The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston is one of the largest and best encyclopedic museums in the United States. Considering how great the collection is, and in spite of their best efforts (many free days, open until 9:45, free live music, knowledgeable and extremely helpful guards, one of whom walked me to a painting I asked about), their attendance isn't all that good. The MFA attendance for last year was 911,216 — way down the list in 54th place, less than half that of San Francisco’s M. H. de Young Museum, which isn’t nearly as important.
European Painting Gallery, Boston Museum of Fine Arts
The museum’s original 1909 building was designed by the architect Guy Lowel in the neoclassical style. Typical of its day, it was, and still is, a dark and uninviting place. Maybe that’s a reason why the museum isn’t as popular as its collection warrants.
In 1981 the MFA tried to fix the uninviting design.
The Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art.
They changed the entrance and opened a large new space designed by I. M. Pei to house the museum's contemporary art collection, as well as a cafe, restaurant, gift shop and a space for temporary exhibitions. This space went to the other extreme — it's too bright and busy-feeling, even when it's empty. (I don't know why, but it seems most museums' contemporary spaces are that way — probably to show they're a groovy and happening place.)
On November 20, 2010, after five years and $504 million, the MFA opened a 121,307-square-foot, four-level new wing for the Art of the Americas. This time they finally got it completely right — at least they got the exhibition galleries right. The entry-courtyard to the new wing (below), however, is an overly grand 12,184-square-foot, 63-foot-high glass-enclosed courtyard (about equal to the space for exhibitions) with a restaurant that's dwarfed by the space, and no art except for a large, green Gilhouly sculpture.
The Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard seen from the Art of the Americas Wing.
(Why do museums feel they need these kinds of soaring, extravagant spaces? Are they imitating the Guggenheim? Is it for patron events?)
While I think the courtyard is ridiculous, the exhibition area of the new Americas Wing can’t be better. In fact, it’s kind of a relief to get away from the courtyard and enter this quiet, intimately proportioned, well-lit space. Each floor has a central spine, with rows of galleries (53 in all) on either side, which makes it easy to locate where you are, and also allows for a great variety of displays.
MFA Floor Plan with the Americas Wing on the right in blue.
There’s some criticism that the space isn’t architecturally interesting enough, that there are no surprises or risks taken. Well that’s fine with me — I think "great" (i.e., showy) architecture, at least when it comes to the interior, is a distraction that usually overpowers the art. Visual variety can come from the art installations, and the MFA does an excellent job in that respect.
Replica of a 19th-century salon exhibition.
Unlike Renzo Piano’s addition to the Gardner, the London architectural firm of Foster and Partners designed a truly restrained, perfect space to exhibit a wide variety of art.
Wall with Thomas Sully, The Torn Hat, 1820, oil on canvas.
This new wing is unique in that it houses the art of the Americas (plural); it's not an American wing like the Met's new galleries. The installations ascend chronologically with Pre-Columbian on the bottom (the basement actually, although it doesn’t feel like it ) and 20th-century American on top, with Native North American, African-American, and what we usually think of as American Art (the colonial portraiture of John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart, the silverware of Paul Revere, the Hudson River School of landscape painting, etc.) in between.
John Singleton Copley, Portrait of Paul Revere, c.1768-70, oil on canvas, 35 x 28 ½ inches
John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Bolt, 1882, oil on canvas, 87.6 x 87.6 inches.
The teapot Paul Revere is holding and the two large Japanese vases depicted above are on display next to their respective paintings. Talk about the strength of the collection!
Thomas Eakins, The Dean's Roll Call, oil on canvas, 1899, 84 x 42 inches and detail.
John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778, oil on canvas, 72 x 90 ½ inches -- ya gotta love it!
Instead of period rooms which mostly waste space, there are periods walls:
American Gothic Landscape Revival, early 19th century
Their collection of Pre-Columbian art is superb -- who would have guessed?
Mayan burial urns, earthenware, 650-850 - about two feet high.
The weakest floor is the contemporary art.
