Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

• Nicholas Tinari takes to the Philly Inky op-ed page to say the right things about Philadelphia’s dismantling of and disregard for the Barnes Foundation.
• LACMA just acquired a painting painted by Goya’s cubicle-mate (sort of).
• The Tate is exploring mapping its collection in all kinds of interesting ways.
• How artist Steve Roden found painter Frederick Hammersley. Great stuff. If I were a betting man, I’d wager on a Hammersley retrospective as part of PST II.
• Carolina Miranda has a new shorthand for the Hirshhorn’s long-proposed ‘bubble’ thingy: “Giant turquoise poo.”
• Speaking of the Hirshhorn, its new website is a mistake. It spins, it flickers, it flashes in ways that make the visitor regret having had lunch. It is harder and slower to search the collection, and you get smaller images when you do.
• It’s nice to see that bylines are back on the LAT’s Culture Monster blog.

• Tonight!: The Modern Art Notes Podcast tapes live at the Baltimore Museum of Art with guest Martha Rosler. Please come out, please say hi. Details here.
• I’ve written extensively about the responsibility of the museum that holds our national collection, namely the National Gallery of Art. For years I’ve argued that the NGA has used its American collection galleries to present an only-in-Pat-Buchanan’s-wildest-fantasies version of American art history. (June 2009, June 2011,  February 2012.) A somewhat similar debate is underway over how the Tate Britain should present its nation’s collection. Don’t miss this from The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones.
• William Poundstone tells a great story about LACMA’s new… secret buddha?
• Bret McCabe takes to Urbanite to share a different story of how art has played a role in community development in a seemingly long-gone part of Baltimore. Your must-read of the day.
• Stanford is building a $4.2 million facility for Nathan Oliveira’s Windhover paintings. Oliveira had one of the most interesting careers in post-war American art.
• On the Milwaukee Art Museum’s blog, Mel Buchanan tells a great, great story about the challenging conservation of a Duane Hanson sculpture.
• The Walker Art Center has a neat video of how it installed Robert Therrien’s massive table-and-chairs in “Lifelike.”
• Katharina Fritsch is on view now at the Art Institute of Chicago. She’s also on the Bad at Sports podcast.
• There’s another union-art behemoth battle ongoing: At the MFA Boston.
• This week’s MAN Podcast guest Cory Arcangel loves Bruce Springsteen and the glockenspiel. Preferably together. MANPodcast.com features an exclusive from-the-cutting-room floor audio clip, complete with… a Metallica shirt?!

• I’m traveling today, so we’ll start with some linksy goodness…
• The Walker’s Brooke Kellaway features selections from film director John Waters’s library. Waters curated this on-view-now show at the Walker.
• The Art Institute of Chicago’s “Francesca C.” (seriously?) digs into an El Greco… or is it? A story of conservation science and discovery… or is it?
• A few weeks ago The Modern Art Notes Podcast featured the excellent Lari Pittman, who is in this important show at the MCA Chicago. The curator of said show, Helen Molesworth, was on Bad at Sports last week. Also, you should absolutely own the smart, handsome catalogue for said show.
• Terrain.org interviewed photographer Frank Gohlke. The next-to-last question is super-smart.
• New Tumblr crush: Art being installed. [via]
• In Salon, Scott Timberg looks at recent government bailouts and asks, ‘What about the creative class?’
• A jackass or two defaces the Walker’s iconic Spoonbridge sculpture, and the museum (and the cops) swing into action, fast.
• Ivy Cooper takes a fond look at the Pulitzer’s new Gedi Sibony-organized show for the St. Louis Beacon.

