collection

Caravaggio sometimes used the device of an abstract image in the upper part of his canvas as a counterweight to the drama below. (Think of the huge shadowy window in the upper half of The Calling of St. Matthew.) In this canvas, he turned a flourish of red drapery into one of the greatest dramatic gestures in the history of painting.

Death of the Virgin, Caravaggio — Louvre, Paris

Eighteenth century British portraiture is full of redcoats. According to Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color, an indispensable book by Philip Ball, Reynolds never entirely mastered the art of mixing pigments. As a consequence his reds often faded quickly. For whatever reason that wasn't the fate of Capt. Orne's Coldstream Guard uniform in this unforgettable portrait. And it's a good thing for him it didn't. That coat is the only thing that lets him hold his ground in the picture against the magnificent presence of his horse.

Captain Robert Orne, Joshua Reynolds — National Gallery, London

I include the Manet here because the intensity of those red pants have always made them seem to me like a color field painting all on their own.

Fifer, Edouard Manet — Musee D'Orsay, Paris

The Italian Futurists were introduced to the divisionist color theories of Seurat by way of the writings of a painter named Gaetano Previati. Boccioni then adapted those to his own more muscular purposes, for which the energies of red were perfectly suited.

The City Rises, Umberto Boccioni — The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Matisse inherited the use of intense cadmium red, a 19th century invention, from the Impressionists. The critic John Rusell was right when he called this canvas "a crucial moment in the history of painting. Color is on top, and making the most of it."

The Red Studio, Henri Matisse — Museum of Modern Art, New York

With the beginning of color field painting in the 1950s, the subordination of form to color begun by Matisse was complete. Newman's immense canvas, which engulfs any viewer, is a complete immersion into the experience of red.

Vir Heroicus Sublimus, Barnett Newman — Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller

Howard Hodgkin's paintings are frequently about the tension between intimate spaces and explosive feeling. Here the feeling spills beyond its confines and turns the whole space into a powerful red chamber.

Dinner in Palazzo Albrizzi, Howard Hodgkin — Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

I'll go out with this one, a 1981 sculpture by Anish Kapoor that uses pure red pigment. It doesn't get much redder than this.

As If to Celebrate, I Discovered a Mountain Blooming with Red Flowers, Anish Kapoor — Tate Collection

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February 8, 2008 4:40

I'm Outta Here

I'm on vacation next week, visiting family. During that time I'll only post once, on Valentine's Day, to re-run my long post from last year on the color red. When you've got your own blog, you can do things like that.

Meanwhile I want to recommend Christopher Knight's review in yesterday's L.A. Times of BCAM, the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum on the campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which opens Feb 16. I haven't seen the opening show, so I don't know that I would agree with what Knight has to say on all the particulars, but his general summing up of the disadvantages for museums and museum visitors of a world where collectors make the rules is required reading.

Most notable statistic:

Of 176 works on three floors, 139 are by artists who have shown with the same gallery -- Gagosian, commonly considered today's leading commercial powerhouse. That's nearly 80%. BCAM turns out to be GCAM. Such a narrow vision feels insecure, more investment deal than adventure.

Okay, back on Tuesday, Feb. 19.

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February 7, 2008 3:38

Penn Central

Glazier, Irving Penn, 1950 /IRVING PENN/CONDE NAST

The news that the Getty has purchased a complete master set of Irving Penn's series The Small Trades — 252 portraits of working people that he made in the 1950s — reminded me of one of the pictures in the show of Penn portraits of artists and writers that's currently at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. As the Morgan points out in a wall card, for one of his writer portraits — of T.S. Eliot of all people — Penn used the same backdrop he was using for the Small Trades series, as though poet were just one more working stiff occupation. Which some days it must be. God knows critic is.

Penn of course got some of the inspiration for his Small Trades series from August Sander's portraits of characteristic Germans. But what I had more fun with on this trip was taking note of the way Penn rummaged around in the history of painting. There was, for instance, a portrait of Man Ray I had never seen before (and can't reproduce here because I can't track it down on line) with an obvious debt to Rembrandt and Hals.

And then there's his famous portrait of Cocteau...

Jean Cocteau, Irving Penn, 1948/ IRVING PENN/CONDE NAST

that seems to conflate the hand-on-hip pose from Van Dyck's Portrait of Charles I Hunting...

Portrait of Charles I Hunting, Anthony van Dyck, 1635 /MUSEE DU LOUVRE

...with the contortions of any number of Schieles, but especially his self portrait from 1917. (Which would make the Cocteau portrait a very interesting blend of cocksure composure and crazy anxiety.)

Crouching Male Nude (Self-Portrait), Egon Schiele, 1917

And what struck me for the first time was that Penn's great blowsy portrait of Colette, who looks like an unmade bed....

Colette, Irving Penn, 1951 /IRVING PENN/CONDE NAST

...might owe something to Ingres' portrait of Monsieur Bertin, the ultimate bourgeois.