I don’t agree with the premise of an Art of the Americas Wing. I think it's an arbitrary distinction. Why not have a wing for all French art from the Lascaux caves to the present? Or just art from 1900 to 2000? (Not a bad idea actually!) What does Pre-Columbian, Native American or South American art have to do with each other or with Colonial American art or the Hudson River School or any of the work usually called American art? None of these are detectable in Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, for example, but the influences of Degas and Velazquez's Las Meninas are — influences Sargent himself acknowledges.
Even though American artists prior to the 20th century had a conflict between their democratic ideals and the Old World royal and religious art they thought was decadent, they nevertheless admired and learned from that art, and adopted it as their own. In fact there really wasn’t an American School in the way there was an Italian, French, Dutch or English School until Abstract Expressionism in the 1940's and 1950's. (Ironically, many of the Abstract Expressionists were influenced — or so they claimed — by Native American art.) Except perhaps for 19th-century landscape painting, American art was provincial and consisted mostly of moralizing allegories, pompous historical subjects or the soft porn of idealized nudes — all with an emphasis on showy virtuosity. American art needs to be seen in the context of the European art from which it derives.
The MFA finally got the space right with this new addition, but they got the curatorial concept wrong.
Renzo Piano’s addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with the original Venetian-style palazzo on the right.
Isabella Stewart Gardner was one of the great patrons of the arts in the early 20th century and counted the artists James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent and the writer Henry James among her friends. Because she disliked the dark, cold, institutional spaces typical of the American museums of her day (the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, for example — a short walk from the Gardner), she designed her home/museum to look like a 15th-century Venetian-style palazzo with three stories of galleries around a central courtyard filled with flowers.
Courtyard of the Gardner Museum Palazzo.
When she died in 1924, she left the museum a one-million-dollar endowment (a huge amount in those days) with the stipulation that everything be permanently exhibited the way she left it, including the garden. If her wishes were not honored, the property and collection were to be sold, and the money given to Harvard University.
Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1559-1562, oil on canvas, 73 x 81 inches (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum).
The Gardner Museum is a magical place to look at art, and the collection is one of the greatest in the country. Among the well-known works in the collection is Titian’s The Rape of Europa, John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo, Fra Angelico’s Death and Assumption of the Virgin, Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait, Aged 23, and Piero della Francesca’s Hercules. Unfortunately the museum has become most famous for a robbery that took place in 1990 when work by Vermeer, Rembrandt (three paintings), Degas (five drawings) and Manet was stolen and never recovered. Several empty frames hang in the Dutch Room gallery awaiting the return of the missing works.
"Cafe G," the restaurant in the Gardner Museum addition.
they built a 300-seat cube-shaped concert hall, a 2000 SF special exhibition gallery to be used mostly for contemporary art, a visitor welcome area called the Richard E. Floor Living Room, a large greenhouse, and apartments for artists-in-residence.
Exterior of Renzo Piano's Gardner Museum greenhouse.
Am I crazy? How could they possibly claim the Piano addition was any of these things? This factory-modern addition is an aggressive, obnoxious assault that's bigger, brighter and flashier than the buff-colored Venetian palazzo which it overwhelms. While I’m glad the buildings are different — it's good to differentiate the new from the old — why does the distinction have to be this drastic? The whole effect is jarring and discordant.
The new (and only) entrance to the Gardner Museum.
Here's an example of what I mean. The original entrance was right across from Frederick Law
Olmsted’s beautiful park the Fenway, and you entered into a small entry-room in the palazzo and then walked into the beautiful courtyard. Now the entrance has been re-oriented to
Evans Way, a side street to the east; you have to go through Piano's glitzy, somewhat corporate space in order to enter the palazzo through a glass tunnel (see photo below). It's a very different experience — fun and flamboyant maybe, but it subverts the genteel intimacy of the Venetian palazzo.
Glass tunnel entrance from the new addition to the palazzo.
And are the new amenities and functions really necessary anyway? Museum director Anne Hawley said "The greatest argument for expanding the museum was to move misappropriated programs into purpose-built spaces, so we can ensure the restoration and conservation of the historic museum spaces." But the ONLY thing the expansion did in that respect was move concerts out of the Gardner’s tapestry room, which for decades had hosted them and other events, allowing the tile floor to be cleaned. Couldn’t they have closed the gallery for a period to clean the floor and do whatever else they had to do, and continue with the concerts in the original, eccentric, beautiful space when they were finished? Or not have concerts?