• This Amy Kellner Q&A with Catherine Opie for Vice magazine is the best Opie interview I’ve read in a while.
• Texts From Hillary gets all the Tumblr-pub, but I’m nerdy enough to prefer the remarkably, consistently fantastic Cave to Canvas.
• The Paris Review’s Yevgeniyia Traps visits Terry Winters in his studio. Great pix, too.
• Mark Lamster takes to Design Observer to examine the Whitney’s other new building.
• On Rhizome’s website, Ron Hanson puts the Taipei art scene into the context of Taiwan’s awkward spot in the world. Wait, the Taipei art scene? Yup, the Taipei art scene.
• Great pictures: Clyfford Still takes in a baseball game at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium and a postcard I wish I’d received.
• Via SFMOMA’s excellent Open Source blog, the definitive history of planking.
• I really enjoyed Annie Harris-Kornblith’s semi-profile of Walter Denny, a senior consultant to the Met on the re-installation of its Islamic galleries and a former professor of Harris-Kornblith’s at UMass.

• Google Earth went all 8-bit for April Fool’s Day, including this representation of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Spoonbridge and Cherry at the Walker Art Center.
• Choire Sicha takes on the Klaus Biesenbach Twitter feed (he’s the director of MoMA’s PS1 satellite cc: @BarackObama, @ladygaga, @JustinBieber) and that really odd Kraftwerk “exhibition” he’s doing.
• I don’t have any idea why The Art Newspaper thinks that the growing Rauschenberg Foundation and the Warhol Foundation are rivals, but this Cristina Ruiz story on the former is good news for artist grants.
• This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Crown Point Press founder Kathan Brown talking about Richard Diebenkorn’s print-making practice. During the show, Brown and I discuss Diebenkorn’s magnificent Green (1986). Here’s an old-school SFMOMA video of Diebenkorn working through versions and proofs of that print.
• The cleverest new Tumblr I’ve seen in a while: Jason Foumberg’s End Piece, which features the “last artwork of great artists.”
• The 2013 Carnegie International blog is quirky and fascinating. This week the show’s curators are asking for help in finding out more about an artist who worked with Rauschenberg and Fontana.
• Just wanted to point this out too: My other favorite-of-the-moment institutional blog is the ICP’s Fans in a Flashbulb.
• If you listened to The MAN Podcast featuring Richard Serra, you heard the remarkable story of an ex-prisoner’s experience walking through Serra’s Pulitzer torqued spiral, Joe, how the sculpture helped him reflect on his past and future. (You also heard Serra’s reaction to it. What you didn’t see was that Serra’s eyes became a bit misty.) The Pulitzer’s Lisa Harper Chang offers more on the program that mashed up a Pulitzer exhibition with an ex-cons program. Fascinating, inspirational stuff.
• The Walker’s Paul Schmelzer has a cool piece on Keith Haring, his 1984 visit to Minneapolis, and the now-long-gone mural he made for the Walker.
• As the Art Institute of Chicago designs its upcoming Roy Lichtenstein retrospective, it’s using the artist’s own paint chips.
• Considering one of Alexander Gardner’s photographs of Lincoln assassination conspirator Lewis Payne.
• The good news: The Tate’s new website is up. The bad news: Their digital publishing ‘landing page’ is even more confusing than MoMA’s.

• The San Diego Museum of Art and the MCASD receive major donations of art, gifts they weren’t expecting.
• On the occasion of a show at the McKinney Ave. Contemporary in Dallas, artist and MANpal William Powhida gives really, really good interview to an unnamed questioner from north Texas’ Arts & Culture Magazine.
• Speaking of artist Q&As, the Walker Art Center tweeted out this excellent 2009 Q&A with artist Tauba Auerbach. Auerbach is one of the stars of the Walker’s “Lifelike” exhibition about recent realism and trompe l’oeil. [In the March issue of Modern Painters, I write about how and why trompe l'oeil is still popular with artists. Funny coincidence: The Mike Kelley photo on the cover was taken by Walker photog Cameron Wittig. Click here to subscribe to the digital edition of the magazine for $20.]
• Speaking of “Lifelike”: The Tom Friedman riff on the show’s website is terrifically clever. (Much more clever than the rather horrid, plexi-box-ruined installation of ‘the same’ Friedman in the show. And of course: Friedman was recently a guest on The Modern Art Notes Podcast.)
• Speaking of “Lifelike” and Walker Q&As, this Paul Schmelzer chat with Kaz Oshiro is super-cool. Great stuff about Oshiro’s interest in “balancing out” representation and abstraction.
• Mark Bradford and Richard Diebenkorn? Yes, definitely.
• Bloomberg architecture critic James Russell on St. Louis’s latest plans for re-making the Gateway Arch grounds. Already a fine public space, it could be so, so much better.
• More awesome Russell: On Paul Rudolph’s Orange County (N.Y.) Government Center.
• As I’ve mentioned here before, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has placed billboards featuring Zoe Strauss’s pictures all over the city. It turns out that Strauss herself sometimes hangs out at ‘em to see what people think.
• Ubuweb just posted some George Grosz artist-books gold. [via... er, I forget, sorry.]
• The most awesome Keith Haring ever is on view for two more weeks.
• While MOCA parties with Mercedes-Benz and James Franco in an effort to tap into their celebrity, LACMA has created its own rock star, reports Christopher Knight. He’s male and very butch (and thus, writes Knight, very in keeping with LACMA director Michael Govan’s usual modus operandi).

