Yet Another Envelope

The year is just about over and here comes Christmas, Chanukah and the New Year. What does everyone have on their mind, this is the U.S., so it’s money, of course. How many envelopes do you receive daily asking for funds for this or that cause, they probably outnumber the gift catalogs 3 to 1.

Sometimes you are thanked for a contribution over the year and an envelope is included for yet another contribution which really annoys me. Sometimes there is no acknowledgement of your contribution at all!

I have written about what to do with your collection and even your cold hard cash. But I thought this time I would look at it from a more personal point of view. So many not for profits are totally legitimate in their quest for funds. Can one put a limit on the money needed for cancer, Alzheimer’s or a myriad of other diseases that need endless resources to do the research.

My wife and I have had many discussions on this subject. I actually enjoy donating to worthy causes, but like most people, we have limits on what we believe we can give away. How does one make a decision on which nonprofits to contribute to? Like most people we give to those whose mission we believe in but we also take into account who is running the organization and where we can make a difference.

Our lives have been devoted to the arts. My wife was a curator, and I was an art dealer so our way of thinking is that art is important for everybody, and museums are the places that can introduce many of the arts to the public.

I remember that one of the founders of our art gallery said “Charity begins at home”. That can have many different meanings, and some might feel that means keep your money for your family but since we left New York I take it differently. While large museums such as the Metropolitan in New York and the Louvre in Paris might want to expand, hire another curator or enhance their collections no fewer people are going to visit if they do not do that.

In smaller towns they may need that work of art or additional space to fulfill their mission and attract more visitors and our contribution can make a real difference.

The southwest is Indian Country, Native American, if you like, and many of the pueblos and reservations are extremely poor. Poverty is a broad problem but it is easier to focus on one group than everywhere. I have written specifically about the Hoop Dancers several times. We give to the Lightning Boy Foundation not because we think everyone should learn hoop dancing but because it engages pueblo youngsters in a discipline that requires the ability to focus, care about improving, and working with others.

In New Mexico there is also a thriving branch of the National Dance Institute which goes into the schools and does the same thing for students of all denominations.

We also love theater and have watched the excitement of children when they see their first play, opera or concert. I have seen a 6 year old walk into a theater such as the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe for the first time and their eyes literally get wider and their jaw drops in wonder.

Our son who is today an actor, was from an early age a regular at performances of a young people’s theater in New York. He was so enthralled he would not leave before the stage set was struck. The other night at the Santa Fe Playhouse we watched a little girl try go up to the stage to high five an actor during the play. Her mother drew her back but during curtain calls the actor came to the edge of the stage to high five her. Those experiences are not forgotten.

If our donations can help institutions that engage people in the arts we love and value we are achieving our goal. What would yours might be?

Our Night Sky Is Disappearing

When we lived in New York City we did not think much about the night sky. Maybe, if we were near Central Park, we could get some idea of the night sky, but you were warned not to go through the park late at night. Walking through the city there are streetlamps everywhere and cars with bright lights.

When we moved to Santa Fe we marveled at the skies day & night, but after some years we realized we could enjoy the clouds during the day, but our night sky was disappearing very slowly but surely. We are destroying our enjoyment of the night sky. You don’t realize it at first, but it starts in your bedroom. The electric clock shines the TV or console or charging devise have a little colored light on them. It is however outdoor lights that are the issue.

We live on an arroyo where there are no streetlights but the Park Service, of all places, has bright lights over their parking lot long after office hours, presumably for security, if nothing else. There is also a glow from downtown Santa Fe but a much more wide-spread glow from Albuquerque 60 miles away. We have all read about the drones over New Jersey. No one knows what they are, but they give off light from time to time.

The Washington Post recently published an editorial on the subject of light pollution. It brought up something I had never thought about, astronomers are having a hard time finding places where night skies are dark enough to have effective observatories. Even in suitable locations, satellites can reflect the sun even after night fall and commercial communications satellites are multiplying.

The article goes on to say that the sky has grown brighter by 10% annually over the last 10 years which means that a child born a decade ago by the time they are off to college will be able to see 2 to 3 times fewer stars from earth. The number of stars we can see at night become diminished by at least 45% which is the lowest percentage I found.