They already have an off-site greenhouse that actually grows the plants; this new one is purely for show. And while it might be nice to have a comfortable and pleasant restaurant and "living room" for R and R, are they really needed? And why do they feel it's necessary and appropriate to show contemporary art?
More important, what are their priorities? I know it's easier to raise money for buildings than for conservation or maintenance, but there is terrible water damage staining the walls from the corroding the metal work,
Water damage from the rusted skylights.
and their signature painting, Titian's Rape of Europa (considered one of the best paintings in the USA), is badly in need of a cleaning, as are many other paintings. New and better lighting is needed. I know it’s been a long time, but I remember the Gardner as being filled with light. The galleries are much darker now, unpleasantly so — and I went on a very bright day. I think they must have added a scrim over the windows to protect the art; but if you need to do that, you also need to invest in proper lighting.
There's a bigger issue at work here: often the priorities of museum professionals and the original benefactors are different. Professionals want to “grow” the museum by adding impressive new spaces, adopting new purposes for its mission, increasing attendance and membership, raising money — these are the things that advance their careers. But places like the Gardner, the Frick and, until
recently, the unfortunate Barnes, aren't suitable for this kind of growth, and it almost always detracts from the original experience. The people who built the collections weren’t interested in "growing the museum." Their passion was for the art.
This is the first of three posts on new museum developments. My next post will be on the new Americas Wing of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of the Artist, ca. 1663–65, oil on canvas, 45 x 37 inches (Kenwood House, London).
I returned to the Met after reading Roberta Smith’s masterful appreciation of the great Rembrandt self-portrait that the Met has on loan from Kenwood House, London (until May 20th). It is indeed a great painting, and I have nothing to add to her superb article other than to note that the perfect circles depicted on the wall behind Rembrandt that she writes about aren't circles but instead, because the wall goes back at an angle, they are ovals (circles in perspective) — an even more challenging thing to draw.
I
think Rembrandt depicts himself with his right hand in his pocket —a wonderful nonchalant gesture especially in contrast to his careworn facial expression — but I
can't be sure because the reflections on the glass make it almost impossible to see the lower part of the painting. This is just what I was discussing in the previous post. One would think that, for their signature painting, Kenwood House could spring for the few hundred pounds that "Museum
Glass” would cost.
You can see the reflection of the guard in the glass as if it were a mirror.
Also, while at the Met, I went back to theSteins Collect exhibition and managed to sneak a better photo of the dog in Matisse’s Tea, 1919. I think it's more noticeable in this photo that the dog's right eye is brown, and the other eye is mostly black.
Henri Matisse, Tea, 1919 - Detail of the dog.
And finally, while I'm on the Steins Collect and color, I noticed I made a mistake saying Mme. Matisse's glove in the Woman with a Hat, 1905, was blue. It looks blue in the photo, but it's green. Just want to set the record straight.
Last Wednesday was the packed opening of this enormous (32 artists) group exhibition on the Grand Concourse and 166th Street (until June 5th). It was made up of well-known artists (such as Mel Chin, Sylvia Plachy and John Ahearn) as well as unknown artists (at least to me). Most of the artists had their own rooms and made site-specific installations. It's an impressive exhibition, well worth the trip all the way uptown.
The Andrew Freeman Home, The Bronx
The Andrew Freedman Home is a fascinating place in itself. In 1924, multi-millionaire Andrew Freedman bequeathed the 100,00 square foot building and estate to be used as a retirement home for the rich elderly who had lost their fortunes. He left enough of an endowment so the home had all the luxuries: white glove dinner service, fine dining, a billiard room; as well as a grand ballroom and wood-paneled library — both of which have been restored. (Apparently Freedman felt sorrier for people that lost their money than for people who never had any.) By the mid-eighties the building fell into disrepair and it’s now mainly vacant; but they’re working on other uses — this art exhibition being one of them. (Someone — I can't remember who — told me that Peter Frank said, "This is the best crummy space since PS1." Good line.)
