North Carolina Museum of Art

Taxidermy!

Signed on for the UNCP field trip to the North Carolina Museum of Art last Saturday, and finally got to tour a pretty great collection of art in Raleigh, NC.  As I might have mentioned before, I think very highly of museums that offer free admission to their permanent collection.  I certainly understand how small non-profit museums struggle to pay staff, but it is really a great thing when a state has enough vision to offer an opportunity to view the arts to the general public.  When I was growing up, my home city (Nashville is no small town), lacked a real art museum and my first exposure to art was from a [paid] traveling show that included a very nice late Monet waterlily painting.  Suffice to say it set me on my current path, showing me that art can have a real physical presence that no flat image from a book can fully describe.

I am thrilled to know that a great museum such as the North Carolina Museum of Art is so close to where I teach, and that is has a substantial collection of historical and contemporary works that includes major works by some of the biggest names in the textbooks.   To name a few, there's an excellent Anselm Kiefer, a few giant Motherwells, and even a Ribera.  It also boasts great works by North Carolina artists that easily stack with the rest.  There is also curiously large amount of Rodin casts in the West building, extending outside as pictured below.  I regret to say that I didn't have time to tour the grounds and surrounding sculpture park, but it's safe to say that I'll be back soon with my dog. 

Footnote to the taxidermy pic:  I was thinking something like "North Carolina spreads its wings," or state that NCMU simply has everything, but readers should note that I simply love taxidermy and actively seek it out. (I'm also fairly certain that most of it isn't copyrighted.) My nose led to this one in a relatvely tiny Audubon diversion currently on display in the East building.  If anyone want to donate any fine specimens, I guarantee it will work its way into a painting someday...

Anselm Kiefer rocks

Lamb of God, literally

More Rodins than you can shake a stick at

Nara, Currin, Messerschmidt

Met up with a good friend today and made our first stop Yoshitomo Nara at the Asia Society.  "Nobody's fool"  is a charming three-floor exhibition of installation, sculpture, painting, and drawing.  Though I have a slight distaste for most Neopop, I was struck by the utter sincerity and completeness of Nara's vision as well as the excellent craft of his paintings. After Nara, we made a quick stop by the Frick to see an excellent exhibition of drawings by Goya and Ribera.    The following stop was to see John Currin's latest paintings on the sixth floor of the Gagosian franchise on Madison Avenue.  As always, Currin perplexes by mixing impeccable craft with his snide vision of beauty and ugliness.  The ultimate goal for the day was Messerschmidt show of portrait busts at the Neue Galerie.  (Here I'll defer to the NYT review.) I've chased these heads all over Europe and this was a rare chance to see so many in one place.  The surprise treat of the day was the concurrent display of postcards from the Wiener Werkstatte. Thanks to A. for the great day!

Josef Divéky

Wiener Werkstätte Postcard 494

1911

Herr Hampelmann/Mr. Jumping-Jack
Chromolithograph

Dozier, Anselm, Brice

Yesterday I learned that a good many New Yorkers eat Thanksgiving dinner in Chinatown. (Not a surprise really, since a good many people can be found doing anything in this city at any given moment.)  Today while much of America (NYC included) was hunting for bargains, I spent the better part of the day trolling Chesea for art. (Doorbuster sale: 5 million off your first five installations!) Right away I stumbled across a Maine favorite, Dozier Bell, and her show of show of tiny, gray-- and very romantic--landscape drawings.  Romanticism seemed to a dominant theme with a major exhibition of Anselm Kiefer just down the block   At a previous exhibition at Gagosian, he left the space quite open to see paintings, with enormous, but low-lying sculptures of rolling concrete and steel.  Kiefer's current show seems to be a return to form using his most familiar shattered glass and lead.  The space was quite packed with vertical sculptures, paintings, and people.  Mood and expectation greatly affects the viewing of art and I was in a rare good mood that put me quite of tune with Kiefer's relentless and somber reflection on the Holocaust.  The equally cheerful crowds did not help as one couple posed for snapshots next to the photos of saluting Nazis and offered their own rendition.  I made a pledge to return and went on to something more lyrical in the form of show of recent large works by Brice Marden.  Though his current paintings are almost as gray as Kiefer's, the looping movement of Marden's lines was more in accord with my energy.  The chief distraction here was in the form of the artist himself, who was standing in the center of the gallery inspecting his show at the time.   While I have utmost respect for Marden as a living legend, I really had nothing to pester him about. So I let Brice be and moved on to the next venue. The timing of Kim Dorland's work in Mike Weiss Gallery seems to make it a parody of Kieffer.  It is a smaller carnival of painting and sculpture, featuring dripping landscapes of white aspen and taxidermy wolf covered in purple paint.  I had to chuckle at the bravura incompetence of his technique with off bits of yarn tacked on here and there and 3-inch deck screws used for emphasis, it is gleefully bad . There was lots more to see from photo-installations with cracking Tesla coils, to simple drawings, with only a few galleries on holiday.  Too much to relate and I'll have no doubt more the next day.

