Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

I’m traveling today. So while I’m away, check out what I wrote about the recent George Bellows retrospective. After debuting at the National Gallery of Art last summer, it traveled to the Met, and now to the Royal Academy in London. Some UK reviews: Peter Conrad (The Observer), Richard Dorment (The Telegraph).

I’m traveling today. So while I’m away, check out some posts I’ve written about the late Margaret Kilgallen over the years.

• I consider a major Margaret Kilgallen (above) that SFMOMA acquired in 2012.
• Back in 2005 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art destroyed an old parking garage to make way for some new museum construction. It could have saved a major Kilgallen it commissioned in 2000. I wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in which I urged the museum to save the Kilgallen. The museum destroyed the art anyway.
• In 2006 I was pleased to see the Hammer acquire a significant Kilgallen.
• Last September Kilgallen’s widowed husband Barry McGee was a guest on The Modern Art Notes Podcast. We talked about her influence on him and his work.

Prepare to lose hours in the Art Institute of Chicago’s new 1913 Armory Show website, which is full of installation shots, PDFs of contemporary publications and more.

• John Perreault takes a look at Gutai at the Guggenheim.
• In the Winston-Salem Journal, Susan Gilmor tells the story of the campus art collection developed by Wake Forest University students, who just took their quadrennial buying trip to New York. Super-neat read.
• The Art Institute of Chicago has a binder full of women.
• The Archives of American Art pretty much always has great stuff on its blog, including this story of John Storrs, shamrocks and (maybe) a church in Ireland.
• Photographer James H. Evans chronicles Marfa and the Big Bend region.
• As the Clyfford Still Museum unrolls Still’s paintings, conservators are presented with striking challenges — including trying to learn what the heck this black-ish mold-ish stuff is.
• An Andrea Zittel A-Z Homestead Unit was just installed in the sculpture garden of Australia’s National Gallery. Artist Charlie Sofo is living in it.
• Speaking of taking care of paintings, MoMA’s James Coddington and Jennifer Hickey are doing an awesome, fascinating job of documenting their attention to Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950. Geek. Out. (That’s MoMA conservation scientist Chris McGlinchey up there.)
• Same Old Art offers a nice take on painter Svenja Deininger.
• Joerg Colberg picks up a book and makes me want to read it: “Painting and Photography, 1839-1914,” by Dominique de Font-Reaulx, a curator of photography at the Musee d’Orsay.
• I just bought Brad Zellar and Alec Soth’s LBM Dispatch “Three [California] Valleys.” Each is a site rich in American art and photographic history.
• Tony Smith’s One-Two-Three (1976) is on view in New York’s Bryant Park for the next several weeks. Check it out — and earn yourself this awesome t-shirt. (Hear more about a key Tony Smith initiative on The Modern Art Notes Podcast. The Smith segment begins just before the 42-minute mark.)
• Why the Civil War still matters to artists, Dario Robleto edition.
• Matthew Harrison Tedford wanders today’s San Francisco to align the present with Carleton Watkins stereographs.
• It’s nice to see New York discovering John McLaughlin, one of the most underrated artists of the 20th century. (Killer installation shots too!)

• I can’t match the headline to a jaw-dropping story by The Stranger’s Jen Graves:  ”Charles Krafft Is a White Nationalist Who Believes the Holocaust Is a Deliberately Exaggerated Myth. What Will Happen to One of the Northwest’s Preeminent Artists—Whose Nazi Imagery Has Always Been Considered Ironic—Now That His Views Are Not a Secret?”
• Christopher Knight looks back at the 1913 Armory Show and the (familiar) knee-jerk nationalism it prompted.
• At the National Gallery of Art, a “temporary” installation of contemporary art was up for 20 years (until it fell down over the weekend).
• The Archives of American Art’s Kelly Quinn shares a story about Alma Thomas, teacher.
• SFMOMA offers up new images of their expansion design.
• Awesome project(s): At the beginning of her ninth decade, Louise Bourgeois made this artist’s book out of 60-year old towels from her 1938 wedding.
• In the WSJ, Joel Henning offers up a bizarre puff piece on the Art Institute of Chicago and director Douglas Druick. The best worst part is Henning quoting Druick saying: “[T]he big word for me is ‘access.’ That sounds trite, but it’s anything but. . . . We’re looking to make the collections more accessible outside and inside the walls of the museum.” Um, really!? The AIC charges up to $23 for admission. It costs a family of four $60-$80 to visit. Access for whom?
• Speaking of which, just after Druick claimed he was all about “access,” the AIC announced it would offer valet parking for another $20 car. Makes it pretty clear for whom Druick is eager to provide access.