Last Monday evening, April 2nd, Norte Maar held a benefit in Chelsea at the Mitchell-Innes and Nash gallery on West 26th Street . It was not only to raise funds but also to honor Julie Martin of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) They had tap dancing; a performance of David Tudor’s Rainforest I (1968) performed by Composers Inside Electronics (see photo below); and a preview of a terrific ballet, The Brodmann Areas,
choreographed by Julia K. Gleich. You can see the full ballet April
12 - 15th at the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn. Click here for more information.
Composers Inside Electronics channeling the electronic output of David Tudor’s Rainforest I through different objects rather than a loudspeaker.
John Chamberlain, Glossalia Adagio, 1984, painted and chromium-plated steel (Philadelphia Museum of Art).
I don't think Chamberlain came up with a viable way to use color in sculpture.
His color still looks applied to the surface and arbitrary; and color still makes his sculptures seem weightless. I must admit, though, that Chamberlain showed more range and variety than I expected — but I expected very little.
What's with these crowds? Could Chamberlain be that popular? Amazing!
Line to get into the Guggenheim John Chamberlain exhibition.
E. 81st Street looking toward the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The weather was glorious — the type of weather that reminds New Yorkers of 9/11. Rather then spend the day outside like a normal person, art-nut that I am I decided to go to the Met and check out The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde (until June 3rd). When I went before, it was so crowded I couldn't see it, let alone enjoy it. And there were so many other art activities going on in New York at the time I really wasn’t able to give it the attention it deserved. This time I slowed down, and I’m glad I did. Not only are there some great paintings, but it was enlightening to see some modest work by famous artists, and some personal work too (gifts, casual drawings, studies, small paintings).
The
Steins in the courtyard of 27 rue de Fleurus, ca. 1905. From left: Leo
Stein, Allan Stein, Gertrude Stein, Theresa Ehrman, Sarah Stein,
Michael Stein (The Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley).
This is more than a show about an art collection, significant as the art is; it’s also about the art collectors, the Steins: Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael, and Michael's wife Sarah. They were well off, but not so rich they could buy whatever they wanted, so they mainly collected inexpensive work by artists that were relatively unknown at the time (the turn of the twentieth century).
The siblings Leo and Gertrude Stein shared a studio at 27 Rue de Fleurus where they hung their collection and he painted and she wrote. They were great networkers (famously introducing Picasso to Matisse in late 1905), opening their studio every Saturday to anyone with a reference. As a result hundreds of people were exposed to the avant-garde art of the time.
The Met exhibition includes films, photographs and letters of the Steins. Soon after the entrance to the show is a mock-up of Gertrude and Leo's studio with a series of wall-sized projected slides of the studio from contemporary photographs. This gives a pretty good idea of what it was like: it was small (460 square feet), the work was hung floor to ceiling, and there was very little furniture. It must have been an intense and mind-boggling experience for their guests.
Leo became progressively deaf and eventually he could not participate in the Saturday salons, so, in 1912, he decided to get his own space. He and Gertrude divided the collection (amicably except for a fight over a Cezanne) with Leo taking the Renoirs, Gertrude taking the Picassos, and the two of them sharing the rest. Soon the visitors to the salon, now hosted by Gertrude alone, were mostly literary people rather than visual-art people.
I like seeing familiar paintings in a different setting because I discover new things about them.
Henri Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905, oil on canvas, 31 ¾ x 23 ½ inches
(San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).
For example, this time I was able to identify more of the imagery in Matisse’s Woman with a Hat, a painting that's still shocking even though it's been around for more than 100 years. When I saw it before, I'd spend so much time gawking at that outrageous hat and colorful 19th-century French outfit that I never took the time to figure out all that was going on. It always looked like an unidentifiable mishmash of clashing colors to me. I think I've figured it out now, at least some of it. The sitter (Mme. Matisse) is wearing a long blue glove, and her arm is extended and bent inward. She's holding a light blue fan that is painted with flowers, and it's opened out almost to her neck. I'm not sure what the green vertical stripe below her hand is -- maybe a walking stick; and I still don’t get what the pointed area on the right side of her dress could be. It's either part of the fan, or Mme. Matisse is incredibly buxom.
