Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

This morning’s post on Ed Winkleman’s essential blog started me thinking about how artists respond to being under bombardment. Many artists have made art under wartime duress — Picasso in Paris, Matisse in Nice (which was also under the constant threat of Italian invasion).

But mostly I think about Henry Moore, who huddled in the Tube with hundreds of thousands other Londoners during the Blitz. (Moore’s Hampstead studio was bombed and destroyed by German planes.) In September the Imperial War Museum will open an exhibit called War and Utility that will feature Moore’s work about and during war. Moore’s most touching WWII work is the drawings he made in Tube tunnels. Many were published in 2002 in London’s War: The Shelter Drawings of Henry Moore.  

Related: As I wrote about in the Dada posts, Max Ernst made a great deal of art about modern warfare, but as a German gunner he wasn’t exactly an innocent. (I have never seen sketches/drawings/journals Ernst may have made in the trenches and neither have a couple of curators with whom I’ve spoken. What happened to them? An art history mystery…)

I’ve been so busy working on a magazine story for the last two weeks that I’m blog-behind. So I enjoyed a quiet weekend of catching up on some favorites:

• If you’re an artist (or a lawmaker) you should read what Edward Winkleman has to say about benefit auctions;
• I think this idea would work for art history too [via];
• Artist Walid Raad is in Lebanon, and tells us what life there is like right now [via];
• Bloggers trickle into SITE Santa Fe;
• Petroleum jelly arrives at SFMOMA, delivery authorization signed by M. Barney;
• What are the great artist biographies? Terrific question. One of James Panero’s would make my list. I see a later-in-the-week MAN post;
• A board game in which you too can be hedge-fund-star and art collector Steven A. Cohen or Larry Gagosian, or both (kinda);
• The newest regional-ennial is the Oregon Biennial. Familiarize yourselves, curators;
• A Richard Serra installation in progress in Seattle, complete with pics, charts, and more. Or, if you prefer something simpler: Building a Sol LeWitt; and
• How one museum lights its Anne Truitt. (Now if they’d only ditch that awful white plate under the sculpture!)

Before we leave for the day, we were stunned by this bit of questionable contextualization at the end of Washington CityPaper critic Jeffry Cudlin’s review of Kiefer at the Hirshhorn:

“Like Hitler, [Kiefer] can’t realize his outsized artistic dreams — but he continues to marshal massive reservoirs of energy and material, presumably convinced of victory.”

Back in February, I wrote an opinion piece for the Sunday LA Times Current section outlining some steps I thought/think the Getty should make to begin to rebuild trust in the institution. (Strangely, I left “clandestine lunch between Barry Munitz and California attorney general Bill Lockyer at the Rocket Pizza Lounge” off the list.) 

The Getty has taken a first good step: A website with information on a range of governance topics went live on July 1. [via] One of the measures I called for, a publishing of the Trust’s audits, is not a part of the site, but plenty of other things are. There are a few slobberknockers up on the website, including:

• Former Getty Museum director Deborah Gribbon’s total compensation jumped from the upper-$400s in 2003 and 2004 to $3,364,688 in 2005. Given that Gribbon resigned in October and that $364K is roughly what she would have earned up to her resignation date, Gribbon received $3 million upon departure (a figure first reported by the NYT and that the Getty now confirms was part of her end-of-employment agreement);
• The Getty has clearly gone above-and-beyond in terms of disclosing detailed contract information for certain employees. For example, Getty Museum director Michael Brand has a five-year contract;
• There is other fairly detailed contract and salary information on the site, as well as bylaws and information about Getty policies. I can picture board members at Los Angeles non-profits scurrying to the Getty site, making sure that they are adequately compensating their staff.

A couple of weeks ago the Washington Post’s Jackie Trescott served up a warm, fuzzy profile of new Corcoran director Paul Greenhalgh. She reported that Greenhalgh wants to bring big crowds to the long-troubled Washington museum. The first exhibit he will bring is Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939, a show created by London’s V&A.

But here’s the slobberknocker: MAN has learned that the cost of bringing “Modernism” to Washington could be as high as $2 million. (A Corcoran spokesperson confirms that depending on exchange rates and the show’s final list of works, costs will be at least $1 million and as much as $2 million.) While it typically costs more to bring a show to Washington than to, say, Des Moines because of increased insurance costs, $2 million would be a mighty high budget. The Hirshhorn says picking up a travelling show generally costs them $250,000 to, at most, $500,000. 

Not only is $2 million a jaw-dropping sum for a travelling exhibition but it’s extra-remarkable given the Corcoran’s well-publicized budget and staffing problems. As first reported on MAN, the Corcoran recently fired half of its curatorial staff. The museum needs over $40 million to address deferred maintenance. And the museum has its hand out to the District of Columbia government, hoping for $8 million to fix a leaky roof. [via]

There is no question that the Corcoran needs a splash, the kind that a travelling show such as Picturing the Banjo couldn’t provide. (The museum’s last stud exhibition was 2004’s Sally Mann show, which was recently featured in this documentary.) And while there are some real highlights in its current show of contemporary art from its collection (including the Truitts we mentioned on Monday, a naughty Lari Pittman and nice Morris Louis and Gene Davis), the Corc’s contemporary collection isn’t grand enough to be a draw.

Modernism might attract tourists and, better yet, it could bring locals back to the museum. For years the Corc’s membership revenues, a good indicator of local interest, have badly lagged its peer institutions. The little-known National Museum of Women in the Arts brings in more membership dollars than the Corc and the locally-beloved Phillips Collection earns nearly 10 times as much membership money as the Corc.

Certainly gimmicks such as the installation of J. Seward Johnson playground-level tableaux is partly to blame for the Corc’s local standing. But other important factors are beyond its control: The museum’s once attractive location, pretty much across the street from the White House, has become a liability in a post-9/11 security environment.