Artists have been interested in the night sky for thousands of years and we have examples over centuries. One of the artists I particularly admire is Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610). This is his painting of the “Flight into Egypt” from the year before his death. You will find the painting today in Munich at the Alte Pinakothek.

Though our first thought of a painting with stars in a night sky might be “The Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh at MOMA, but a better example might be his “Starry Night Over the Rhone”, 1888, in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris‎. Here you can even see how the light from the houses can take away from the view of the stars so van Gogh accentuates the stars as brighter.

The other night I was looking at the full moon with the clouds. I didn’t catch the image with my camera, but art historian Antonia Bostrom did, and posted it on Facebook. Now is the photographer creating art or am I simply taken by the beauty of the subject? Well, I would not discard the photograph because it does remind us of the beauty we saw but it is not the original.

It also reminded me of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting in the Metropolitan Museum of “Two Men Contemplating the Moon” (1825-1830) which so effectively conveys the experience.

Maybe the best place to see a pure night sky is at sea and it is dramatically captured by J.M.W. Turner’s “Fishermen at Sea” (1796) in the Tate, London. In our technological age we forget that stars were essential guides to navigation on the ocean.

Death Valley in California is rated as one the best places on terra firma for star gazing. Far enough from the urban centers and their light pollution, it is debatedly as close as a mortal will get in the U.S. to a total view of the night sky. You might spend a night, but you can’t settle there!

Three Artists In Dialog

Last week I went to a talk at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe. There were three Native Artists in dialog: a painter, Tony Abeyta (Navajo Diné); a Ceramicist, Diego Romero (Cochiti); and a Beader, Marcus Ammerman (Choctaw). The latter has an exhibition at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian that I wrote about earlier this year ...

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/search?q=amerman

Diego Romero I wrote about 8 years ago ...

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2016/09/diego-romero-1964.html

... and Tony Abeyta I have mentioned in miscellaneous Missives.

They have several things in common and the most important is that they are at the top of the chart in their fields of art. They have recognition from other artists as well as the collectors and museums that exhibit and acquire their work.

Something else they have in common is that they all attended The Institute of American Indian Art (IAIA) in the 1980’s and attribute much of their success to the school and the teachers who were seminal in their careers.

IAIA started out as a high school in 1962 and from 1975 offered college and post-graduate courses. In 1994 it was designated a land-grant college and by 2001 was fully accredited. Today 20% of the students art non-Native.

It could be compared to the French Royal Academy of the 18th century, the institution that oversaw the training of artists with hands on instruction by leading artists, lectures, access to prestigious commissions and opportunities to exhibit their work. All this is very similar to IAIA. However, instead of an annual Salon IAIA has a museum in the center of Santa Fe to exhibit the work of alumni and students.

The panelists talked about how IAIA also trained them in the business world and how to manage and sell their art, driving home that just saying you’re an artist does not put bread on the table.

All three of the panelists had degrees beyond their studies at IAIA. Diego Romero went to art school in Berkley before IAIA and then went on to Otis Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles for his BFA and UCLA for a Masters Degree. Tony Abeyta received an Associate of Fine Arts degree from IAIA and later an honorary doctorate of humanities. He earned his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a MFA from New York University. Marcus Amerman earned his BFA at Whitman College in Walla Walla Washington.

Diego Romero had debated whether to concentrate on making jewelry or pots. However, Ottelie Loloma, ceramicist and wife of the most famous Hopi jeweler, Charles Loloma, was teaching at IAIA and convinced Romero to concentrate on his ceramic work. In fact, Ottelie influenced many Native American artists who went to IAIA and not necessarily directing them towards ceramics.

The artists agreed that art was part of a narrative ie telling a story. Here is a pot by Diego Romero in the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City. The image depicts two soldiers, accompanied by a priest, executing a sentence imposed upon a number of Acoma men in 1599 in retaliation for the deaths of soldiers killed at the Pueblo months earlier.

I was surprised when Tony Abeyta talked about his education including travels to the South of France and to Florence. Abroad he learned from the work of Old Masters and contemporary European artists but did not try to copy them. He said of himself that, aside from being an artist, he is a collector and a curator and wants to understand the art of all cultures. Here is Abeyta at work painting a mural at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona to complement the exhibit,"Over the Edge: Fred Harvey and the Grand Canyon."