Henri Matisse, Tea, 1919, oil on canvas, 55 x 83 inches, (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).
Another painting I learned something about, one that I used to look at a lot when I lived in Los Angeles, is Matisse’s Tea, 1919. It was said to be Diebenkorn’s favorite painting in the County Museum, and it certainly is charming. You have to love the painting just for that adorable dog. What I noticed for the first time is the dog’s right eye is dark brown (not black) while his left is black with just a speck of brown. This, I think, makes the dog’s eyes seem softer and even more lovable. Matisse is a subtle one!
Matisse, Tea, 1919, detail of the dog
By late 1905, early 1906, Matisse was generally acknowledged to be the leader of a new school of painting, Fauvism. The Steins (mischievously?) made sure Picasso saw Matisse’s Woman with a Hat when he came by to dine with them. Picasso, who was working in a neoclassic manner at that time, must have felt his work was pallid in comparison. This painting and another painting Picasso would have seen at the Steins, Matisse’s Blue Nude (below), spurred him on to begin his Demoiselles D’Avignon. In fact, Picasso’s Head of a Sleeping Woman can be thought of as a vertical version of Matisse’s Blue Nude.
Henri Matisse, Blue Nude, 1907, oil on canvas, about 36 x 55 inches (Cone collection, Baltimore Museum of Art).
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Sleeping Woman (Study for Nude with Drapery), summer 1907. Oil on canvas, 24 1/4 x 18 3/8 inches (Estate of John Hay Whitney).
An interesting thing about Picasso's Head of a Sleeping Woman is there’s an unpainted border around the edge of the entire painting. As a result, the paint seems to lay on top of the surface and the image appears to start at the surface (the canvas) and come forward into the viewer’s space. I discussed this phenomenon before in regard to Demoiselles D’Avignon and Monet's Water Lilies.
Picasso, Head of Sleeping Woman, detail.
Finally, there are two trends here having to do with exhibitions in general and this show in particular. There's a tendency lately, with blockbuster exhibitions, to hang work high, presumably to make it easier to see in a crowd. It doesn't bother me because I'm relatively tall, but it might be a problem for short people when they finally make their way to an individual painting. The other trend, an entirely positive one, is the increased use of the non-reflective, almost invisible "Museum Glass." Regular glass, even glass that claims to be non-glare, reflects light and can be very distracting, especially if the painting is dark. (I remember an exhibition of Rothko's late brown paintings where some of the paintings were covered with glass, and they looked like mirrors.) I noticed that The Steins Collect exhibition made extensive use of this glass. Wondering if the Met went to the trouble and expense of changing most of the glass in this show, I called them and asked about it. They said they wouldn't change the glass of borrowed work but "Museum Glass" is the trend now. That’s great news!
In the last two days I attended two panel discussions: one of the worst I've ever seen, Cindy Sherman, Circle of Influence at the Museum of Modern Art on March 26th (sorry, no link because the MoMA website apparently doesn't archive past events) and on March 27th one of the best, A Conversation with the Curators: American Vanguards at the New York Studio School.
The MoMA panel was made up of artists (George Condo, Kalup Linzy, Elizabeth Peyton, and Collier Schorr) who were supposed to discuss, to quote the program, “Cindy Sherman's influence on contemporary art practice, including issues such as feminism and identity.” Condo was first and he presented a muddled and vague talk, mainly about his own work. The little he said about Sherman’s influence amounted to noting they were of the same generation. And then the panel went downhill from even that low.
Elizabeth Payton showed about 30 slides of her own boring portraits and said literally NOTHING! She didn't even identify the portraits. NOTHING -- BUPKIS! Next came Kalup Linzy who’s known for performances where he takes on roles of different characters (sort of like Sherman, right?), but all he did was sing Cyndi Lauper's “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” (I kid you not) and show a few slides of his work. Last came Collier Schorr who showed a mildly interesting video made up mostly of pictures of adolescent boys. That was it! The discussion that followed made no sense even though the moderator, exhibition curator Eva Respini, posed interesting questions.
