Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

1.) The Worcester Art Museum is the best American art museum you probably haven’t been to. The European collection is deep and full of good paintings and the American collection (and installations) are top-notch.

2.) Worcester’s Jacob van Ruisdael might be the best 17thC Dutch seascape in an American museum. (Wanna disagree? Tweet me and I’ll share your picks.)

3.) Worcester’s early American collection can go up against almost anyone’s. Have a browse here to see what I mean. (Roberta Smith, who criticized the National Gallery of Art’s American installation for being stale would probably love Worcester’s installs, which mix naive painting with overmantels with formal portraits. I sure did.) Among my favorites were Worcester’s Freake portraits, a cleverly detailed Ralph Earl landscape and a terrific John Vanderlyn portrait.

4.) Edgar Degas once owned this Worcester Gauguin.

5.) Want to know when a city was at its wealthiest? Look at when its art museum acquired its best paintings. Worcester’s mostly came in between 1910 and the 1940s. The European paintings galleries still look great.

• The MFA Houston conserves a Kiefer in full public view. The Houston Chronicle’s Douglas Britt provides the video.
• At the Brooklyn Museum, Yinka Shonibare makes an entrance.
• Is this a solution for how to make wall-text less squinty?
• Last year I did a series of posts on the American flag in contemporary art. These arrived too late to be included.
• Six centuries of tapestries in painting.

1.) I was excited to see a new Tadao Ando. I was excited to take a walk in the Berkshire woods to get to a new Tadao Ando. When I got to said Ando I discovered it was a couple of small, afterthought-ish galleries tacked onto a beautiful paintings conservation/etc. lab. Seemed like a very, very, very limited use of the architect, the space, the opportunity.

2.) The Clark has put together a pleasant site for its Dove/O’Keeffe show. (One oddity: Lots of JPEGs of paintings, no credit lines.) The show itself is a nice tennis match between two American moderns. Bonus: Check out this O’Keeffe, just acquired by the Wadsworth Atheneum.

3.) This is a really nice Pissarro. The more Pissarro I’ve seen since the MoMA Pissarro-Cezanne show the more I’ve thought that the show presented a slightly out-of-line pairing. Must re-read that catalogue.

4.) The Clark’s galleries are wonderfully dignified. No wonder Sterling Clark once lived in an apartment in the back galleries. (Can you imagine Eli and Edythe Broad living in an apartment in the back galleries at BCAM? Er, perhaps that’s a bad example…)

5.) I tweeted that an Ammi Phillips painting had the most touching credit line I’d read on a museum wall-label: “Gift of Oliver Eldridge in memory of Sarah Fairchild Anderson, Teacher of Art, North Adams Public Schools.” Here’s the painting.

• In the DC Express, Danielle O’Steen talks to William Eggleston about spontaneity in his work — not that Eggleston exactly puts it that way.
• The Philly Inky’s Peter Dobrin reports that the Philly Museum has hired a new director: Cleveland’s Timothy Rub.
• Kenneth Baker continues his lament about the decline of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Latest sadness: Tut.
• Best Holland Cotter line in months (on James Ensor at MoMA):”[O]ne minute he’s doing biblical scenes, the next the equivalent of biker
  tattoos, in a style that veers between crude and dainty.”
• Possible next story for LATer Mike Boehm: If MOCA’s finances are ‘fixed,’ why did they recently do another round of staff layoffs? 
• The Dallas Morning News’ Michael Granberry on how artists address WWII Japanese internment camps through art, now at the Crow Collection in Dallas.
• In the Miami Herald, Fabiola Santiago details the next private collection to go on view in a Miami warehouse.
• Just right for Doug Harvey in LA Weekly: Outback Renaissance.
• A new downtown sculpture park has opened in St. Louis and David Bonetti approves. Complete with pix.

1.) Over 60 percent of Williams College students take an art/art history class.

2.) WCMA might consider re-photographing this van der Hamen still-life, because it’s really quite exceptional.

3.) The only museums I visited all week that did not have a Sol LeWitt wall-drawing on view were (I think…) the under-construction MFA Boston and the Clark. WCMA’s is right in its lobby, in its staircase. Typically a line in a painting might do that to your eye — think of the way a diagonal in a Monet leads you into the heart of the painting. The LeWitt at WCMA pulls your whole person up to the museum’s second floor, as if you were on a clothesline. Cool.

4.) A tiny LeWitt show at WCMA features a drawing that LeWitt made for his mother. It is not the kind of thing you and I would make for our parents. It isn’t light or funny or cutesy. It’s a typical LeWitt, just for his mom. Something about that is reassuring.

5.) You do not want to fall asleep having just thought about Ribera’s The Executioner. Srsly.

