Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Last Friday NYTer Michael Kimmelman left readers slack-jawed by oh-so-carefully not using the word “greedy” in describing the Bloch-Bauer heirs’ disposition of the Gustav Klimt paintings that Austria recently returned to their family. I found his essay to be both shaky on the facts of the case (the NYT, rather pathetically, ran only one correction), and presumptuous.

This morning the Wall Street Journal’s Eric Gibson kindly quotes MAN and piles on, pointing out that Kimmelman was out of touch with financial reality, at least:

Long-denied heirs like Ms. Altmann should be allowed to do as they please with their property once they have recovered it. Isn’t that, so to speak, the whole point? The “story about justice and redemption after the Holocaust,” to borrow Mr. Kimmelman’s phrase, surely includes the right of the descendants of Nazi-era victims to exercise the freedom their families were denied.

Also, here’s my Fortune magazine story on how Ronald Lauder and the Neue Galerie pulled off the Adele.

My Fortune story about Lauder/Neue Galerie, Adele/etc. just went online.

Because we’re not just about deaccessioning, strippers at the Nelson-Atkins, Polidori, endowments, Diebenkorn, and other seriousness… The art world’s favorite television show is Project Runway. In the last month I’ve, sigh, come out about my addiction to the show. Curators, critics, and artists have laughed at me… and then have copped to their own PR obsession. (Don’t think I haven’t noticed the way my email stays oh-so-quiet on Wednesday nights about 10 ET.) I think we dig it because it’s every bit as art world as the art world — and here are five things that prove it:

1. PR represents the creative process fairly accurately. BS’ing in the studio, Tim’s crits, creative types editing other creative types, jealousy and sniping. Familiar.
2. The way a timeline can drive or force creativity. The judges are waiting, a show opens Friday, etc.  
3. The way the judges push the designers to take risks — but not so many risks that their work stops being their work.
4. The thinness that separates creative success from middling mediocrity. (Also known as: How quickly you can go from the high-creative world to the Asheville-craft-show-world.)
5. We know the characters: Laura’s fatalism (She’ll just “throw another kid on the pile”), Jeffrey’s fear of failure (as manifested by the middle fingers he flashes when he succeeds), Michael’s comfy suavity (he mixes the kind of phrases you figure he learned at his grandmother’s house with teaching the Oklahoma-drag-queen-designer how to walk), and Uli’s laid back hedonism (let’s get vasted). We all know artists like this.

You’ve read this before: A prominent American museum has acquired a Gustave Courbet seascape. Back in June, MAN broke the news that the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco had purchased a magnificent Courbet wave painting. Over the summer the Wadsworth Atheneum also scored a Courbet: The Shore at Trouville: Sunset Effect, the largest seascape Courbet painted during is 1865-66 trip to Trouville.

This is no wave painting. The sea is calm. A beach is covered by rocks. In the distance the sun falls into the ocean. Birds chase it. The sunset has caused the sky to go pyrotechnic pink. To the right of the painting a sailboat approaches the horizon. Courbet made this painting in 1876, and died the next year.

I’ve not yet seen this one in person, but in the 3000×3000-pixel JPEG of the painting, Courbet’s knife-work looks particularly alive in the rocks, especially to the right of the painting. (I’ve particularly enjoyed having Courbet’s palette knife on the brain of late.)

So two big American museums picked up Courbets at about the same time. (I’m pretty sure there’s a third, but it escapes me — readers?) Coincidence? I tend to think not…

Related: Coming up at the Walters: Courbet and the Modern Landscape.

On Monday I talked with Marc Wilson, the director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. (The occasion ws a series of Q&As I’ll be running next week about museums and admissions charges.) It’s a busy time at the Nelson-Atkins: the Kansas City Sculpture Park is re-opening, and next year the museum’s new Steven Holl-designed Bloch addition will open to the public. (Don’t miss the great links about this at the bottom of the post.)

Talking with Wilson reminded me of a long-forgotten story from my childhood. I was probably eight or nine years old, and my family was visiting Kansas City on our way to a camp in the Ozarks. One morning I asked my parents what we’d be doing that day, and my mother replied that we were going to the museum. I didn’t like that so much. “But mom,” I said, “We have museums at home. You can see the art there, can’t you?”

So I have kind of a soft-spot for the Nelson-Atkins. Oh, and I love Shuttlecocks too. (The OldenBruggens were installed while I was in college, at the University of Missouri.) They’re probably the most famous public artwork in America. “We’ve had weddings under the shuttlecocks,” Wilson told me. “And a stripper was photogrpahed next to one. In the buff.”

So I’ve particularly enjoyed watching the new Bloch Building go up, especially because the N-A scored a major coup/gift during construction: Hallmark gave the museum one of the nation’s best private photography collections. It will anchor the museum’s new 5,000-square-foot photo galleries.

All of this is a long way toward getting that Marc Wilson/stripper quote onto the blog. Oh — and to steer you toward the KC Star’s Sunday section on the new Nelson-Atkins (you may need BugMeNot):

• KC Star art critic Alice Thorson particularly likes the N-A’s recent Walter De Maria;
• Steve Paul’s overview of the building-in-progress;
• Today’s don’t miss: Steve Paul on the unexpectedly fascinating process of trying to construct the glass walls of Holl’s building. (Wilson: “Nobody knew how to build it.”) Part Two and Part Three. I highly recommend printing these out — you’ll love the story.

