Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

The first big new gallery at the Phillips is the first big gallery at the Phillips. It’s just to the right as you enter the museum’s latest addition and it’s clearly built for big paintings. But the first installation in this gallery provides a reminder that the strength of the Phillips’ collection isn’t mid-century massive.

A Joan Mitchell painting here looks good. So too an Adolph Gottlieb. But the Stella is one of those confused 70s monstrosities. A Motherwell (not online for a reason, perhaps) looks like something a giant-bird did doo-dooed on canvas. And why oh why is British abstractionist John Walker here? 

Just outside this gallery is this fantastic Morris Louis. Unfortunately it’s next to a door and behind plexi. Between the glare and the plexi it’s unviewable. The best look you’ll get of it is there, on the left.

The installation stays clunky in a small gallery just off of a new staircase. Why are several awful William Christenberry sculptures competing with three quietly strong August Sander photographs? And John Walker is also installed upstairs, as are uniteresting paintings by Jake Berthot and Bill Jensen. Why has the Phillips hung so many third-rate painters when it has a collection stuffed with good work by top-shelf artists?

After these false starts — to be fair, it always takes curators a while to figure out new buildings and spaces — a few new spaces and hangings begin to work. The Phillips has a smart little 1951 Pollock collage and it looks great with four Aaron Siskind photogrpahs of granite boulders.

The museum’s famous Rothko Room is back (below) and it’s still a hit. The Phillips’ Rothkos aren’t the kinds of color clouds in which a viewer immediately loses himself. They’re a slower burn — and ultimately just as rewarding.

And in one of the best constructed spaces in town, plenty of natural light illuminates an upstairs gallery where Diebenkorn, Diebenkorn, Guston, Guston, de Stael and Calder also benefit from a high ceiling.

So yeah, I have quibbles. Instead of some of the lesser lights I would have preferred seeing Wayne Thiebaud, Clyfford Still, an Edward Hopper Santa Fe watercolor, or one of the museum’s surprising Gene Davises. And if the Phillips was intent on showing some lesser-known painters, Jacob Kainen or Thomas Downing would have been better picks. But mostly it’s nice to see the Phillips add space for its permanent collection. I’m hoping for regular rotations.

Question: Is Terence Riley’s art museum (which ever one it is!) in downtown LA, too?

For as long as I’ve lived in Washington — that’s since 1997, making me a near-native in local terms – the Phillips Collection has been my favorite local museum. It’s got a killer collection of truly great paintings. It hangs them in small, intimate galleries that encourage a visitor to spend lots of time with individual works. It’s in a cozy neighborhood. It does art history-smart shows. And it’s got a killer collection.

So enamored am I of the Phillips’ collection that I’ve been willing to grumble a little less about the museum’s flaws: The lighting design in the museum’s Goh Annex galleries are out-of-date. The museum doesn’t think that benches are worthy of its galleries. The Phillips’ fascination with its own saccharine Renoir is sad — and kind of funny.

And of course the museum’s biggest flaw — a screw-up of such massive proportions that it ranks among the dumbest things any American museum has ever done – was its Bellagio deal. It was the Phillips and director Jay Gates who, in 2000, inaugurated the make-a-deal-with-a-Vegas-casino charade. (The Phillips hung paintings in the casino, and received a cut of each admissions ticket, with a specified minimum payment from the casino. It was the precurosr deal to MFA Boston director Malcolm Rogers’ rentals.)

ALl this is a long way of saying that while I love the Phillips, I think its new $27 million, 30,000 square-foot expansion is only a partial success. The museum added galleries, a conservation studio, an auditorium, a courtyard, a cafe, and library space. Some of the galleries are fantastic, some of them are little more than anterooms off of a staircase. Some of the art in the galleries is great, some of it is definitely not.

Later this morning: Checking out the galleries. 

LACMA’s website features a webcam that shows the ongoing construction of the future Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA. (The B-CAM Cam? ) Over at blogging.la, Sean Bonner has started a Photoshopping contest based on LACMA’s giant pit. Sean’s entry is up now.

Top ten things not to like about the new Mega-MoMA. (Part II is here.) I agree with most of CultureGrrl’s picks, but I’d probably think even bigger. (Elizabeth Murray?!) One note on Rosenbaum’s closing note on John Elderfield: I agree up until about 1940. His Matisse gallery is brilliant — who else would (or could) present Matisse as a pioneer of abstraction?

Modern Art Obsession spotlights the release of the artist list for the upcoming International Center of Photography Triennial. (I mused on this topic last week.)

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In today’s New York Times, Glenn Collins tells a fine story about a documentary producer who has accumulated an important archive of video and other material related to the Sept. 11 attacks. The producer has 7,000 gigabytes of historically-important footage and he’s looking for a buyer or a donor. But not just any buyer: Some kind of non-profit that will make the footage available to historians, documentarians and the like. Here’s hoping that the Smithsonian isn’t interested.

Last Thursday Smithsonian boss Lawrence Small explained to Congress the details of the Smithsonian’s contract with CBS Corp. The deal gives CBS subsidiary Showtime nearly exclusive access to America’s collection of documentary film footage. It’s a brazen, sad example of a government agency allowing private business to benefit from something owned by the American people. The closest parallel is the Bush Administration’s giving valuable gas and oil leases to Big Energy for nearly nothing.