Portrait of Louis-Francois Bertin, Ingres. 1832 / MUSEE DU LOUVRE

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February 7, 2008 12:04

Home Away from Home

Toxic Schizophrenia/Hyper Version, Tim Noble and Sue Webster / MCA DENVER

I see that the first American site specific commission for the British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster is Toxic Schizophrenia/Hyper Version, the largest yet variation on their signature heart and dagger motif. It recently went up in front of the new Museum of Contemprary Art in Denver that was designed by the Nigerian-British architect David Adjaye. Is it just a coincidence that Noble and Webster are old friends of Adjaye's who gave him one of his first highly-publicized commissions, their house and studio in London?

Just asking.

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February 5, 2008 4:36

The Old Way of Finding a New Met Director

With the Metropolitan Museum preparing to choose a successor to Philippe de Montebello, I've been re-reading Making the Mummies Dance, the jaunty — make that very jaunty — 1994 memoir by former Met director Thomas Hoving. Given that the Met recently formed a search committee, which has now picked a head hunting firm, I laughed when I got to one passage early in Hoving's book about the way they went about these things 40 years ago.

As we join the action, it's the summer of 1967. Hoving appears to be on the list of candidates for the top job. He's at lunch with Ted Rousseau, a Met curator acting as go-between for some pro-Hoving trustees. Hoving asks Rousseau to tell him who's on the Search Committee and how it works. Rousseau's reply:

He said the committee was "for show". The actual candidate would be chosen in camera, by [then-Met Board Chairman] Arthur Houghton and his inner circle. As Rousseau described it, the time honored custom was to form a committee of at least five members, no more than seven, so that there would be a ready quorum. No women were allowed. The chairman had to be in the president's pocket. It was ritual that "the entire world be searched." It was equally sacred that the committee spend at least as much time finding the new director as it had the last one. To be avoided at all costs was a candidate who might turn down the offer. Thus the question had to be popped very carefully. It was taboo to consider a bachelor, a homosexual, a foreigner or a woman.

Well I guess that would have ruled out K.D. Lang.

But seriously, we can be sure that at least some things have changed since then. The Search Committee now has a dozen members. And five of them are women.

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February 5, 2008 1:16

There Goes the Neighborhood

A couple of developments in the world of big bad buildings.

Prince Charles, heir to the throne of Britain and sometime architecture commentator, is complaining again about the way London is shaping up. Charles' taste runs to the traditional, the nostalgic and anything by Leon Krier. The last time he got seriously involved in an architectural battle in London, in 1984, he called Richard Rogers' proposed addition to the National Gallery "a monstrous carbuncle". That helped get the Rogers proposal shelved in a favor of the much more deferential addition by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown that was eventually built.

It was Rogers — now Lord Rogers, Pritzker-prize winner and chief architectural adviser to the Mayor of London — whom Charles was after again last week when he gave a speech denouncing the concentration of new skyscrapers in "the City", the financial center where Norman Foster's Gherkin also rises. One of those is a still incomplete Rogers' building, 122 Leadenhall Street, that people are calling "the cheese grater" because of its tall wedge shape. Charles wants tall towers in London confined to the area around Cesar Pelli's Canary Wharf development. (A development that's surprisingly lively even after work, with a very happy pub crowd — this is after all the U.K. — and new restaurants along the riverbank.)

122 Leadenhall Street/ Richard Rogers/ © 2007 ROGERS STIRK HARBOUR + PARTNERS

Charles' attack on Rogers' new building — all 44 stories/737 feet of it — is completely misguided. The wedge design was chosen partly to preserve vital (and protected by law) sight lines from Fleet Street to St. Paul's Cathedral. Because of the tapering silhouette, it actually has a relatively small floor area for a building of its size.

But I would not be so quick to dismiss Charles' larger concerns about a concentration of tall buildings in the City, where several others are planned, and which is the same area where there's a precious archipelago of churches by Wren and Hawksmoor. Charles warns of a world in which they're dwarfed by a robot army of massive towers and he has a point. That world is not exactly upon us yet, but his intention is obviously to push London to rethink how it grants permissions to build in that part of town.

The irony here is that at least a few of the new towers being planned or built in London, which was stuffed with bad modern architecture in the post war era and beyond, are some of the most promising proposals the city has seen for years. But I'd hate to see the day when those Wren churches start looking like the little Greek Orthodox chapels you run across in Athens that are swallowed by massive modern garbage on all sides.

In related news — not even a year after the opening of Seattle's new sculpture park, a new 14 story condo is scheduled to go up just yards away. The developer says the Seattle Art Museum, which created the park, is crazy about his scheme. "This is a big love fest," he says. Is that the polite term for forced marriage? Via.

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February 4, 2008 5:37

A Talk With: Alex Barker

After my recent conversation with Jim Cuno, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, I thought I would get in touch with a prominent archaeologist to see what he thought of Cuno's proposal for a return to partage, the practice whereby source nations used to share some of the finds from archaeological digs with the foreign museums or universities that financed the digs and provided the archeologists. Alex W. Barker is the director of the Museum of Art & Archaeology at the University of Missouri-Columbia and chair of the Ethics Committee of the Society for American Archaeology.

