Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

UPDATE: OK, I lied. I flat out love this From the Floor post with the explanation of a MoMA mystery.

I’m going to follow the lead of most other art blogs and call it a 2004. See you in 2005.

http://greg.org/archive/2004/12/29/if_i_had_an_artforum_top_ten_list.html

Sorry I missed these last week — that happens when I’m on travel (as more than one reader has noted).

Carolyn Zick on Anne Truitt. More from Greg Allen on Anne Truitt. Grammar.police on Anne Truitt. Paintclot on Anne Truitt. (Subtext: To the WaPo, Truitt is a fusty regionalist. At some point, ya gotta figure they’ll hire a culture editor/czar type with a clue about art, right?)

Also, Iconoduel has a fab list of blogs that AiA missed.

An excerpt from my Bloomberg review of the Cezanne watercolors show at the Getty:

Cezanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors is on view now at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles through Jan. 2, and it is a rare gem.

How rare? The last two museum exhibitions of Cezanne’s watercolors were in 1983 and 1973, both in Europe. The most recent American show I could find that was dedicated to Cezanne’s watercolors was at a New York commercial gallery, Knoedler & Co., over 40 years ago.

Watercolors are delicate and, clearly, aren’t shown that often. While American museums are rich in Cezanne holdings, I can’t think of a single one that exhibits his watercolors regularly.

These factors alone would make the Getty’s small show of 21 paintings and two drawings a welcome event. But this exhibition is more than a surprise, more than just historically relevant. Getty curator Lee Hendrix has created a show that will surprise even Cezanne fans.

Most of the paintings come from the last 15 years or so of Cezanne’s life. I had always thought of his late watercolors as energetic, quick sketches, vibrating with a near op-art effect. Cezanne achieved that feel by first drawing a composition in pencil, then by painting over it with watercolor.

The examples of Cezanne’s watercolors in American museums, such as the Morgan Library, the Philadelphia Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, are all full of this energy.

But with one exception, the artworks in this show are almost completely different. In the watercolors with which I was familiar, the artist allows pencil and watercolor to duke it out.
Here, Hendrix shows us example after example of Cezanne allowing pencil and watercolor to work together. As a result, these watercolors have the rich sculptural quality of oil paintings.

Hendrix has built the show around a watercolor the Getty owns, “Still Life with Blue Pot,” (circa 1900-1906), a masterpiece of the medium. This watercolor is as fine an example of a Cezanne still life as any Cezanne oil.

The blue pot at the center of the painting rises above the corresponding fruit in the same way Mont Sainte-Victoire rises above Provence in a Cezanne landscape. The painting’s blues, reds and yellows are deep, loud and distinctive, unusual for watercolors. (The show’s terrific catalogue, written by Carol Armstrong, explores this piece in remarkable scientific detail.)

Some tidbits while I fly cross-country today…

While Michael Kimmelman was busy confusing black-eyed susans with sunflowers, Roberta Smith was telling us about how some of the details of MoMA are holding up to repeated visits.

I also found some of the new juxtapositions pretty interesting. Mondrian and Joaquin Torres-Garcia. Matisse’s The Serf staring down Les Dems. And more. It’s going to be my favorite MoMA game on my next visit, I think.

It was nice of the Washington Post (password, etc.) to get around to running an Anne Truitt obituary on Dec. 25, days after she passed away. And today, with Blake Gopnik apparently busy bumping into sculpture at the National Gallery, Benjamin Forgey, the Post’s architecture critic, writes an appreciation piece about Truitt. For some reason he presents her as a regionalist artist, someone who made some work that the art world cared about in the 1960s and not since.

Sad. Truitt is not a regionalist, she’s a significant national figure. Recent exhibits, including Ann Goldstein’s A Minimal Future? @ MOCA and the re-installation of MoMA’s permanent collection, have included Truitt as a vital figure. The leading historian of minimalism, Emory’s James Meyer, has been especially vigilant about restoring Truitt to a position of prominence. But somehow no one at the Post has noticed any of this.

(I’d bet on a major Truitt retrospective being launched at a major American museum sometime in the next 5-7 years.)

This is a thoroughly reasonable Philly Inky story (password, etc.) about the challenges facing the Barnes as it gears up to move. But for some reason Barnes ED Kimberly Camp and Pew boss Rebecca Rimel wouldn’t talk to the Inky. Why not? If I were a potential donor, I’d notice that kind of thing and I would wonder what they had to hide.

Well, apparently art blogs are all grown up. Art magazines are picking favorites (thanks RR, AiA), art blogs are picking (magazine) favorites, and as magazines move into 21st century, the biggest of the bunch, GawkerForum, pleases no one.

So while lists are great (guilty), the fun is in the looking. Yesterday I wandered through SF MOMA, took in their new permanent collection installation (aside to Ess Eff: you have 12 hours to put up a Thiebaud before I notice that there isn’t one there) and was pleased to notice a number of Lewis Baltz photos up in the photo galleries. More on all of that in the days ahead. I also drove down to Stanford’s Cantor Museum to go see one painting: Richard Diebenkorn’s masterful Window.

Lists are fun, but the looking is the thing. Lots later this week on SF, Stanford, Cezanne @ the Getty, and more.

MAN is off for the holiday weekend. Back Monday. (BTW, I fixed the link in the post below.)

I wanted to spotlight two stories that AJ plugged on the main page today: One from the Dallas Morning News about the reinstallation of its contemporary collection, and one from the Toledo Blade about how Toledo arts organizations are working together to make their programs more accessible to their audience.

First, on Toledo: In NYC, DC, etc. I see a lot of directors primarily concerned with their own institutions or with building their own legacies. I rarely see museums working together to make available/market the visual arts to a macro-audience. I really never see arts organizations working together cross-platform to encourage cultural consumption. So I think what’s going on in Toledo merits some attention.

On Dallas (go here for the link that bypasses registration, etc.): It’s just plain fun to read about the re-installation of a collection, to see what a museum puts up… can’t wait to get to SF MOMA over the weekend for the same reason.