• Christopher Knight smacks down the speaker of the Missouri state house of representatives, who has commissioned a sculpture of Rush Limbaugh. Epic. And stay for the end, where Knight ties the whole thing up in a most remarkable fashion. Mega-dittos.
• C-Monster brings us the latest incredibly tacky gift shop that the Philadelphia Museum of Art has assembled for its latest blockbuster show. The latest in one of my favorite long-form photo subjects — ‘tacky PMA gift shop’ should be a pre-set tag in every WordPress template — in all digital publishing.
• This Chloe Wyma piece on Yelping New York art galleries is pretty entertaining. I imagine that it left a few bloggers wincing, too.
• A major Katharina Grosse installation is coming to the under-construction Cleveland MOCA, reports the Plain-Dealer’s Steven Litt. [via] I know that men get all those big, splashy, permanent art museum commissions (ahem), but here’s hoping Grosse picks up a few.
• Joerg Colberg has a nice two-fer on Rineke Dijkstra, the subject of a career survey at SFMOMA. Here’s Colberg’s write-up on Dijkstra and Botticelli and here’s a fascinating little hit on how he had an interesting time finding the, er, right image for his post.
• Doesn’t Gothic architecture look really, well, Islamic? [via]
• The Getty just bought a rare drawing by 15thC Florentine master Piero del Pollaiuolo. [Above.] Getty assistant curator of drawings Julian Brooks tells the behind-the-scene story of the museum’s auction purchase, complete with details of auction-style dirty tricks.
• This is fantastic, and not just because it puts Rick Santorum in context: John Yau breaks down Alec Soth’s hermit pictures on Hyperallergic.
• This is fantastic, and not just because it puts investment art-bankers in the same place John Yau put Rick Santorum: Felix Salmon cites Gerhard Richter and Diego Velasquez in explaining why the art market is a fool’s game.
• MOCA’s blog is doing bang-up work on the museum’s upcoming Cai Guo-Qiang show. Wish more museums did this kind of thing around upcoming exhibitions.
• Jonathan Jones explains what Angelina Jolie’s leg has in common with Renaissance art.
• Over at PORT, this earth work by Brooklyn-based Rainy Lehrman looks brilliant. And vaguely tiramisu-like.
• Little moment of happiness for me: The MAN Podcast with Larry Bell prompted MAMFW to take another look at its beautiful (and beautifully installed) Bell — and at the museum’s history with the artist.
• Each Wednesday afternoon I tweet/Facebook out a little tease about the guest of the following day’s Modern Art Notes Podcast. In a related story, this would be a very, very good week to begin to follow me on Twitter and/or on Facebook.