 
Kim Dorland
Lavender Wolf, 2010
Oil, acrylic, screws and yarn on taxidermy
44 x 66 x 21 inches

Broken Umbrellas, Illuminated Manuscripts

"Broken umbrellas like dead birds."  This Waits line was on my tongue last week on my brief trip to New York.  I left rain for more rain and on Saturday's walk back from Chelsea I passed at least twenty black umbrellas scattered about Seventh Avenue in under three blocks.   Memorable, but lead to relapse of the nasty cold I caught in February's monsoon which bloomed nicely into Bronchitis. That, combined, with leaving my computer behind is to blame for this retro-post.

The main goal of the trip was to see the display of the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, a 15th century illuminated manuscript that is on display at the Morgan Library.  Normally rare books are on display two pages at a time, if at all, but a rare showing of many of the pages is currently on view.  At the end of the show, the book will be rebound and probably stashed away in the vault.   Included in the show is a touchable complete reproduction of the entire book, which will continue to be for sale in the gift shop, untouchable, for a the low low price of $15,000.  Though I object that only the truly rich have that sort of pocket change for a glorified Kinkos (well, it did have gold leaf, and was probably made by hand...) I perhaps learned the most by having the simulated experience of flipping through the entire book of hours, page by page.

I also caught a completing show at the Met, "The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry."  Not to be outdone, the Met's show was larger in scope, spread out across an area roughly four times the size of the Morgan show, with many pages displayed front and back in vertical glass cases.   The shows were equally incredible opportunities to see two equally rare and famous books.  The effect of looking at all of those miniatures was exhausting.   I can normally stay all day in a museum, but after two hours in the Met, I had literally absorbed a hundred incredibly rich paintings.   

Both the Met and the Morgan museums also had concurrent drawing exhibits.    I'm a big fan of Bronzino, so the show of his drawings was a draw at the Met.   It's always fantastic to see drawings in person; reproductions rarely come close, and of course I always think of that docent at the Albertina who assured me otherwise.  Though it's great to live in the immediacy of the hand of the master, Bronzino's drawings were clearly never intended to be shown and do not begin to compare to the complexity of his finished paintings.   There were scraps, sketches, and many drawings were covered by grids used by assistants as to enlarge for his murals. The show was small, three rooms, and really was more of an interesting curiosity.   It was the Morgan this time that trumped the Met with its drawing show, "Rome after Raphael." Though less cohesive in theme, the Morgan's show was of simply better drawings, even by lesser known artists.  

Of course, I did my fair share of galleries.   I try to always stop at the Forum, and was surprised by the crustiness of Bernardo Siciliano's paintings.  Also, the grid he must use to transfer his images from photographs was very evident at times, which I wonder if he views as a conceptual part of his paintings.  Ross Bleckner at Mary Boone was nearly sold out, with each painting at 125-150K each.  Some of the paintings had a really nice presence through scale and the blur. In Chelsea, I mostly got very, very, wet so I did not see a lot but I'm usually not impressed by shows with two-three sculptures in the big white box.  There were a few more at Gagosian, but the space was pretty cold.  Last, I confess I skipped the Whitney Biennial again.   The trip was just too short, and I used the time to linger near the Courbet paintings in the Met. 