“We apologize for the hullabaloo this has caused for Congress,” Small said.

Small should be apologizing for selling our history to a private corporation. Unfortunately, incompetence is nothing new for Larry Small. His reign at the Smithsonian has been filled with mismanagement, deteriorating facilities, the illegal importing of bird feathers to benefit his own personal collection, the effective rental of Smithsonian museum space to private corporations such as Clear Channel, and the sale of naming rights and the conceptualizing of exhibits to fatcat donors.

Lawrence Small’s leadership of the Smithsonian has been a national embarrassment. His errors have been of Munitzian proportions. He should resign or be fired.

Related: Greg Allen, Oolongo.

Just about every time I look up Lee Rosenbaum has something on her blog that I just have to link to. Today she smacks MoMA upside the head over a questionable deaccessioning. Rosenbaum, who has complained about MoMA’s deaccessioning before, is dead right here. I wonder: MoMA has made plenty of deeply questionable sales. Isn’t it well past time for the NYT to examine, say, a decade’s worth of MoMA deaccessioning to examine how well-thought-out it was or wasn’t?

Introducing a new feature on MAN: In addition to doing monthly posts on a year’s worth of acquisitions from a selected museum, I’ll now spotlight selected museum acquisitions as I find out about them. Why? Because acquiring art, through gift, purchase, or whatever, is pretty durn central to what an art museum does. Unless A Big Museum drops $50 million on a Duccio, most newspapers, magazines, and even art magazines, pay little attention to acquisitions. It’s an area to which blogs can devote space and that we can cover well. (To be fair to other media: Nearly every museum in America is lousy at telling people about acquisitions. For whatever reason, they’re just not set up to do it.)

The highlight of New York-based sculptor Roxy Paine’s last solo show at James Cohan Gallery, Weed Choked Garden (2005), is on its way to MOCA. The museum will almost certainly purchase it with funds donated by The Glenstone Foundation, the philanthropic arm of DC-based collector Mitchell P. Rales. (Rales is also the vice-chairman of the Hirshhorn’s board.) It’s one of Paine’s best sculptures, the kind of work that stops people in their tracks because they just have to see what’s going on there. Once I investigated it I was both fascinated and repulsed.

Weed Choked Garden is Paine’s meditation on a theme being explored by dozens of artists in the last couple years: Decay and collapse. As we’ve written about here on MAN a great deal, artists such as Jason Middlebrook, Edward Burtynsky, Adam Cvijanovic and Paine, are especially interested in what is happening to the planet and are exploring the symbiotic destructive forces of man and nature in their work. (Other artists, such as Raymond Pettibon, Hans Haacke and Richard Serra have focused on political deterioration.) Memo to a smart contemporary curator: There’s a major, New Topos-level-of-import group show to be done on this.

Paine’s Garden is made from thermoset plastic, polymer, oil paint, stainless steel, lacquer epoxy, pigment and something called PETG. Of course, you may know PETG better as glycol-modified polyethylene terephthalate, a copolyester that is a clear amorphous thermoplastic.

Related: Chris Jagers with more pix and Paine on Paine. Joao Ribas interviews Paine for artinfo.com. NYTer Ken Johnson on Paine’s last Cohan show. David Cohen on artcritical.com/New York Sun on the same. Rales’ Potomac, Maryland-based private museum, Glenstone, opens this fall.

Note to museum curators and communications departments: Let me know what your museum is doing. (You’ve probably noticed MAN is as interested in Dallas and St. Louis as we are in New York, so… ) I won’t post everything I’m emailed as a stand-alone post, but lots of things I hear end up on MAN in lots of ways. So share.

Admin: Apologies for MAN’s silence yesterday. The server hosting ArtsJournal’s site and its blogs was down. Again. Yes, we know, and yes, we are.

Update on the Zorach: On Monday we told you the story of the Met’s latest Tinterow-nian deaccessioning: A William Zorach sculpture, apparently the only one in the museum’s collection. (On Tuesday, Wednesday and today the New York Times didn’t tell you a word about it. Why so silent Gray Lady? A relatively new top curator of a major department in the biggest museum in your town has plainly started a deaccessioning campaign and…)

Yesterday Sotheby’s offered the work in its American Paintings morning sale. The Zorach failed to sell. Estimated at $300-$500K, the bidding stopped at $270K.

• Enjoy Memorial Day weekend. MAN will be back on Tuesday. (Meanwhile, don’t miss the Roxy Paine/MOCA news in the post below this one.)
• Zahi Hawass is a piece of work! Via a William Mullen Tribune story: At the opening for the Anschutz rent-a-Tut show in Chicago, Hawass called out one of the exhibit’s sponsors — and threatened action against him because of an object in his collection of Egyptian antiquities. (It is unknown at this time whether Hawass plugged his memoir in the process.)
• Speaking of Roxy Paine and how artists view nature, check out a show Paine is in: Uneasy Nature at the Weatherspoon Art museum in North Carolina.
• Popped into the Hirshhorn for a bit this morning. Another permanent collection shuffle. (Again! How great! What life!) One new-ish gallery features Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, and Alma Thomas. Thomas, who lived and painted on 15th Street NW in DC, more than held her own. The Hirsh owns eight Thomases. Sounds like a gallery waiting to happen. (The best Alma Thomas, Evening Glow, is one of my favorite paintings. It’s in the Baltimore Museum’s collection.)