There were humorous moments in their presentations. When Romero said he looked at the work of Dan Namingha (Hopi Tewa) renowned painter and an IAIA student some years earlier, Marcus countered, that he too looked at the work of earlier artists, but in order to do something different!

Amerman also said something interesting that I did not think much about until I read my own notes. He said that Indian (Native American) artists get others to join their own cultures and not adopt that of others. That is probably one of the reasons that they are just recently joining the mainstream of the Eurocentric art world and are only now being incorporated in contemporary art collections. Amerman did this beaded work, “The Gathering” for the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. These Native American riders are represented against the Portland cityscape with Mount Hood in the background. It was inspired by a photograph of Nez Perce Chiefs of the Umatilla reservation in Oregon.

In the Q and A session one of the members in the audience asked, “How do you become an artist” and Tony Abeyta responded, “First you fill out the application ... ”

Hard To Believe

As I have said many times things always change and as communication becomes faster so does everything else. For centuries enormous effort was expended by artists on reproducing as accurately as possible the visible world. One radical change came when J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), the Romantic painter known as the “master of light” which soon led to Impressionism. Then came Cubism and right on its heals Abstract Expressionism. Each change in style brought on scorn and criticism. When Abstract Expressionism came around, I too thought: What talent does that take? To me it often just looked like scribbling. I like the comment I heard in a recent television interview, “You can’t change the conversation without ticking a few people off". So here we go again ...

Maurizio Cattelan (1960- ) is an Italian Conceptual artist. Known primarily for his hyperrealism in sculptures and installations, Cattelan also is a curator and publisher. His satirical approach to art has resulted in him being frequently labelled the “jester of the art world.” He has had no formal artistic training and calls himself an “art worker” not an artist.

As you probably know by now a work of his has sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s. The original 2019 edition sold at Art Basel Miami Beach, for between $120,000 and $150,000.

In 2024 this is the entry from Sotheby’s catalog:

*****
Comedian
banana and duct tape
7 ⅞ by 7 ⅞ by 2 in.
20 by 20 by 5 cm.
(installation dimensions variable)

Executed in 2019, this work is number 2 from an edition of 3 plus 2 artist’s proofs.
This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

Provenance:
Perrotin, New York
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 2019)
White Cube
Acquired from the above by the present owner
*****

Continuing with more than 25 bibliographic citations, the entry sounds to me like a send-up.

It’s not the Mona Lisa!

Prior to the sale, Sotheby's confirmed to CNN that neither the tape nor, thankfully, the banana are the originals. “'Comedian' is a conceptual artwork, and the actual physical materials are replaced with every installation,” an auction spokesperson said via email at the time.

Who would spend that kind of money on an ephemeral work? The answer turned out to be Justin Sun, the cryptocurrency entrepreneur who founded the block chain TRON. At a news conference in Hong Kong he followed in the “jester” mode and ate the banana. The “original” banana cost just 35 cents.

Defending his acquisition Sun said, “This is not just an artwork; it represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community. I believe this piece will inspire more thought and discussion in the future and will become a part of history.” I would think that is a bit optimistic but, by its nature, we cannot predict the future of art.

Sun added, “To thank Mr. Shah Alam, I’ve decided to buy 100,000 bananas from his stand on New York's Upper East Side. These bananas will be distributed free worldwide through his stand. Show a valid ID to claim one banana, while supplies last.” Here is a recap of what I and dozens of others have written about.

This leaves the question of why would an individual, some people would say, waste their money this way. Mr. Sun’s net worth is estimated at 1.4 billion dollars, certainly more than one would need to live a good life. Including what the 100,000 bananas would cost him the total he spent on his project was $6,235,000. Please correct me if my math is wrong but I believe that it is the same as if someone had $100,000 spent about $445 or just under 1/2% of their money. For Mr. Sun it seems cheap for the kind of advertising he got for his company. Was he just trying to make himself seem important? Then again maybe he just found it fun to continue the “jester” meme.

It could be a bit of all these and more. Maybe you can think of other possibilities?

The Speed of Mail

We recently received a printed mailer from the United States Postal Service (USPS) touting its devotion to exceptional service and warning of the December 18 deadline for holiday mailing. The online USPS Postal Facts states their mandate “to bind the nation together”.

