Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Don’t expect a MAN Super Bowl Bet this year.

The Harvard Art Museums bowed out last week, citing the complications of its ongoing construction project. The Met and the MFA Boston never replied to my emails. And after initially signaling interest, MoMA has been quiet for a week as well.

So what happened? Keeping in mind that the MAN Super Bowl Bet is 85 percent fun and 15 percent something else (encouraging art museums to engage with their communities and to bask in what has been an astonishing amount of dream-level PR), there’s a serious reason that the Met and the MFA and the others didn’t get together this year: They value community engagement, er, differently than other art museums.

In Indianapolis, New Orleans, Milwaukee and Pittsburgh, the first four cities with art museums to participate in the bet, museums want to share art with their communities, to show them how great art can be, to make a case that art has a place in the lives of the people who live there. There’s a little bit of the evangelizing fervor to the art museums in those places: We have something wonderful we want to share with you, our own kind. Those are places where sharing this wonderful thing matters to the people who work there. That’s a big part of why they work there.

The Met, MoMA and the MFA are not civic-focused art museums in the way the Carnegie or the IMA are. They don’t rely on their communities to sustain them and to visit them in the same way. Instead, they rely on tourists. To wit: It is free to visit the Indianapolis Museum of Art. MoMA and the MFA effectively price out all but the travel-able upper-middle-class by charging $25 and $22 respectively. The Met asks visitors to pay $25 too. Via their admissions fees, those institutions are letting you what audience matters most to them.

Or, to put it another way: The Met, the MFA and MoMA aren’t as interested in people from New York, Boston, Yonkers or Marblehead as the people at the IMA are in people from Fishers or Speedway — because they don’t have to be.

That’s too bad.

Update, noon: Sounds like a bet is going to get done sometime this week…

The key players in this years hoped-for Super Bowl bet between the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art both initially expressed interest in a wager yesterday, but then fell silent. So far we don’t have a replay of last year, when Indianapolis Museum of Art director Max Anderson and New Orleans Museum of Art director John Bullard trash-talked and stakes-raised until a Turner and a Claude were on the line. However, with 13 days left before Super Bowl XLV, there’s time yet.

As Bullard said last year, for a Super Bowl bet to really be exciting, “Each museum needs to offer an art work that they would really miss for three months.” So seeing as MAM and CMOA are playing it so close to the vest, here are some ideas:

Milwaukee should put one of two paintings on the line. One option should be Gustave Caillebotte’s Boating on the Yerres (1877, above), a sparkling bit of impressionism. Even more fitting would be Gerrit van Honthorst’s Mars, God of War (1624-27, a better image is here and at left, via Flickr user JoetheLion), a knowing wink at football’s preferred metaphor. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Mary Louise Schumacher urges MAM and CMOA forward here, suggesting that MAM put up a Kandinsky, Rothko or Fragonard on the line.

And what about the Carnegie Museum of Art? It has what may be the greatest Pierre Bonnard in America, this picture of the artist’s dead wife in the bath (yes, really). Hard to top that. (Heck, if the bet was with me, that would be the wager — and the CMOA would never get it back.)  Schumacher also makes some good suggestions from CMOA’s collection, including this terrific Cezanne and this cheeky Sargent portrait of an antsy young man. That last one seems like a particularly coy possibility: If the Packers win the Super Bowl, that lad would spend 90 days sharing Pittsburgh’s petulance with Wisconsin.

I don’t think Milwaukee has a Degas painting, so this circa 1895 bath scene at the Carnegie would be a nice, racy, temporary trophy. Even racier: Simon Vouet’s Toilet of Venus, which is full of verve and flesh. But in keeping with the Bullard edict, the best choice would likely be the Carnegie’s terrific Van Gogh, Wheat Fields After the Rain (1890, right), painted just four days before the artist died. Schumacher seized on that one, too: “How much do you love your team,” she asked Pittsburgh. “Put it on the line!”

Related: Don’t miss Schumacher’s entertaining urging-on of the tweedy combatants.

Last year, before the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints met in the Super Bowl, MAN instigated a bet between the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Each museum put one of its most significant paintings on the line: The IMA wagered a JMW Turner (The Fifth Plague of Egypt, 1800, at right) against a NOMA Claude Lorrain. In the end, Indy’s Turner spent some time in New Orleans. The unconventional wager was a lot of fun: During football’s two biggest weeks, a couple of art museums got prime coverage from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, the BBC and dozens of other newspapers, television stations and radio networks around the world.