Okay, I admit I’ve been to worse, but this was the freakin’ Museum of Modern Art, for God's sake. Wouldn’t you expect better? ... Jaw dropping!
The New York Studio School panel, on the other hand, far exceeded my (very high) expectations. For one thing, the panel was made up of some of the top art historians of 20th-century American art: William Agee, Irving Sandler and Karen Wilkin.
Here were three art historians with a masterful knowledge of the period. They not only supported their arguments with an impressive body of facts, but they gave you a deep understanding of how rich and complicated this period was. I loved that they kept interrupting each other (Sandler had trouble getting a word in) and enthusiastically and passionately arguing about such things as:
the “Americanness” of the work these artists did in the 1930’s (Agee: the exuberance and inventiveness definitely made it American; Sandler: no, they were still “disciples,” and even their mature work, in the 1940‘s, was New York art, not “American.” But they all agreed that being American and making American-type art was important to all of them);
the relationship of the artists to the American Abstract Artists (AAA) group (too dogmatic for them) and Surrealism (they liked Miro-type abstract surrealism but not the Dali-type -- although Stuart Davis claimed to reject both);
and the influence of the too-little known artist John Graham (they all agreed it was huge and that Graham was ”the glue that held them all together”).
Here are some of Graham's paintings that are in the exhibition:
John Graham, The White Pipe, 1930, oil on canvas mounted on board, 12 ½ x 17 inches (Grey Art Gallery, New York University).
John Graham, Blue Still Life, 1931, oil on canvas, 25 ⅝ x 36 inches (The Phillips Collection).
John Graham, Seated Woman, c.1942, oil on canvas, 48 x 35 ½ inches.
Christina Kee, the moderator, did an excellent job of reigning in these strong personalities and asking them fruitful questions. And unlike almost every other panel discussion I've been to, the questions from the audience were mostly good ones; and even the ones that weren’t were changed into good ones by the answers. All in all an exhilarating experience.
I take back what I wrote about flashy spectacles being so common that they’ve become stale. Here are two exciting and I believe profound ones: Adrian Villar Rojas's A Person Loved Me in The Ungovernables, the New Museum's otherwise tepid Triennial; and Jeff Koons's proposed public sculpture for the High Line.
A Person Loved Me was created on site for the Triennial by a team of six people from Argentina. It was made to crack as it dries and, ultimately, it will be destroyed at the end of the Triennial, on April 22nd. What I find so moving about it is the eerie anthropomorphism of the work. It's as if the sculpture was once an alive, partly organic robotor weapon from some alien futuristic world. You can experience this better close up:
Detail: Adrián Villar Rojas, A Person Loved Me.
And The New York Times reports the Koons proposal is a
full-size replica of a 1943 steam train suspended from a crane, possibly
installed at the intersection of 10th Avenue and 30th Street. The Friends of the High Line are trying to raise $25 million
to commission the sculpture, and I hope they can
pull it off -- it would be thrilling. Here's a photo of the proposal taken
from the Times:
Image by James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Jeff Koons, (courtesy of Friends of the High Line).
BTW, the article states that "CSX
Transportation Inc. had agreed in principle to donate the third section
of the elevated rail bed, allowing for the park’s completion." I hope CSX will be as generous to the Jersey City Embankment.
Other Art News:
The Times also gives a revealing peek into the way the Gagosian Gallery sometimes does business. Charles Cowles, former art dealer and erstwhile publisher of Artforum, in need of money, approached Larry Gagosian to sell his mother's Lichtenstein. Gagosian said he could get $3 million for it but, to quote the Times:
... the gallery had offered the painting
for considerably less to a collector, Thompson Dean, a managing partner
of a private equity firm, telling Mr. Dean that he had an opportunity to
get an incredible bargain. “Seller now in terrible straits and needs
cash,” said a July e-mail to Mr. Dean from a Gagosian staff member. “Are
you interested in making a cruel and offensive offer? Come on, want to
try?”
