Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

The thing is, we need the Judd Foundation.

Donald Judd is one of the three most important American artists of the last 50 years and one of the most important critics, too. (Judd’s dismissal of Anne Truitt, for example, is part of the reason she has never received her due.) Still:

• There is no Judd biography. By comparison: There are lots of Warhol and Pollock bios;
• Major American museums such as the National Gallery of Art, SFMOMA, MAMFW and LACMA have enormous gaps in their Judd collections; and
• Judd’s papers and facilities in Marfa and New York have been only lightly combed by scholars, historians and critics.

Barring the unexpected donation of Judd’s papers to some cash-rich institution such as the University of Texas, the art world needs a healthy, functional, responsible Judd Foundation to catalogue and conserve Judd’s papers. And given Judd’s will, who but the Judd Foundation can preserve and keep open Judd sites in Marfa (the Judd Foundation oversees all the Judd sites in Marfa except for the Chinati Foundation sites) and New York, and ensure Judd’s legacy by smartly placing work in important collections?

Of course this all takes money. Somehow, the Judd Foundation has very little of it. At the end of FY 2004 the Foundation had an estimated $200 million in art assets, but only $500,000 in cash. The Foundation’s board members have not been active donors: According to the Foundation’s tax filings, none of them gave money between FYs 2002-04 and the foundation has brought little in contributions from sources outside the Judd estate (such as private individuals or foundations) in those years.

Furthermore, trustees in a position to provide leadership donations seem to have shied away from making contributions to the Judd Foundation. Louisa Sarofim, a new Judd board member, is president of Houston’s Brown Foundation. Brown gives about a quarter of its annual grants to arts organizations. In its most recent fiscal year, which ended on June 30, 2005, Brown gave $49K to Ballroom Marfa, $302K to Chinati… and only $1K to Judd. (Brown’s annual report says that it “does not expect to support” private foundations; Judd is a private foundation. However so is the Menil, and Brown has supported Menil quite substantially.)

Of course, during that fiscal year the Judd Foundation was about to hire an executive director. On Jan. 23, Barbara Hunt McLanahan, formerly director of Artist’s Space, started at Judd. 

When it was time to make a decision about how to bring in some money, Hunt McLanahan saw that foundation was art-rich, endowment-poor, operating-cash-poor, and had no recent history of fundraising success. Hunt McLanahan decided that the Foundation needed an endowment — and that it had to raise it quickly.

So the foundation decided to sell 35 Judd sculptures at Christie’s in May.

“In all of the discussions we had there were no other suggestions as to how we might make a $20M endowment,”  Hunt McLanahan told me. “I think people do enjoy being critical but if other people had other solutions…”

Part two is here.

Coming later today: The Judd Foundation sale. First:

• Todd Gibson is right on curators = artists. Several years ago I was at the Hirshhorn for a Dan Cameron talk. It was snowing like a son-of-a-gun outside, so there were only about 30 people in the audience. During the Q&A someone told Cameron that she so admired his curatorial efforts that she thought of him as an artist. My snort was so audible that the person I was with shrank into her seat.
• Los Angeles is going to Paris for a major show at the Pompidou, says LATer Suzanne Muchnic.
• Lee Rosenbaum on antiquities in today’s WSJ. It’s free!

Been wondering what’s up at the Milwaukee Art Museum since they built their Calatrava? First, MAM director David Gordon and critic Martin Filler exchanged, er, ideas in the New York Review of Books. Next, Filler laughs and laughs and laughs  as Martinifest partiers run wild at the MAM. (Via AJ… and OK, OK, we just assume that Filler is laughing.) The best line:

Asked whether artworks had been damaged or are in need of cleaning, the museum said two sculptures had been removed for “review” and more would be known in two weeks, after the senior conservator returns to the museum and has had a look. The sculptures are made from resilient materials such as bronze.

Patina? Pshaw. And we hope that the senior conservator is made from resilient materials too.

This Jean Ipousteguy bronze, David and Goliath (1959), from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will be offered in Sotheby’s March 15 contemporary art auction.

But should it be? The Met’s deaccessioning policy states that the museum will not deacession any work of art within 25 years of when it was acquired, unless the museum receives approval from the donor or the estate of the donor. This piece was acquired by the Met in 1983 from the estate of Mr. & Mrs. Charles Zadok. Last week I asked the Met if such permission had been granted or if there was a policy change. The museum did not respond.

This is the second time in a month the Met has at least tried to deaccession a piece it has owned for under 25 years. In January, NYTer Michael Kimmelman caught the Met attempting to deaccession an Eduardo Chillida sculpture that it received in 1986 from Dallas collector Frank Ribelin. The Met withdrew the Chillida from that auction. If the Met responds, we’ll pass it along.

In Sunday’s Los Angeles Times opinion section, I expound upon a point I made here a couple of weeks ago: With CEO/prez Barry Munitz gone, the focus at the Getty is on how the trustees will address the problems Munitz exposed.

In my write-up I also name several visual arts professionals that the Getty should consider adding to its board, and I name a couple candidates for the top job.

Not in the piece but also a good idea: It’s one thing for a multi-millionaire to serve on the Getty board without being paid, but it’s quite another for someone whose net worth is merely in the six-figures to devote many hours to such a responsible position. No problem: The Getty should find a way to compensate its trustees in an effort to reward qualified professionals will want to add Getty duties to their busy lives. Another benefit of this policy change: A recent Council for Effective Philanthropy survey shows that paid trustees are substantially more involved in their trusteeship.