• The Nelson-Atkins blog, where we find out that they have nicknamed their Duane Hanson Museum Guard ‘Roy.’
• Global Warming Your Cold Heart, which recently mused on artists who are household names.
• Not an add, but a heads-up: Brian Sholis’ blog has been really strong over the last few weeks. Right now he has Varnedoe-related posts at the top. Check it out.
• Not even remotely related: The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives picked an architect for its new building: Toyo Ito & Associates.

Regular readers have grown fairly accustomed to my occasional rants about the United States’ failure to engage in cultural diplomacy, particularly between the eastern Mediterranean and, say, Indonesia. (Which would be about half the globe.)

Two stories caught my eye today: The Washington Post showed up to a press conference and wrote the story fed to it by the feds: Cultural diplomacy gets a new worldview. In short: Laura Bush held a White House event and announced that the U.S. government would be spending $4.5 million on a Global Cultural Initiative. Are you kidding me? $4.5 million? Quick comparison: The U.S. has spent $317 billion on the war in Iraq, a war that has contributed mightily and negatively to perceptions of the U.S. abroad. And the White House is acting like a $4.5 million cultural exchange program is something worth being excited about? (Yes, it’s a simplistic comparison, but you get the gist.)

The related story: Also on the Post’s website: Want to begin to understand how some Islamic governments treat the visual arts? Read Bashir Goth’s take on PostGlobal.

UPDATE: Several readers have written in to point out that the number that matters more to the health of an institution is its ratio of endowment to operating costs. (But that this list is still good, clean fun.)

One of the nice things about running this website is that people often read things here and promptly offer up fascinating info. Thanks to a kind source, here are the top ten art museum endowments as of June 2006, with totals rounded to the nearest $5M (excluding the Getty, which is a different thing):

1. Metropolitan Museum of Art, uncertain
2. MFA Houston, $760 million
3. National Gallery of Art, $600 million
4. Art Institute of Chicago, $565 million
5. MoMA, $495 million
6. Harvard University Art Museums, $470 million
7. MFA Boston, $440 million
8. Cleveland Museum of Art, $385 million
9. Indianapolis Museum of Art, $345 million
10. Winterthur Museum & Country Estate, $330 million

During the course of writing a long magazine story, a writer accumulates lots of good info and detail that he can’t use. So over the course of the next week or so MAN will be the beneficiary of what I found while working on the Lauder/Adele/Neue Galerie story.  

One of the things I explored in reporting the piece was the persistent art world buzz/unsubstantiated-cocktail-party-chatter that Ronald Lauder planned to some day fold the Neue Galerie into MoMA. Not only could I not find anything to support the rumors, but everything I heard, including discussion of how Lauder would provide for the Neue Galerie’s long-term (read: independent) future, indicated the place would be around for a while. The last line of the story makes clear Lauder’s ambitions for the place. He’s also considered a Neue Galerie Downtown.

During our second (I think) conversation Lauder told me that he was personally endowing the museum. 

“If that was the request [the heirs] made of Lauder, it was wise,” said Anne Poulet, the director of The Frick Collection, a museum a few blocks from the Neue Galerie on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “To have these institutions exist in perpetuity and be healthy, they really need to have a good solid foundation in an endowment.”

Since the early days of the Neue Galerie, Lauder has held the Frick as one of the models for his museum. Like the Neue, the Frick was founded by a single wealthy donor: Henry Clay Frick. In 1919 Frick endowed his museum with $15 million, $185 million in today’s money. Frick also enlisted a dream team of industrialists to oversee his museum’s endowment, including John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, and Henry O. Havemeyer. Today that endowment is worth $240 million and last year it provided for half of the Frick’s operating budget.

Given Lauder’s ties to the family business (Estee Lauder cosmetics), asset diversification will be especially important to the future of the Neue Galerie. Many of the late Estee Lauder’s and Ronald Lauder’s gifts and loans to Neue Galerie have been in Estee Lauder stock, but Ronald Lauder told me that his museum’s endowment will not be dependent on a single company. Houston’s Menil Foundation has benefitted from this kind of planning. The Menil was created and eventually endowed by Dominique de Menil, whose family fortune also came almost entirely from one company: oil services giant Schlumberger. By the time de Menil died in 1999, her estate’s contribution to the Menil’s endowment was $90 million, with less than $4.5 million in Schlumberger stock.

Lauder won’t specifically say that hes selling Estee Lauder stock with Neue Galerie’s future in mind. “It’s totally secure,” he says.

Wondering about the endowment of your favorite museum? Here are a few numbers, pretty much randomly selected and ~-hedged because the data I have on file may be a year or so old. Chances are that I’ll update this as the day goes on and as my mind wanders from the work I should be doing, so check back later:

• Walker Art Center: ~$195 million
• Indianapolis Museum of Art: ~$350 million (And you wondered why Max Anderson went to Indy…)
• Modern Art Museum Fort Worth: ~$25 million
• Baltimore Museum of Art: ~$65 million
• SFMOMA: ~$170 million
• Metropolitan Museum of Art: $2.2 billion (Met-only, there are various other funds on which the museum draws)
• My educated guess as to the top six museum endowments, in no particular order (a guess because some museums haven’t fully folded recent gifts into their endowments, and one of these is a trust that operates a museum): Cleveland, Getty, MFA Houston, the Met, NGA, MoMA. UPDATE: I was five for six (more or less). I’ll post the top ten later today.

This is the slobberknockin’-crazy art story of the month. Maybe the year. [via] Here’s hoping that the Dallas Museum of Art’s director, John Lane, personally steps in and talks with the school district, the teacher, the local press, etc. Art museums should stand up for themselves and for art education when this kind of silliness happens.