Our mail service does indeed have a long history beginning in 1775 with its establishment by the Second Continental Congress with Benjamin Franklin as postmaster general. In 1787 the U.S. Constitution empowered Congress to establish Post Offices and Post Roads, and the Post Office Act of 1792 made the postal services an official part of the Federal Government. I remember that my father driving on the Boston Post road a mail route from New York City to Boston. It evolved into a major highway system now with names like Route 1.

The Pony Express was established in 1860 and started in St. Joseph, Missouri and could reach Sacramento, California, covering nearly 2,000 miles using a relay system of riders and horses in approximately 10 days. Wells Fargo managed the Pony Express for just 6 months during 1861 and issued their own postage stamp. Celebrating the Centennial of the Pony Express the USPS issued a 4¢ stamp that is in the same spirit.

Things change for better and for worse. According to the USPS in 2024 it takes 2.5 days for mail to arrive from one destination to another across this country. That has not been our experience. Last year we ordered tickets to a show in Santa Fe. They were mailed a week before the show, a distance of 2.2 miles, and arrived a week after the performance. Happily, the theater had a record of the tickets, and we did not miss it.

More than once, I have said to my wife that I remember when we got two mail deliveries a day in New York. I was a little boy then who was so excited to run to the door at 9 am and 4 pm every day in our apartment building to pick up the mail in front of the door. This was in the second half of the 1940s. At that time if you mailed a letter on one day in a city it arrived across the city by the next day. In 1950 the USPS eliminated two mail deliveries a day, so it depended on what time of day you mailed your letter. Since email started the contents of our mailbox is a good deal less exciting as they are most often advertising catalogs or solicitations for donations!

Rate increases are so frequent that the Forever stamp has become popular. It was only in 1959 that the cost of first-class mail within the U.S. began to climb from the 3 cents rate established in 1932. A 3¢ stamp with 4 different images of Washington D.C. was issued to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Washington, D.C. as the capital of the United States.

Even though the U.S. transatlantic airmail service began in 1939, we tend to forget that most mail from the U.S. to Europe was still carried by boat. When I started flying to Europe in the mid to late 1950’s I remember the prop airplane had to take on fuel twice, in Shannon, Ireland and Gander, Newfoundland before reaching London. Of course, then it was more expensive to send a letter by air and it depended on the weight of the envelope as well. It was quite expensive to send mail by air early in the twentieth century and costs rose depending on the distance.

A British General Douglas Gumbley who was the director of Posts and Telegraphs in Mesopotamia (Iraq) is credited with introducing the concept of the single sheet “air letter” also known as an Aerogram in 1933. The USPS introduced them in 1947. They confused me probably until my early teenage years because I could not figure out how to fold them and lick the sides to close them or open them without cutting the writing in half! In 1955 it only cost 10¢ to mail an Aerogram to Europe while a letter in an envelope cost 15¢. The service was quick, however, because in the mid-1960’s I remember mailing on a Monday and actually getting a reply from either London or Paris by Friday. No, that was not usual, but the fact that it could happen was quite startling.

My wife recalls during her research of Madame de Pompadour (1721-1764)the thrill of finding at the Morgan Library letters Pompadour sent to her brother during his travels in Italy. The missives were limited to one side of a single sheet which was then folded and addressed like an Aerogram and the enthusiastic sister continued writing up the margins to finish her thoughts.

The delivery of mail, postage stamps and their history around the world is a fascinating subject that I have barely touched upon.

What To Do With All That Art

Although the question of what should be done with an art collection one has built, either before or after one has expired is something I have written about before, recent examples bring me to it again. In personal terms Penelope and I have given quite a bit of art to institutions as our circumstances and tastes changed and yes, we have sold some. The closets still have a lot of what we have no more room to hang or install. We are basically taking the lazy way out … let the kids deal with it.

Everyone looks at their treasures differently. The outstanding art collection of Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, went to auction after he died, and it brought world record prices. Some said he should have given his collection to the Metropolitan Museum. That museum did not need it and Allen’s aim was to fund his and his wife’s foundation that supported organizations dealing with issues like climate change but with an emphasis on the arts and culture.