Cheers to the fast Fung-Wah, and here's a link to a great online resource of the Morgan Library, Corsair. Photo dedicated to Stefan and Ella.

Polar Dispatches

I checked out the Portland Museum of Art's exhibition, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration in American Culture which will be closing June 21, 2009. If I missed something so thematically pertinent to my work in my own backyard, I would have felt professionally negligent. It's a small show, mostly consisting of old prints, but I found it interesting. On the same floor is "Polar Dispatches, an installation of 19 contemporary works by 6 artists..." who all recently took trips to the Arctic or Antarctic. My first question is, "how do I
I get that gig? There's a big painting on paper by Alexis Rockman that I dug.

Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is exhibiting "Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice." Although the show closes August 16, I was eager to see at as soon as possible. I am most acquainted with the Titian and Veronese paintings on permanent display the Met in New York. I've always guessed the Veronese works there as damaged by fading color. My mind's eye holds Veronese as a master of color and this was upheld by the beautifully preserved and restored paintings at the MFA. Tintoretto was the relative unknown to me as I've always been a bit shy of reproductions that lead me to connect him with an overwhelming amount of visual information and an overt display of perspectival acrobatics.

As usual, a show offer this a chance to change perceptions and witness work that would otherwise stay in Venice, or that long been separated from its native context. On example is a very sweet double family portrait by Veronese that is normal split between two distant museum connections. Past the introductory salon, the exhibition illustrates the rivalry of the three masters in separate galleries organized into galleries of sacred themes, female nudes, portraiture, and each artist's last work. Evidence of technical innovation, or theft, are shown by juxtaposition. About in the middle, a curiosity piece from Tintoretto is featured in its own corridor. A literal Frankenstein's monster, the painting is a sewn together mishmash of bits reworked by different artists and the curators invite the audience to participate in how this puzzle is put together in an interactive display. It is mentioned that much of the Ventian style was never intended to be seen so close, certainly not at the nose to canvas distance I prefer, as broken brushwork and Veronese's optical color mixtures really only come together at a distance. In this sense, each painting at the show offers the viewer to play scholar or archivist and see how the paintings are constructed.

As expected, I did make some personal discoveries. Tintoretto work really only makes sense in person. At a reduced scale, his work rivals the intensity of some contemporary graphic novels, a dense overload for the information age. When the figures are larger than life, they provide a restful axis for all the activity and multiple layers of depth in the painting. David Hockney posits in Hockney on Art that Northern Renaissance painting encourages a longer read of a painting across multiple levels of space like his photo collages, while later Baroque painting strove to create a single, frozen moment like modern-day snapshots. Tintoretto's Tarquin and Lucretia would seemingly prove this point, as a broken string of pearls is frozen in midair. However at the roughly 70x60 inch scale, the eye is drawn to one pearl and then the other, following them to the floor where you can all but hear them dropping. Like Northern Ren. paintings, there is simple too much high-focus detail going on in so many areas of the painting to absorb at once, encouraging the viewer to sit back and soak it in slowly like a suspense film. Of the three, Tintoretto seems be the most visually innovative in large scenes. His Susannah and the Elders is downright weird and utterly fantastic. Less interesting observations include Titian use of dark red undertones to flesh, with only yellow and white making up the flesh. I could not see any cool tones in his nudes, something I never noticed and markedly different from my own use of color.

In summary, if you can make it to Boston this summer, see the show. The show only enhanced my regret that I squandered too much of my one day in Venice roaming the 1995 Biennale. If you make it to Venice, I suggest you first admire the city and the sea, then see every Ventian painting you can. The MFA show is actually showing the tiny, portable, stuff by comparison.