• The ICA Philadelphia’s blog Miranda has an interesting rundown of Charline von Heyl’s recent lecture at the ICA. (Here’s The MAN Podcast featuring von Heyl.)
• There’s so much about Pierre Bonnard I don’t know or understand, including: When the Phillips Collection promises a Valentine’s Day love story about Pierre Bonnard, will it be about his wife, Marthe, or his long-term lover, Renee Monchaty? (News peg for this post: This exhibition at the Phillips.) And this art historical tidbit that confounds me: Picasso has been nicked by generations of art historians for picking up a young, 17-year-old Marie-Therese Walter. (That’s Picasso biographer John Richardson’s assignation of her age, anyway.) Bonnard, er, discovered Marthe when she was 16. I can’t recall the same level of art historical ahem over Bonnard… [Image: Bonnard, Marthe nude, seated on the bed with her back turned, 1899-1900. Sepia-toned gelatin silver print; 1 ½ x 2 in. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.]
• Adorabz picture from MASS MoCA is adorabz.
• Nice write up of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Zoe Strauss survey by Barry Schwabsky in The Nation. (Here’s The MAN Podcast featuring Strauss.)
• Christopher Knight unloads on the well-connected, ultra-right-wing opponents of Charles Ray, Frank Gehry and the Eisenhower Memorial.
• This two-day Anthony McCall exhibition-and-symposium in Chicago this weekend sounds like a pretty great place to be.
• One of America’s most underrated curators is SFMOMA’s Corey Keller. So when SFMOMA’s Open Space blog posts a Gchat conversation between Keller and FAMSF chief curator and photo curator Julian Cox, it’s must-read stuff.
• California is home to the best art museum blogs. Each of the first five posts at The Getty’s Iris blog is fascinating both visually and otherwise. (Tease: They include beheadings, love, lust, the apocalypse and other assorted naughtiness, plus a tall Valentine.)
• This is the last week to see Doug Wheeler’s remarkable new ‘infinity environment’ at Chelsea’s David Zwirner gallery. (Across the country, MCASD just acquired this Wheeler, which is on view until August 1.) Wheeler, who at 72 is enjoying a late-career ‘comeback’ for which I can’t really think of a parallel, was my guest on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast. I think it’s only the third one-on-one interview he’s ever done. You can download the show here, subscribe via iTunes here, and see images of the works discussed on the show here.

This would be a mistake, even a crisis, of international proportions. [Via.]

• You might not recognize Tom Learner’s name, but he’s the conservator who brought us De Wain Valentine’s sensational Gray Column at the Getty during Pacific Standard Time. He talks with Richard McCoy about paintings conservation, re-making an Eva Hesse from scratch-ish, and of course, Valentine.
• Things I did not know: Sol LeWitt made work for synagogues and other Jewish institutions. (One institution even made a LeWitt yarmulke.) Robin Cembalest tells the story in Tablet.
• Don’t miss this really good Chloe Wyma Q&A with Shirin Neshat for Artinfo. (Neshat was the guest on Modern Art Notes Podcast Episode No. 11.)
• Link of the day: Carnegie International curator Tina Kukielski tells a great story about discovering some WPA-era murals made by Maxo Vanka in a Croatian Catholic church just outside Pittsburgh. [Image above. Love the steel mills-ish industry in the background, no?] Fascinating stuff. Also, did you know that CI13 has a blog?
• Two more Mike Kelley remembrances well-worth the read: Walker chief curator Darsie Alexander, artist and Columbia art history professor John Miller.
• JMW Turner’s The Fifth Plague of Egypt at the Indianapolis Museum of Art is plenty famous — and not just for being included in the first MAN Super Bowl Bet.
• Awwww!: Jackson Pollock saved this piece of fan mail, complete with picture and puppy, from a seven-year-old South Carolina boy.
• I hadn’t thought of it myself, but I’m kind of digging this juxtaposition of Larry Sultan and… Thomas Cole?
• Greg Allen reads Benjamin Buchloh so no one else has to — and meditates on how important over-painting is to Gerhard Richter.
• Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West blog is full of beauty and ingenuity. Among my favorite stops.
• Yawwwwwwwwwwn.
• And on the opposite side of the spectrum, this PST-related post from William Poundstone includes “cast a spell to summon a typhoon,” and “Their goal was to produce a Moonchild who would open an interdimensional gateway for the goddess Babalon.” So just go read it. Amazing.