Aso Tavitian (1940-2020) though not a household name like Paul Alllen, was a computer technology developer who built a major collection of European paintings and sculpture. Born in Bulgaria of Armenian descent, he lived for a time in Lebanon before immigrating to the United States where he received a scholarship to Columbia University. In 1975 he co-founded SyncSort, Inc. an early software development company. He established a foundation to provide scholarships for students of Armenian and Bulgarian origin as well as projects for the Republic of Armenia. He served on several boards including that of the Clark Art Institute where he developed plans for the future of his collection.

Located in the Berkshire mountains the Clark is a relatively small museum with research and academic programs, including a major art history library. It has become a leading international center for research and discussion on the nature of art and art history with programs that bring together scholars from around the world.

Last month the Clark announced that the technology pioneer, through his foundation, had left 331 works of art and $45 million to endow a curatorial position to oversee the collection and take care of it in addition to funding an Aso. O. Tavitian Wing at the Museum. We so often read about museums receiving “transformative” gifts, and in this case, it is certainly true.

I will illustrate 3 works that give the sense of quality of the Tavitian collection.

The star of the show is “The Madonna of the Fountain” by Jan van Eyck (Netherlandish, c. 1390–1441) and his workshop ...

A bronze of a model that I have always loved by Giovanni Francesco Susini (Italian, 1585–1653), “The Abduction of a Sabine Woman” ...

And these remarkable works in wax ...

I love collectors who study a field of art that interests them and learn a lot more by actually collecting and becoming experts in their own right. A Boston lawyer is one such person. George S. Abrams (1932-), and his late wife Maida, had been collecting Northern European art since 1960. He has been Knighted by The Kingdom of the Netherlands for his contribution to the study of Dutch art, especially in the area of drawings. In 2017, he gave 330 Dutch, Flemish, and Netherlandish drawings to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, his alma mater. Starting in the 1990s, he and his wife had already given 140 drawings before this larger gift.

Here is one of 9 Rembrandt drawings in the Abrams gift. It is of a farm possibly on the Amsteldijk.

Another Abrams gift is one of 4 studies of the tulips for which Holland is famous by another 17th-century Dutch artist, Jacob Marrel.

The “largest gift in its 170-year history” was recently reported by the British Museum. Sir Percival David (1892-1964) was a Bombay-born British financier who, over his lifetime, built a collection of Chinese ceramics. He established the Sir Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art in 1952 and was so passionate about China that he even studied the language “to a very high level.” Though his collection had been on public view at the British Museum since 2009, as they say, “it ain’t over til it's over," and almost exactly one year ago, his 1700 Chinese works of art, mostly ceramics, were formally given to the museum through the Foundation.

I found this pair of Funerary Urns with Celadon Glaze exciting.

Of particular significance is this Falangcai Bowl with Peonies. Falangcai refers to porcelain painted with enamels in the imperial workshops of the Forbidden City in Beijing, China.

I will be presumptuous enough to say that collections are formed by people who are passionate in their interests, and often, these include art. For various reasons, we want others to appreciate the works, and yes, our egos make us believe that our collections are important enough to be shared. Should the museums accept these donations is another question entirely. Both the Fogg and the Clark are already on the art map for scholars: not so much for the general public. These gifts give another reason for making them a destination. Whether a museum that already has one and a half million objects needs 1700 more is open to debate, but clearly stellar collections, like these above, enhance the institutions.

The display of the Tavitan donation will attract more visitors to the Clark. The Abrams gift makes the Fogg a must-go to for the study of Northern European drawing, for, it is now the largest collection outside of Europe. Similarly, the David collection makes the British Museum a permanent center for the study of Chinese art.

The Power of the Political Cartoon

Though subjects here will clearly be reminiscent of the current political climate they merely reflect life in America since the white man arrived from abroad.

My interest was sparked by the cover story, “Win, Lose & Draw: The Power of the Political Cartoon”, in our local newspaper’s Pasatiempo weekly magazine. The article was about the renowned cartoonist Pat Oliphant who is a long-time resident of Santa Fe. An Oliphant cartoon from 1970, when the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and rising inflation and unemployment as well as Nixon’s diminishing approval rating, shows numerous Democrats leapfrogging to be Presidential candidates.