The invaluable Art Newspaperhas come out with worldwide art museum 2010 attendance figures. They break it down by the popularity of particular exhibitions as well as total annual attendance. The Louvre is number one with an attendance of an amazing 8,880,000; and the Met is second with 6,004,254, up from 5.2 million in 2010. The Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio had the largest attendance for an exhibition -- 573,691 for "The Magical World of Escher."
And finally, Tyler Green is as excited as I am about the new "Closer to van Eyck" macrophotography website I wrote about here. Green points out a tiny blue jewel in a broach on which Jan van Eyck painted the reflection of the window in the chapel where the altarpiece is housed. Keep in mind a viewer wouldn't even be able to see it with the naked eye.
Broach, the Singing Angels' panel of the Ghent Altarpiece
James Panero, managing editor of The New Criterion, makes a good case for the preservation of old art institutions like the Barnes and Gardner museums. Scroll down to the last third for the best of it.
Johnny Ramone was really into clothes. Check out this New York Magazinearticle adapted from Commando: The Autobiography of Johnny Ramone.
Typically masterful and brilliant, T. J. Clark reviewsPicasso and Modern British Art at Tate Britain and Mondrian Nicholson: In Parallel at the Courtauld Gallery: Almost all visual art made in Britain in the 20th century has the instinct of hiding (and good manners) built into its every move ... .
There are two completely different LES exhibitions near the New Museum definitely worth seeing: Not Vital at Sperone Westwater (until March 31);
Not Vital, Hanging & Weighting (2010).
and one of the wildest shows I've seen (and walked on) in a while, Franklin Evans at Sue Scott Gallery (until April 15). Below is only a small taste.
Franklin Evans, Wallcollectionwallsystems, 2012, mixed media, 120 x 300 inches.
I know it's weird, but I like Whitney Biennials. I like learning about new art and artists, and I especially like the arguments that arise from the shows. The main problem I’ve had with past Biennials, and large group shows in general (e.g. The Armory Show), is there’s so much art competing for attention that only flashy spectacles — usually expensive ones — succeed in getting our attention. But these kinds of extravaganzas are so common now that they’ve become stale. Not only is there none of that in this Biennial, but, to the credit of curators Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders, this is a not a Biennial of blue chip artists from blue chip galleries. Instead the work seems sincere, unpretentious and intimate — intimate in that it’s hand-made, DIY work and thus more personal than art done by assistants or fabricated in a factory.
But, unlike Roberta Smith who thinks this is “One of the best Whitney Biennials in recent memory,” or Peter Schjeldahl who wrote it was “...decidedly among the best ever,” (sorry, no link — New Yorker paywall), I think this show is pretty lame. There’s plenty of okay work, but there’s very little that’s new or inspiring.
It’s possible that this kind of unpretentious and intimate art works best on a modest scale, and in a venue where the expectations aren’t so high — a place like the Dependent art fair, for instance. But off the top of my head I can think of several artists who would be better: Shane Hope, B. Wurtz, David Altmejd, Charles Garabedian, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Judy Pfaff, and videos by John Miller, Victor Alimpiev and Cliff Evans. And if they want to revive an artist or two or three, how about Alan Saret, David Park, John McLaughlin or the film-makers James Nares or Klause Vom Bruch?
The installation and performance art in particular (and there’s a lot of it) looks tired and self-indulgent. Los Angeles artist Dawn Kasper moved all her belongings to the third floor and will be using the space as her studio for the duration of the Biennial. This is an idea that has to go back to Lascaux. Marina Abramovic and about a hundred other artists have done it before. And Kasper's own work, at least from what I can see of it in the clutter, looks like warmed-over Los Angeles feminist art from the 1970’s.
Installation view of Dawn Kasper (in the plaid shirt), This Could Be Something If I’d Let It, 2012 Whitney Biennial.
Judith Koether presented some truly awful 1980's-style East Village-type paintings around one of the Whitney’s signature windows forming an installation that I guess was to make them look avant-garde or something.
Installation view of Judith Koether, The Seasons, 2011, synthetic polymer and oil on glass.
And then there’s Joanna Malinowska who re-interpreted a Joseph Beuys performance into an American-Indian ritual and also converted Duchamps’s bottle rack into a stack of faux bison tusks. If there such a thing as sophisticated kitsch this is it.