Fast forward to 2011: Let the betting begin! In the NFC championship game, the Green Bay Packers beat the Chicago Bears, 21-14, while in the AFC the Pittsburgh Steelers held off the New York Jets, 24-19. So let’s go, Milwaukee Art Museum and Carnegie Museum of Art: Let the wagering begin!

The Indianapolis Museum of Art is set to pay off the Super Bowl bet director Max Anderson made with New Orleans Museum of Art director E. John Bullard.

JMW Turner’s The Fifth Plague of Egypt [left] will go up at NOMA on Thursday morning. The painting will stay there for three months

I don’t mean to pick on one writer or on one blog, but here’s a good example of why I’m enjoying the Super Bowl-wager back-and-forth between the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art: Yesterday the big sports blog site SB Nation ran a post on it here: “I’m as surprised Indianapolis has an art museum as you are,” SBN editor Holly Anderson snarked.

Well, that’s the point. People who never thought about art or about Indianapolis having (a quite fine) art museum are now looking at IMA paintings. Heck, Sports Illustrated media critic/reporter Richard Deitsch is so amused that he’s posted multiple tweets about the directorial discourse. The IMA and NOMA are chest-thumping with the rest of their communities. Bye-bye fusty, hello Team Us.

I’ve always liked the way cities rally around their sports teams, the way a team becomes a point of commonality. Why shouldn’t art museums try to do the same thing — and in the process become somewhere that more people in their communities think about visiting?

Related: Instead of doing multiple posts on the wager, I’m just updating this post, which is just below this one. It’s updated to reflect agreement on a wager!

UPDATE, Wednesday, 130pm EST: The bet is made and done. See below/bottom.

In response to the proposed Super Bowl bet between the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art about which I posted on Monday, NOMA director E. John Bullard has come roaring back in defense of his Saints.

First, some background: On Monday, IMA director Max Anderson initially proposed wagering an IMA loan of an Ingrid Calame painting. That was a nice choice… but apparently Anderson wasn’t too worried about having to pay off the bet: “We’re already spackling the wall where the NOMA loan will hang,” he tweeted.

On Tuesday morning, Bullard emailed MAN HQ:

“Max Anderson must not really believe the Colts can beat the Saints in the Super Bowl. Otherwise why would he bet such an insignificant work as the Ingrid Calame painting? Let’s up the ante. The New Orleans Museum of Art will bet the three-month loan of its Renoir painting, Seamstress at Window, circa 1908, which is currently in the big Renoir exhibition in Paris. What will Max wager of equal importance? Go Saints!”

Anderson TwitPics this from his seat at the Colts’ Lucas Oil Stadium. I expect a response soon…

UPDATE, Tuesday, 2:20pm EST: SNAP! Anderson tweets back at NOMA: “We’ll see the sentimental blancmange by that “China Painter” and raise you a proper trophy: [A Jean-Valentine Morel jeweled cup, which won the Grand Medal at the 1855 Paris World Fair.]”

UPDATE: Tuesday, 11:20pm EST: These museums are getting serious.

In an email I received while I was, er, on my way to dinner (sorry for the delay!), Bullard raised the stakes: “I am amused that Renoir is too sweet for Indianapolis. Does this mean that those Indiana corn farmers have simpler tastes? If so why would Max offer us that gaudy Chalice — just looks like another over-elaborate Victorian tchotchke. Let’s get serious. Each museum needs to offer an art work that they would really miss for three months. What would you like Max? A Monet, a Cassatt, a Picasso, a Miro? Sorry but we have no farm scenes or portraits of football players to send you.”

Ouch!: I suspect Bullard knows that the Indianapolis Museum of Art actually owns a farm. (It’s part of the IMA’s endowment.)

A couple hours after Bullard’s rejoinder, Anderson replied to both Bullard and to @NOMA via Twitter: “Colts will win; here’s how sure I am: [the IMA's four-by-six-foot JMW] Turner for Vigée Lebrun’s Portrait of Marie Antoinette.”

[The Lebrun, painted in 1788 when Marie Antoinette was queen and just a year before the French Revolution, is the middle image. The Turner, from 1800, is just above, at right.]

This morning I’m playing matchmaker via Twitter in an attempt to arrange a Super Bowl bet between the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

IMA director and Twitter-devotee Maxwell Anderson responded by wagering a three-month loan of this recently acquired painting. Nice choice… but apparently Anderson isn’t too worried about having to pay off the bet: “We’re already spackling the wall where the NOMA loan will hang,” he tweeted.

Museum directors talking trash? My, my. You gonna take that, NOMA? Follow it here.