When I set off researching, I found that the first political cartoon published in an American Newspaper is credited to the Pennsylvania Express of May 9, 1754. It was created by none other than Benjamin Franklin. It was his call to the British colonies to unite against their enemies the French and the Indians. It shows a snake cut in eight pieces each with the initial of a colony at the time.

Some 40 plus years later we are no longer fighting the French or the British but rather amongst ourselves. This was a fight on the floor of Congress between Vermont Representative Matthew Lyon and Roger Griswold of Connecticut. The controversy was over the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. These were a series of laws passed by Congress in that year that restricted the free speech and the rights of non-citizens.

It is hard to find anything amusing from the Civil War, period, though I did have to chuckle at this image of General Ulysses S. Grant whooping the rear end of General Robert E. Lee. It refers to the Wilderness Battle during the Overland Campaign.

Illustrated in this 1924 cartoon is Senator William Borah giving a speech to Congress about corruption in campaign contributions which the Senate was investigating. Cartoonist Clifford Berryman responded thusly to his words.

In 1934 the country (not to mention the world) was still suffering the results of the Great Depression. FDR is shown as a doctor with a bag of New Deal remedies for an ailing Uncle Sam while Congress is a nurse wringing its hands with worry over whether Roosevelt’s grandiose plans can work.

The political cartoonists’ addition of humor to current controversy often allows us to consider two points of view. In this cartoon, the leaders of Israel and Egypt pointed their peace signs in opposite directions when President Jimmy Carter greeted them. Carter ultimately worked out a peace treaty between President Begin and President Sadat which was signed in 1979 known as the Camp David Accords.

Here is another controversy over which a great deal of ink has been spilled and I fear may be coming up again. I do not believe it requires any more explanation.

To prove there is nothing new under the sun I will conclude with a cartoon about the currently hot issue of immigration. Of the many cartoons I found on the subject over our nation’s history, here is one from over 150 years ago.

Joni Mitchell’s song "The Circle Game" keeps coming to mind, as the chorus goes:

"And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game."

Putting It Together

I love it when people make suggestions of what to write about. After 15 years of weekly Missives, it is not always easy to come up with an idea. Recently a friend wrote, “… I was again reminded how difficult it must be to design the hoped for collection, get permissions to move the objects, packing those objects, moving them, insuring them, unpacking them, and displaying them, while assuring their safety. Then you must produce the catalogue and sell the tickets.”

All these issues are what goes into an exhibition, and I probably have answered the question over the past 15 years in bits and pieces but never in one Missive so here goes: Here is a list which covers the entire process so, obviously, there is no way to give the process its due:

-The Concept
-The List
-The Contact
-The In-Person view
-The Deal
-The Catalog
-The Packing and shipping
-The Installation
-The Opening
-Did I forget Funding?!
-The Crossed fingers

An idea is not enough. You need to think of how you turn it into the museum visitor experience. Is it possible to get the cooperation of those who will be involved which starts at your own institution? Possibly they will want to form a committee which makes the curator’s job more complicated but may or may not make the concept clearer. The larger the committee the greater the risks.

Then you make a list or, cull a list if it is a one artist show, for your ideal exhibition. Inevitably this will be adjusted along the way. Will the museum or collector lend the work you believe is the best work for your exhibition?

Most exhibitions, unless they are done exclusively from your institution’s collection, will require some travel. If possible, you need to see the works in real life. When my wife was doing international exhibitions, she was continuously flying abroad to deal with the art for the show and the possessors of it.

The desired work may be too fragile to travel or the insurance value the owner wants on the work sounds prohibitive. How long will the exhibition be on? Are there plans to travel it? Will there be a catalog? All considerations of the owner deciding if they will lend the work, and it is your job to convince them it is worth the risk and for that owner to be missing that work for that length of time. If you are dealing with another institution they may ask for a specific work from your museum when they do an exhibition two years from now. You can be sure there will be hiccups along the way, and you will have to compromise your original “ideal” list.

You will probably enlist outside experts to contribute to your catalog well ahead of time. You really want that catalog to arrive from the printer before the show opens. If the catalog happens to come from abroad you may have to deal with U.S. Customs which, of course, goes for the art works as well.