1.) MASS MoCA’s Sol LeWitt drawings retrospective could not be better. Really: I can’t think of anything the museum could have done differently that would have improved the presentation. It’s perfect. Ideal. Riveting. It’s on view through 2033.

2.) Speaking of ambition — and the LeWitt presentation is ambitious institutionally, artistically and every way else I can think of — how about Anselm Kiefer? I don’t think ambitious artists are  valued at the moment, let alone encouraged, but none of that has slowed down the 64-year-old Kiefer. The Kiefer mini-show at MASS MoCA is modest, but the work is big. As I looked at the ginormous concrete sculpture at the heart of the show I couldn’t stop thinking about us in Iraq, us in Afghanistan, chaos in Iran… where is next…

3.) Simon Starling loves/needs him some wall text.

4.) The LeWitt show should start us all thinking about what other artists deserve that kind of long-term installation. Fred Sandback? Robert Irwin? Doug Wheeler? Agnes Martin?

5.) I can’t get enough of the LeWitt time-lapse videos.

1.) The Serras get the headlines, the Fred Sandbacks steal the show. Dia has nearly a dozen. But: Sandbacks bask in the space and light of Dia’s space. Put them in crowded galleries with other art and standard lighting and they go flat, such as at MoMA. Sandback deserves a major retrospective… but there aren’t many spaces in which the work can look as good as it looks in Beacon.

2.) The only two places in America that are whiter and more male than the National Gallery of Art’s American galleries are Tom Tancredo’s imagination and Dia Beacon. There is a temporary Zoe Leonard exhibition on view, an inexplicable Antoni Tapies mini-show (a Dia curator has an appointment at the Reina Sofia…) and Louise Bourgeois is in the attic. As I Tweeted on Friday: Anne Truitt belongs in Beacon.

2a.) I’m tired of the posturing, posing, ostentatious, excessive, unnecessary Dia colon. I have exorcised it from this post.

3.) Dia’s presentation of Dan Flavin looks a little stale. I’ve never liked those early, white Flavins as much as the later, colorful works. Maybe that’s it.

4.) Richard Serra’s torqued ellipses are one of my favorite art experiences of the last half century. Look carefully and you can see much of the history of abstract painting in their surfaces: Larry Poons’ dots, Gerhard Richter’s shmears, Cy Twombly’s scribbles and so on.

5.) New York-based critics who complain and bitch and moan and complain that Dia is not in New York City are being narrow and small. Beacon is less than 90 minutes away from Manhattan by train. The space and light in Beacon enables one of the most beautiful, thoughtful collection installations in America. Dia being in Beacon is good for the art, good for the artists (see Sandback, Fred) and it’s good for us because it sows us the work to best advantage. Would it be nice if there was a Dia exhibition space somewhere in New York City or in New Jersey? Sure. Lots of things would be nice. But is it a big deal? No.

• If you’re a museum director, OCMA boss Dennis Szakacs will whisper to you the name of his favorite bargain shopper, reports LATer Mike Boehm. (At which point you can then leak it to Boehm…);
• MCASD director Hugh Davies is not amused by Szakacs/OCMA’s antics;
• In the NYT, Deborah Sontag talks with Yinka Shonibare;
• The Boston Globe’s Sebastian Smee and the case of the falling horizon line at the Peabody Essex Museum;
• The Dallas Morning News’ Scott Cantrell reviews a new show at the Meadows Museum that reveals what kind of a cubist Diego Rivera was;
• The KC Star’s Alice Thorson wonders who will lead the Nelson-Atkins next? (Strong collection + great new building = plum job.); and
• In the Houston Chronicle, everywhere Douglas Britt looks he sees John Chamberlain (including at the Menil).

Some of you have been kind enough to encourage me to tweet more visits to art museums/etc. Well, over the next week or so I’ll be tweeting from lots of art museums. It might be a fun time to join me on Twitter.

On June 4 I posted about how the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new so-called American Wing and the National Gallery of Art’s American galleries are problematic. The two institutions are clinging to embarrassingly conservative, Pat Buchanan-Tom Tancredo-style definitions of what ‘American art’ is. That thinking culminated in yesterday’s post, about the NGA.

A word on why I didn’t include the Met, whose ‘American Wing’ is almost as embarrassing as the NGA’s presentation of American art. So far the Met’s space is not worthy of the name ‘American Wing.’ It is the white, northeastern American wing. Call it the ‘1/8th of America Wing.’ 

But the Met isn’t done. In 2011 the museum’s American paintings and sculpture galleries will re-open. I’m not sure there’s any reason to believe they’ll be more fully American than what’s opened so far. But it would be unfair to comment on the totality Met’s view of American art until…