The fourth floor is given over to the creation and rehearsal of dance performances by Sarah Michelson and Michael Clark. (For more on these dances check out Aaron Mattocks’s series of articles for Hyperallergic.) Are the Biennial curators claiming that the creation of art, the choreographing and rehearsal of a dance, is art in itself? If so, is
it worth showing in a forum that’s supposed to include the best and
newest art? Besides, let's face it, like most creative enterprises, choreographing a dance is a slow, deliberative, trial-and-error process and painfully boring to watch.
At the risk of being accused of being a Bushwick booster, I recently saw a better solution than watching live rehearsals, in a group show of Bushwick art called “What I Know” organized by Jason Andrew at NYCAM (New York Center for Art and Media Studies). It was an 8-minute video by choreographer Julia K. Gleich set to a score by Nico Muhly, entitled 14 Seconds. It condensed the development and rehearsal of a dance so that one could actually see the evolution. (This video can be seen by appointment at the Norte Maar gallery.)
(I noticed a minor but interesting problem. Because these dancers are not used to breaking the fourth wall, they studiously avoided eye contact even when they weren't rehearsing — not that I blame them; it’s embarrassing. But that’s the position they were put in — awkward all around. At least Dawn Kasper wasn’t bothered by it since she seems to be naturally outgoing.)
I guess you can call the two artist-curated exhibitions within the exhibition a type of installation art. Nick Mauss installed an eccentric section of art from the Whitney’s collection and, more successfully, Robert Gober presented the work of the self-trained, visionary artist Forrest Bess. This is nice and interesting, but what has it to do with the Biennial? Are they saying curating, if it’s done by artists, is a new art form? And again, if so, is it worth showing in this forum?
One work getting universal acclaim is Werner Herzog’s Hearsay of the Soul, a five-screen digital projection of the landscape etchings of the relatively unknown 17th-century Dutch artist Hercules Segers. It is set to exquisitely beautiful music: a haunting hymn sung in the Wolof language of Sub-Saharan Africa; a Handel aria; and music by the Dutch cellist and composer Ernst Reijseger. Critics report they were moved to tears. I, on the other hand, felt manipulated. With that music, ANYTHING would be moving, and almost anything else besides five close-ups of landscape etchings would be deeper and more interesting. Why do we accept this kind of heavy-handed schmaltz on film or video but not with the other visual arts? Take a look of this clip of Ernst Reijseger chewing the scenery (overacting) to see what I mean.
The painting, photography and collage selections are better, if also somewhat antiquated. And it’s to the Whitney’s credit that this time they offered enough space for a lot of work by each artist. But keeping the space open, supposedly to allow for the interaction of work by different artists, makes it difficult to focus on one artist at a time. Not surprisingly, artists with their own rooms, or at least a corner to themselves, have been getting raves — Nicole Eisenman, for example.
Nichole Eisenman, mixed media monotypes, 2011.
But as impressed as I am with her facility, I can’t help feeling I’ve seen work like this that's been around since the 1920's (German Expressionism for example). And Andrew Masullo has also been getting praise, and I do like his work, but come on, hasn’t this type of abstraction been around since at least the 1940’s? And why is he arbitrarily limiting his pallet to tube colors?
Andrew Masuillio, installation view via ArtFagCity, 2012 Whitney Biennial
I really liked the tiny hand-made sculptures of Matt Hoyl, and although he didn’t have his own room or even a corner, I think because the work was so small they created their own worlds — worlds separate from the Biennial distractions. But even this work isn’t particularly unique. Donald Lipski (his early wall pieces) and others have done similar sculpture, and usually with more humor.
Installation view of Matt Hoyt, Component Objects, 2010. Mixed media. Collection of the artist.
Behind the space where the dance rehearsals were taking place is an installation I unreservedly loved: Wu Tsang’s Green Room, a replica of a green room in a Los Angeles Latin tranny bar (which also sometimes serves as an actual green room for the dancers). The installation includes a video interview with the owners of the bar and with some of the drag performers. The hot colors, dark, close quarters and over-stuffed interior made for an intense experience, and perhaps the only unique one at this Biennial.