You will work with your registrar on the arrangements for packing, shipping and insurance. Is there a packer in Timbuctoo that you and the owner will trust with that work of art, or can you send a registrar to pick it up in person? Museums will sometimes ask to have a curator accompany the work of art even if it means flying on a cargo plane… an official escort. Works of art are installed and must be taken down again when the exhibition closes. This image from the Bowes Museum in County Durham, England.

Meanwhile, the installation must be worked out. The art must be fitted into the available gallery space and installed in a way that tells the story you wish to convey. You need to work with a museum exhibition designer, here I will refer you to a previous Missive.

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2021/06/the-designer.html

You have to prepare a schedule with your partners within the museum needed for the project. As the works of art arrive at your institution, a conservator will be needed to check their condition. Maybe you made a prior deal to have your conservator clean or restore a work for the owner in advance. Did you agree to have protective glazing on the picture before it was being shown? Damage during travel as minor as a chip on a frame has to be addressed. Skilled mount makers and additional art handlers may be needed. You may still be putting up the labels when the crew of lampers arrive for the critical final step of lighting.

Hopefully, your institution has left enough money in the till for advertising and a great opening… did I forget to say that the funds to do the exhibition have to be raised? You needed to have worked with your development department to accomplish this.

Obviously, each bit of what I have written could easily be a chapter in a book, so this is merely a gloss. I will leave it to you to think of all the issues that can come up in each circumstance!

Tacita Dean

We were in Houston, Texas a couple of weeks ago with an afternoon free, so we decided to go to The Menil Collection. In 1954 John and Dominique de Menil established a foundation whose stated purpose was “to foster greater public understanding and appreciation of art, architecture, culture, religion, and philosophy”. The museum, beautiful in its simplicity, built to house their collection by the famed architect Renzo Piano, opened in 1987.

It is designed with pods usually consisting of 2 exhibition rooms each. When we were there, in one was a wonderful show by surrealist Max Ernst and another of ancient as well as indigenous arts. However, what especially grabbed us on this visit was the exhibition of a contemporary artist, Tacita Dean.

Clearly, we are not with it, as they say, because the artist was new to us. Ms. Dean is represented, for one, by the esteemed Marian Goodman Gallery. Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, England and the biography sent me by the Gallery refers to her as “British European”. Today she splits her time between Los Angeles and Berlin. She received her MFA in painting from The Slade School of Fine Art in London. There is a long list of awards and solo exhibitions going back to 1994. In 1992 she created a 16mm, 16 mm, color, optical sound, 8 minutes; continuous loop called The Story of Beard.

This exhibit at The Menil is her first major museum survey in the U.S. though she has had shows at the National Gallery, The National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy in London, and also in Basel, Switzerland, in Mexico City and Sydney, Australia.

The show we saw was called “Blind Folly”. A short pamphlet that is available in the exhibition has a quote from the artist which says in part, “I have allowed the making of my work to be open to interpretation and redirection by chance …” and that is what I found particularly intriguing. My wife and I saw different but similar things in the works.

There was much more to the show than I will give examples of here, but these are images that really struck me. A fantastic (including all of that word’s meanings) work is The Montafon Letter, 2017, lent by the Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. It looks to be a photograph but it is actually a white chalk drawing on black board. It measures 12 by 24 feet. Montafon is a 39 km long valley in the westernmost Austrian federal state of Vorarlberg and Dean’s image is a scene of its icy Alpine peaks. The artist says she based it on an account of a fatal 17th century avalanche in the Austrian Alps in which 300 people died and one priest survived making it a symbol of hope. The story goes on and may be historically interesting, but for me, who lives in the mountains of New Mexico and has loved Switzerland since I was a child, I prefer to see mountains and not tragedy. Here you will see the image in the installation and a photograph of the work alone. (images gallery shot Montafon 1 and image solo Montafon 2)

One of my wife’s favorite works was the Delfern Tondo, 2024. Delfern refers to an estate in Los Angeles. The work is 10 feet in diameter and again looks like a photo but is not. It is chalk on blackboard and paint on Formica. In preparation, however, the artist did lie on the grass and point her camera upwards for inspiration. Living outside of town we often look up but at night we do not see clearly the cloud patterns we are able to see during the day. Dean evokes those magical moments that are so difficult if not impossible to capture with a camera. The close up is from the frontispiece to the catalog.