Will “Modernism” be a stunning, fabulous show that draws over 150,000 people? Possibly. It pretty much better be.

The NYT says that the Whitney now has all the necessary approvals for its Renzo Piano-designed expansion. Next, presumably, we’ll find out how much it will cost and how the museum will pay for it. Then, just-as-presumably, Whitney chairman Leonard Lauder will announce he’s going to pick up a huge chunk of the tab. We may have to wait a bit to hear about that last part — Lauder is on a boat somewhere, enjoying a July vacation.

The Tate Modern is expanding and the Tate’s own website has lots of info. Here are the newspaper stories: NYT/IHT, The Independent, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Times of London. (Lots of different architectural drawings there too.)

The Clyfford Still Museum in Denver has picked five firms that will ‘compete’ to build the — duh — Clyfford Still Museum. They are:

• Allied Works Architecture (Portland);
• David Chipperfield (London);
• Diller Scofidio + Renfro (New York City);
• Ohlhausen DuBois Architects (New York City); and
• SANAA (Tokyo).

All but Ohlhausen have done major American museum projects in the last couple years. And many of them have those massively annoying Flash-heavy websites that architecture firms love. Especially Ohlhausen, which must be stopped before they Flash again.

Yesterday MAN posted the Art Institute of Chicago’s throat-clearing at the NYT. Today the Chicago Sun-Times picked up on the hullabaloo.

Yesterday Lee Rosenbaum picked up the Met’s deaccessioner-in-chief Gary Tinterow and knocked him around a little bit. His offense: His industry-defying thoughts on selling objects in the Met’s collection. (Rosenbaum posted Tinterow’s comments last week, while I was enjoying a Truittian sublime.)

I won’t recap Tinterow’s comments here — you should click and read them because they’re, well, stupefyingly clueless. But Rosenbaum’s case against Tinterow is stronger than she acknowledges: Tinterow didn’t just try to dump an Eduardo Chillida sculpture (Michael Kimmelman caught that one, and at the last minute he tut-tutted the Met into the proper shame), but MAN subsequently caught Tinterow trying to unload a William Zorach sculpture. (That scheme failed too.)

A couple observations: Tinterow’s follies are not an isolated case. MoMA has made a regular habit of unwise deaccessioning, including selling a best-of-the-best de Chirico and a just-as-good Pollock. Last May Kimmelman called MoMA “a regular Kwik-E-Mart of art sales.” (Unfortunately Kimmelman wrote his anti-deaccessioning tract only after it was too late for the power of his keyboard to save his protagonist, the NYPL’s Asher Durand.) And last year LACMA covered itself in egg by deaccessioning top-notch works too.

So while Tinterow has been unusually public and unusually quotable about his dealings, he’s not a lone wolf in the wilderness. And while Tinterow should be confronted more directly, not just by Rosenbaum and me, but by other media too, the ultimate responsibility here falls with museum trustees. They need to be reminded that their responsibility is to safeguard our cultural objects with an eye toward history. Their job is to be wiser than the Tinterows, to say, ‘Stop – in 50 years that piece you think is dated and dead may be back in favor; The measly $300,000 you hope to bring in (one-tenth of one percent of our budget) isn’t worth violating the fundamental tenets of museumdom.’

So if you sit on a museum board or if you’re a director, email both this post and Rosenbaum’s to your board. Remind them that they have a duty to say no. And if you want some guidance, talk to the trustees at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Faced with massive budget problems, no director, and plenty of other problems, they flatly rejected selling anything from the collection. If the Corcoran’s trustees can say no, any trustee can.

Related: Modern Kicks.

The Art Institute of Chicago is not so happy with the New York Times. The protagonist is Randy Kennedy’s “Museums’ Research on Looting Seen to Lag,” which ran today. The piece jumped from the front of the Times’ arts section inside to a photo of Courbet’s “The Rock at Hautepierre” — and that’s where the AIC began to be unhappy. The AIC was not mentioned in the story, but there’s that big ol’ Courbet with a caption that says the Courbet “was determined to have been taken by the Nazis.”

From an email from AIC public affairs chief Erin Hogan to the NYT:

We here at the Art Institute of Chicago are deeply concerned about the misinformation presented in the caption to the image, Gustave Courbet’s The Rock of Hautepierre, that accompanied Randy Kennedy’s article, “Museums’ Research on Looting Seen to Lag” in the New York Times 7/25/06.

First, the caption has the wrong title. The title is The Rock of Hautepierre, not Rock at Hautpierre. [Ed. note: It's now correct on NYT.com.]

Second, the caption claimed that the Courbet painting in our possession “was determined to have been taken by the Nazis.” We would like to submit the following correction for your consideration:

There is no evidence that Gustave Courbet’s The Rock of Hautepierre was seized by the Nazis. The work was owned by the collector Max Silberberg, who sold it to an unknown buyer at an auction in 1935. It was resold several times and subsequently entered the Art Institute’s collection. In the course of the Art Institute’s provenance research on the painting, the museum and the last surviving relative of Mr. Silberberg established contact and worked to learn more about the history of the painting. The Art Institute and the surviving relative reached an equitable resolution of this matter in 2001. The results of the Art Institute’s extensive research on this work are posted on the Art Institute’s web site.

We are additionally concerned that the following sentence in the caption, “A survey of 332 museums suggests many are not reviewing their collections enough for such works,” implies that the Art Institute is one of those museums.

Nowhere in the article is the Art Institute of Chicago even mentioned as one of the museums that responded in a timely manner to the survey sent by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany; that the museum follows the guidelines of the American Association of Museums on Nazi-era provenance research; and that the Art Institute has been committed to provenance research since before the guidelines were issued.