Albertina Museum Review

If you are traveling to Vienna, save your Euros by skipping the Albertina Museum. If you like to travel and attempt to compulsively visit every Art Museum in a city, you will occasionally be suckered by a lame museum with little to show and a high price of admission. Vienna, with its abundance of large state-funded museums, seems to be a museum-goers paradise. It's tourism board spends a lot on advertising their museums' various virtues, which apparently infiltrates guidebooks in the form of mindless spam:

My guidebook states "the Albertina houses a collection of one million prints, over 65,000 watercolors and drawings, and some 70,000 photographs," as do most Vienna guidebooks and a section of the Albertina's website. Advertisements plaster Vienna with images of Durer's hare, one of the world's most famous drawings. All of this really leads you to think that you will actually see this and other famous drawings, under dim light, or maybe under bulletproof glass like the Mona Lisa. If you love drawing, or works on paper, you will be drawn to this museum like a fly to honey, so I feel compelled to point out that all of this advertising is misleading. Not outright lies, but misleading.

As you enter the museum, you can head directly to the current temporary exhibition, or wander the back halls of the palace where a number of drawings are prominently displayed. It's suspiciously quiet, as the best parts of museums often are. Museum veterans can testify that often excellent parts of a permanent collection go unviewed while the crowds shuffle like headphone-wearing cattle through the current blockbuster temporary attraction. As I wandered back through the halls, I stared in smug satisfaction at Michalangelo drawings next to Egon Schille, then Klimt, then at last-Durer's hare. I don't think I worked myself up to bliss before my native suspicion took hold: It was quiet, but too quiet. Peering further at the delicately colored lines of the famous rabbit, I searched for the master's hand. It was there, along with a small label stating "facsimile." I quickly retraced my steps, scanning the previous drawings, and they were all--- fakes.

In a furor, I marched back down the halls to the information desk, and patiently waited. "Where is Durer's hare?" I demanded. The docent smiled, and patiently explained to me that If I knew the first thing about works on paper, I would know that they are sensitive to light and cannot be displayed at risk of degrading the drawings. At this point, I may have been rendered clinically insane. I playfully mused that if this was so, how was it that I saw Leonardo drawings in Florence, Michalangelo drawings under dim light in Ohio, and Klimt drawings this very morning across town at the Secession museum labeled under "permission of the Albertina?" Ah yes, well the museum occasionally loans work to other institutions. So, I summarized, to see a work from the Albertina's permanent collection, I have to wait for it to travel to another museum and see it there? Or, he offered, wait for it to be displayed in one of the temporary exhibitions. He assured me that the reproductions were very good, and many experts have been unable to tell them apart from the originals. I wondered how the art pilgrim could be so abused of the object of pilgrimage, and then I wondered if all those bones on display in cathedrals were real or maybe some sort of advanced plastic.

As the docent blinked pleasantly, I was forced to retreat to the gift shop. There was obviously no refund either. As I searched the postcards, I looked for Durer's hare. I could at least take with me own cheap facsimile. It wasn't there. There were larger, more advanced reproductions for sale in various sizes, a husk of hares staring down from shelves from every corner. The lowest priced one I could find fetched sixty dollars, so I contented myself with two postcards of Durer's less-famous, but equally good, watercolor of an owl for three dollars. I went on to the two temporary exhibits, one of prints, the other of some French paintings, feeling hollow and cheated. That summer was extremely hot so at least there was air-conditioning. So my final advice for the Vienna-bound: go by the Albertina and stop at the gift shop if you want to see Durer's hare. They sell reproductions as excellent as the ones you see in the museuem. It's free and air-conditioned. Look at the catalog of the current temporary exhibition while you are there; if you like what you see you can pay the admission. Otherwise, save the fifteen dollars for a cup of coffee.

So traveler beware, if you read that a museum "houses" this or that, you may be paying respects to a tombstone in a tomb that charges admission. Again for museum veterans, this is nothing new. Big museums all have collections much larger than their floors allow for display. My students are always surprised to hear this, and listen in awe as I describe rolling file walls of stacked paintings in humidity-controlled rooms. And when a museum renovates, you can kiss your favorite local Rembrandt goodbye. It will get shipped off to another museum as part of a blockbuster show; good for the people of Podunk, but woe to the pilgrim. Speaking of which, I am so excited to go see the Venetian painting exhibit next weekend in Boston.

(I traveled to Vienna in the summer of 2007. It recently occurred to me that this Blog might be the perfect place for this art-related rant, or museum review of this sort. Guidebooks are all too bland and should be a little snarky, so I think I'll continue to drop a review here or there.)