An image that the curator, Michelle White clearly loves since it is the cover of the museum brochure, and the press release, is “Beauty 2006” lent by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It represents a barren tree. Here Dean did use a photograph blown up to roughly 12 by 12 feet but she isolated the tree from its surroundings and enhanced its image by painting in gouache with a small brush around its limbs. This was one of her first in a series of what is called in the catalog “portraits of trees”, sometimes in color, that she found in different locations around the world. (image Beauty, 2006)

This is such a multifaceted artist! Dean has made 16mm films which are being shown in rotation at The Menil. She believes in creating works with found objects and her unusual surfaces include abandoned locomotive windows. One series in the show is composed of found postcards where she has painted mirror images to mount next to them. I was tantalized by the thoughts she left in partially erased notes in her larger drawings. She says she does not know what she will create until she serendipitously sees and does it. How do you capture that?

The exhibition will be on view at The Menil until April 19, 2025.

Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350

When I received the press package from the Metropolitan Museum for “Siena:
The Rise of Painting 1300-1350. I immediately regretted not being able to get to New York to see it. For those who are or will be in New York, it opened October 13, 2024, and runs until January 26, 2025. The reviews since confirm my reaction.

According to Director, Max Hollein’s introduction to the catalog, “Siena was an epicenter of artistic innovation and ambition in the 14th and 15th century. Its impact on the development of European art and the development of painting cannot be emphasized enough.” Siena was also situated on a major route from Northern Europe to Rome and on to Naples and hence was a major artistic influence.

During the first half of the 14th century Siena became a hotbed of creativity, that is, until half the population of Siena perished in the plague of 1355.

The exhibition includes paintings by four of the greatest artists of their time. Duccio di Buoninsegna (1278-1319), Simone Martini (1284-1344) and the brothers Pietro Lorenzetti (1280-1348) and Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1290-1348). Though the Press Release emphasizes the Paintings, the over 300 page catalogue indicates categories including Sculpture, Goldsmiths’ Work, Illuminated Manuscripts and Textiles from over 40 lenders from at least 10 countries. With over a hundred works in the exhibition and most of them stellar examples, it is impossible to do full justice to the exhibition here.

Since, for better or for worse, we have a pecking order for categories let us start with a couple of paintings. The Frick Collection, just half a mile away, lent their wonderful Duccio of the “Temptation of Christ” to the show, but this is a show with more than one Duccio! The exhibition created in conjunction with the National Gallery in London, lent this small tryptic by the artist representing The Virgin and Child with Saints Dominic and Aurea, and Patriarchs and Prophets (ca. 1312-15). The first image is the picture from the Frick and the second from the National Gallery.

These four small panels by Simone Martini form the Orsini Polyptych (ca. 1335-1340) that are today split between the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, the Louvre in Paris and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin are reunited here. Each panel is painted on both sides. This one is my first choice, “Going to Calvary,” with Jerusalem depicted as a medieval city. The building has a central plan symbolizing the temple of Jerusalem. I love the individual faces where you can imagine what they are all thinking. Imagine these panels hinged and folded together so as to be portable for private devotion. A second illustration shows them installed at the Metropolitan.

A few fragments survive of a great wooden crucifix created by Lando di Pietro as a personal gift to a Sienna confraternity. The nearly life-size crucifix was all but destroyed in an Allied bombing of the Basilica di San Bernardino all’Osservanza in 1944. Exhibited in the show, a damaged head of Christ in polychromed wood was lent by the Museo Castelli in Siena. It was only through the destruction of the rest of this work that parchments secreted in its fragments were discovered, revealing its author, who had previously been known only as a goldsmith and architect, was a sculptor as well!

There are several amazing ivory pieces in the show. This Tabernacle Polyptych of the Virgin and Child and scenes from the infancy of Christ created in the 1280s in Paris is a great example, lent by the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. Some of the original polychrome and gilding remains. It too could be folded and taken along for private worship … today we carry our computers!

Oh, so many more riches to view but I am going to leave it at that. Hopefully, I have given you a taste of this artistic caviar.

Now, I have a surprise for you. The Met created a video tour of the exhibition with the curators responsible for putting it together and others who were involved with putting it on. The accent is on the paintings but some of the objects are visible along the way.