• With a significant exhibition at the Asia Society coming in September, Iranian post-war art will finally get a moment in the New York spotlight reports Robin Cembalest in ARTnews.
• Carol Diehl unloads on Ken Johnson’s review of the Wolfgang Laib installation at MoMA.
• Also in ARTnews, Richard B. Woodward on the intersection of etymology and (exploitative?) documentary photography, aka ruin porn.
• A couple of standouts from the Martha Schwendener-edited, extra-super-mega-meta, ‘alternative ideas’-themed Brooklyn Rail: Blake Gopnik on how art criticism’s retreat into the art ghetto denies the broader world engagement with progressive ideas, Paul Schimmel on the promising future of artist-created foundations, Christopher Knight on fixing/replacing the NEA, and David Carrier on the over-priced, over-featured exhibition catalogue.
• In Worcester Magazine, Doreen Manning tells the story of how the Worcester Art Museum is conserving a rare pair of Hogarth portraits, from beginning (funding!) through process. Neat, thorough piece.
• Behind the scenes of the ICA Philadelphia’s “Glitter and Folds” with artist Field Kallop and her diamond dust.
• In Frieze, Negar Azimi writes thoughtfully against Arab Spring-era Revolution Art.
• In the Washington CityPaper, Kriston Capps drops his second Hirshhorn bubble-centric piece in a week. It’s difficult to reconcile Capps’ tone and new-found enthusiasm for the project with what his reporting has uncovered. To recap: Capps reported over the weekend that the Hirshhorn has officially delayed the opening of the bubble for at least the third time. The project has been so long-plagued by poor fundraising that the naming rights Bloomberg, LP has acquired will expire (May 2014) before the museum’s targeted opening date (fall 2014). In the 38 months since the project was announced, Hirshhorn director Richard Koshalek has raised only $4 million in outside funds for it. That’s a lot of going-nowhere slowly, and the Hirshhorn’s institutional focus on a folly shows in lax fundraising for the museum’s art-focused mission (oh yeah, art!). Yesterday Capps reported that with just months to go before the museum’s trustees vote the project up/down, the museum has hired a fundraising consultant to do what Koshalek hasn’t been able to do: Find enough money to fund the project. However, the museum won’t name the consultant because the contract’s not done yet. (With mere months. To go.) Capps quotes Smithsonian executive Richard Kurin saying that the full cost of the bubble project — a minimum of $15 million — was presented to Hirshhorn trustees only two meetings ago, almost three years after the project was announced. Finally, Capps reports that the Smithsonian has commissioned a study that will, in short, determine if the whole thing makes operational sense. (From a mission-orientation point-of-view, it makes no sense at all. The Hirshhorn is an art museum and bubble has nothing to do with art. Besides, the Hirshhorn already has a perfectly good, recently upgraded events space.) Capps has lots of great details about the bubble project (someone should really report on the rest of the museum’s finances…), but in collecting firewood he seems to have missed the forest: The bubble project has lacked direction, purpose and planning. Worse: The museum’s leadership has wasted three years on the idea when it could have been doing what contemporary art museums do best: Telling the story of art in our culture, acquiring art, expanding its role in its community.

• The Getty begins to reveal goodies from the trove of Mapplethorpes it shares with LACMA. [Image: Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon, 1984. Collection of the Getty Research Institute.]
• The odd story behind Rembrandt cheese.
• Celebrating some badass women on Tumblr’s Storyboard.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art opens a satellite branch, reports Steven Litt in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. At least kinda, anyway: The museum will program the space six months of the year and two private collectors will program it the rest of the time. That’s a new one.
• LACMA cleans a John Singleton Copley, complete with before-and-after pictures.
• The Eastman House buys developer trays — sort of.
• Greg Allen (convincingly) argues that a number of Robert Rauschenbergs are actually collaborations between Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg, and that at least one famed Johns is a collaboration too.
• Julia Halperin noticed that a bunch of museums have been pulling all-nighters.
• To celebrate the 100th anniversary of The Armory Show, MoMA’s blog Inside/Out is creating 1913-specific content here. Early highlight: A look at Kandinsky’s illustrated book Sounds with curator Starr Figura.