The problem with this: J. Paul expressly forbade it. However, wouldn’t it be nice if the Getty thought it was a good idea, if it then convinced the California attorney general to agree it was a good idea (and thus the AG would allow a change to the indenture under which the Getty was created), and voila?

Coming Monday: The Judd Foundation sale. Read Carol Vogel’s good piece for background.

• Joe, meet Hiroshi. Hiroshi, meet Joe
• What’s not to love about Lego art?
• DC’s pre-blogs Five Things is back for a (very) limited engagement (nice images there — I’ve always been partial to Jason Falchook’s photography);
• Kanye or Vanessa Beecroft?
• In one of my Sugimoto posts I referred to a Shinto shrine. A Daily Dose found the pix — and more;
• These are good programs. But on Sunday mornings?!;
• What the future ended up not looking like;
• Normally I don’t like flicks about the art world, but I want to see this movie;
• So the College Art Association is blogging its conference. (via) Perhaps someone there will tell us why they keep giving the Mather/critics award to non-critics; 
• Matthew Barney has a new film out (trailer here). Plus an exhib coming to SFMOMA this summer;
• The Walker has a page on MySpace. (via) The Walker’s gender: Male. (Who knew!) Age: 79. It’s even better from there; and
• Not blogs, but while we’re here… Philadelphia, Chicago and LACMA all have new websites.

“At MAMFW? Kiefer at MAMFW?” you’re thinking. “Isn’t that show in Montreal by now? And hasn’t it been there for, uh, a while?” Uh, yeah. It has been. Thing is, I’m behind. There’s been LACMA news. And Getty news. And antiquities news. And my obsession with Julius Shulman. So I’m just now catching up.

That’s not to say that Michael Auping’s Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, wasn’t a really good show. It was. So here we go…

• There are not many artists about whom you can say this: The bigger the scale on which they work, the more outsized and ambitious they build, the better they are. And Kiefer, unquestionably, is at his best when he’s working huge.
• Kiefer is not really a painter. Sure, there are some gouaches and some watercolors in this show, but with one exception they’re the weakest works here. And yes, there is some oil paint on some of his big canvases, but those pieces aren’t about paint, they’re about building things on canvases.
• Also, as he’s matured Kiefer has increasingly limited himself to two compositional devices: acute perspective and strict horizon lines. He is especially fond of putting those horizon lines somewhere near the top of the canvas. That’s about it for Kiefer as a painter.
• But Kiefer as an object-maker is pretty fantastic. His works overwhelm the viewer with scale, material and layers of physically built-up stuff… and meaning. One of the special aspects of the Fort Worth hanging was that two monumental Kiefers, The Heavenly Palaces (2004, collection of the artist) and This Dark Brightness which Falls from the Stars (1996, Dallas Museum of Art) could be viewed from ground level and from up above, on the museum’s second floor.
• Joseph Beuys’ influence on Kiefer is mentioned so commonly that I wonder if no one really thinks about it anymore. I found myself thinking of Kiefer as Rauschenbergian, someone for whom the canvas was often the convenient surface onto which stuff was slathered, and not much else. Think of Kiefer as organic Rauschenbergism.
• In the Albright’s The Milky Way (which is not nearly as dark as that JPEG), Kiefer shows us Germany’s post-war scorched earth. Usually Kiefer’s paintings about destroyed earth are read as being about German land being WWII battlefield, and as a metaphor for what Germany did to itself. Another reading: In The Milky Way, Kiefer presents charred earth and a visible vein of milk that looks like an open wound. After WWII, Germany’s richest agricultural lands ended up under USSR control, in what became East Germany. Instead of returning to their previously level of productivity, they were choked by Soviet agricultural policy. I’d argue that Kiefer refers to a lot more than the war here.
• The first gallery of paintings at MAMFW included many of Kiefer’s earliest surviving paintings. They are paintings about evil and shame. Each of them is painted with the perspective of someone hanging his head, looking down.

Scroll a couple screens and you’ll find what appears to be the text of the Met-Italy deal. (via)

Later today: Anselm Kiefer at the  Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and probably more on antiquities.

Five easy things art museums — especially contemporary art museums — could do to reach broader — and younger — audiences.

1. Host a blogger preview for every exhibit. Press previews are de rigeur for any show of note. But museum communications offices should realize that the bloggers in their communities have a cumulative audience approaching the size of all but the biggest one or two outlets in their cities. Metblogs, -ists and others maintain substantial local blogrolls. Use them. (Aside to the Armory Show: You’re already No. 2 to Art Basel in the US, and you’re fading fast. So your current round of letters denying respected and well-read bloggers press credentials is not smart. Furthermore, to deny someone credentials because you don’t approve of what a blog has written (!) about the show? To insist on ideological purity? Please. And then to cluelessly disregard one of the most-widely read all-arts blogs around? Mistake. (UPDATE: Ionarts is in.) Blogging is no longer new — any PR person worth his/her cell phone should know 10-15 art blogs worth including on every list he/she has. Miami is nicer in December than New York in March, you know.)
2. Podcast. Many of you do that.
3. Blog. Not enough of you do.
4. Did you see how much great press and goodwill (and the crowds!) White Night generated in Turin? (It’s worked for the Hirshhorn too.) Try it. And encourage the bars/shops near you to join in.  
5. Remember that while you may be a national-level museum in your field, you still have to attract local audiences. Involve local artists, writers, critics, gallerists, etc. in your programs. Build community.

• On NPR’s All Things Considered, Anthony Kuhn looks at how the Chinese reclaim their cultural heritage; and
• In the Boston Globe, Geoff Edgers and Sofia Celeste report that the Italians have planned a visit to the MFA Boston.