LACAYO: Many people outside of these debates don't understand the idea of archeological site damage. Could you name a particularly painful instance?

BARKER: The Spiro Mound site in Oklahoma was probably the most spectacular [Native American] burial site ever excavated in the United States. It was all excavated by looters. They even leased the land as a mining company so they could dig for artifacts. When they were done they filled it with black powder and blew it up. Most of that looting happened in 1933.

LACAYO: The goal of the archaeological profession is to protect sites from vandalism by looters. But Cuno and many museum people say that despite the tightening of cultural property laws, and the more aggressive pursuit of museums and collectors, looting has actually increased. On the other hand, Francesco Rutelli, the culture minster of Italy, says that in his country looting has declined.

BARKER: Well, it's not an either/or proposition. In some areas the looting may have decreased, especially if there's a very active effort on the part of the source country to discourage looting. A lot of it has to do with the resolve and the level of funding the source countries are able to throw at the problem. But I think the levels of site looting have gone up. There are a number of reasons for that. One is that the market has expanded hugely. Values have expanded hugely. And the scale of antiquities trading and trafficking in minor pieces, things that aren't going to end up in a place of honor at the Met, has increased hugely as a result of on line auction houses and E-bay.

LACAYO: So by itself the enforcement of cultural property laws doesn't adequately protect the sites?

BARKER: Of course. I don't think there's anyone on any side of the argument who would suggest that the laws and protocols we have in place at the moment are sufficient to protect the sites.

LACAYO: What would be sufficient?

BARKER: I wish there were clear cut answers. One of the reasons this is such a compelling ethical question, at least for archaeologists, is that with the exception of a certain cases of outright criminal intent, this is an area that's rife with shades of gray. I think compelling cases are made by encyclopedic museums who say they are perserving the world's heritage. But at the same time they're also in many cases the ones who are driving the antiquities market.

LACAYO: Jim Cuno wants to see a return to partage. Do you think that's possible, or, to begin with, even desirable?

BARKER: Do you mean a division by title where the museums would have part of it and the source countries would have part of it? Or a division in which the source countries would make things available to museums for long term display?

LACAYO: Let's talk first about the old fashioned kind, in which, say, the University of Chicago would come home from an archaeological project with title to some significant portion of the find.

BARKER: For practical and political reasons I think it's unlikely we'll return to a system like that.

LACAYO: What about the other kind, in which the objects go abroad but are still understood to be the property of the source nation.

BARKER: That would be much more practical. I would hope over the long term those are the kinds of solutions we can come up with. Look at the case of Egypt. Zahi Hawass [head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities] opposes the idea of things coming out and staying at foreign institutions. But at the same time Egypt faces enormous economic pressure to care for the collections they have, simply because of their scale. One can imagine a model in which Egyptian material can go out to museums around the world with the understanding that it still belongs to the people of Egypt but is being cared for by museums around the world in return for the opportunity to show it to their publics. I think then Egypt wins, the antiquities win and the public in all those other areas win.

LACAYO: What about in effect "renting" them? That's a proposal that's been advanced by a Harvard economist, Michael Kremer, who suggests that source nations could charge to make their antiquities available to foreign museums on long term loan. The money could go to improve museum quality in the source country or to beef up security at archaeological sites.

BARKER: My concern about a leasing model is that it puts a lot of source countries, which are in a position of substantial financial hardship, into a position where they start treating their antiquities as a resource they can mine.

LACAYO: To use the phrase of John Merryman, the Stanford law professor who favors some kind of free market in antiquities, do you think there can be a "licit trade" in antiquities?

BARKER: Licit versus licit is a matter of law. I'm forced to think about it more from an ethical standpoint, whether there should be a licit trade in antiquities. A lot of people will talk about objects as things that have intrinsic value. Archaeologists are much more concerned about all the other information that goes along with them. And that's a very fragile thing and can be lost very easily. I'm very sympathetic to the position.

LACAYO: Do you think there are a few steps that might be taken that would satisfy the desire of museums to see a more flexible regime in the area of cultural property but still adequately protect the sites?

BARKER: I think there are solutions that would be workable and fair to all parties concerned, but that's very different from saying would all parties agree to them. One or another form of partage is one — and I think the most likely is the kind where source nations are able to maintiain their claim on the material but museums are able to show it, partly for the benefit of their own public, and also to drive tourism to the source countries.

Part of this also depends on museums viewing title in a slightly different way. Most museums are uncomfortable with dealing with objects on a long term basis if they can't secure good title. From an economic standpoint it's scary. This is one of the things that has really chilled museum exhibition of Native American material. Museums are afraid of building a hall which is suddenly going to be emptied of objects. That may be a reality museums need to face.

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February 1, 2008 9:07

Sex and Art City

When I was wishing yesterday that we had something in the U.S. that would create a little media excitement about art on a regular basis, this isn't what I meant.

But hey, if Sarah Jessica Parker is going to do a reality show about art, at least she's doing it with "Magical Elves".

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