• Jonathan Jones speculates about the National Gallery’s ‘new’ Titian.
• Jones also thinks art criticism is too fawning. Is it ever.
• In the Daily Mail, Lewis Smith reports that LED lighting may be responsible for darkening yellow paint in some 19thC paintings.
• Benjamin Sutton visits a Louise Bourgeois church in Provence.
• The Buffalo News’ Colin Dabkowski offers a thorough introduction of the Albright Knox’s incoming director: Janne Sirén. Apparently he’s the guy who thought the Guggenheim Finland was a good idea.
• The Amon Carter Museum of American Art’s blog features the inventor of the infographic, whose ~1870 work looks a little Diebenkorny.
• Who knew?: The Met has put up a tight little installation of Ingres drawings.
• MoMA’s going all-in on the 100th anniversary of The Armory Show. First up: Curator Leah Dickerman talks about a key Boccioni in “Inventing Abstraction.” WNYC has joined in, producing a one-hour documentary called “Culture Shock 1913,” complete with its own (somewhat dormant) Tumblr.
• At Creative Time Reports, an art collective in Pakistan is collecting the cell phone videos of migrants living in Karachi.
• These interior shots of the renovated Rijksmuseum are holy-cow level.
• A much-discussed artwork honoring labor and commissioned for a state building in Maine has been relocated to a Maine art museum.

• The Smithsonian American Art Museum has had a questionable half-decade — including showing a self-glorifying exhibition dictated to it by George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg, and an exhibition of video game “art” organized by an industry executive — so how is it the museum is doing something as serious as a Nam June Paik retrospective?
• Frederick Cohen’s painting of an Ohio family is a classic, semi-famous bit of Americana. Oberlin’s Allen Art Museum points to where the ~1847 painting may have been made. Neat story!
• How a 19th-century landscape painter might have traveled around Colorado.
• The Caravaggio hoodie.
• It may be hard to top Storm King as a site for Mark di Suvero’s work, but this’ll give it a run.
• As usual, you should just go to the ICP’s’ Fans in a Flashbulb and just start scrolling. Superb stuff.
• Simultaneous Hiroshi Sugimoto: on Naoshima and in Pittsburgh.

• So the Corcoran isn’t selling its home after all. Let’s not be too surprised about this: Once the District attorney general’s office became involved it was unlikely the Corcoran was going to be able to wiggle out of its charter. Instead, view this week’s news as the rough equivalent of George W. Bush announcing that the United States was going to Mars: Never mind the money or the details, we’re going. Well, the Corcoran is staying. But it still has poor donor relations, poor foundation relations and little money or prospects. Look for the Corcoran to announce a merger or arrangement of some sort with George Washington University, which is in the Corc’s neighborhood. That could be good for everyone — and might finally allow the Corcoran to attract talent to senior leadership positions and to its board.
• How a catalogue raisonne is published (in under two minutes).
• Paintings (and John Ruskin) prompted art historian Jill Burke to wonder if Renaissance women removed their body hair. [via]
• Why is the Hammer Museum looking at games? Oh, that makes sense.
• Greg Allen explains how a painting in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Civil War show reminded him of his own mixed-race ancestry.
• In The New Republic, Jason Farago experiences Martha Rosler’s Meta-Monumental Garage Sale at MoMA. He finds it anti-climatic and a “first specimen” of relational aesthetics: Rosler’s first garage sale was in 1973. (That’s a reasonable approach but factually it’s a smidge off: Tom Marioni started it all with his The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art in 1970.)
• John King takes to Landscape Architecture magazine to comment on the parklet boom. Worth considering: So far as I know, the first parklets were created by early Bay Area conceptualist Bonnie Sherk in about 1970. Featured in the important Orange County Museum of Art/Berkeley Art Museum “State of Mind” exhibition, they’re pictured here too.
• Speaking of OCMA, how could it downshift so quickly from a couple of years of excellent, scholarly, important shows to this collector-fluffing crap? Sad.
• I love that the Walker is offering video art over the interwebs. This one’s from Kim Beom and is up through Dec. 20.