Three City Tour - Cleveland

As I was landing in Cleveland the American Eagle pilot announced the prediction of rain for the next week. Rain everywhere I go, yuk! I have just finished my second and final day here and happily the weatherman proved wrong again.

Like many museums The Cleveland Museum of Art is in the middle of a building program.  Theirs should be finished in 2013.  The original building was built in 1916 and in 1970 another building was added designed by Marcel Breuer.  On one of the landings are three portholes Before, with a historic image, Future, with a photo of the final model and Present where you actually see the construction going on. During construction one needs to navigate to the 1916 and Breuer buildings and to do that you go down to go around to go up again and sometimes more than once.  I got my exercise within the buildings.

Being involved in so many media, I always need to see several curators and they are not always available just because I arrive.  I was, however, lucky enough to meet with the curators of paintings, drawings, medieval art and decorative arts and had material to show to them.  Of course, many departments are divided by period as well so for paintings you have curators before 1800, the 19th century and the 20th & 21st centuries.  The “good old days” when the director of the Cleveland Museum accompanied by a couple of the pertinent curators, who were not so numerous as now, could make decisions on site in New York.  These days, though curatorial visits still occur but they are more often at art fairs where they do not need to slog from gallery to gallery.  As there is less art available there seem to be more dealers to handle it!

As any business person understands it helps to put in face-time and get to know the people who choose the art and can tell you in what direction they and their director are hoping to go.  But curators must also be opportunistic if the “right” work of art comes up.  So, I am trying to find the right work of art and pique the curator’s interest and possibly show them something that they had not thought of.  In the old days I would send transparencies when I got back to New York.  Today, I can send an email as soon as I get back to my computer, much more practical and expeditious.

I learned that neo-classicism was of interest in the painting and drawings departments, but not in the decorative arts.  This made perfect sense in light of what had been collected in the past.

Below, are a pair of paintings by Rubens, Diana Before the Hunt and a portrait of Isabella Brandt, Rubens’ first wife, that we sold many many years ago to the Cleveland Museum.  In all, the museum has acquired over 100 works of art through my family.

I have 2 more stops to make on my tour. Tomorrow I head for, Toledo, Ohio and then Detroit.  Like Cleveland’s, their art museums have been major clients of our firm over the years.

Central Park

Permit me an indulgence.  In this Missive I am going to talk about a different kind of art.  The art of city planning.  In New York City, Central Park opened to the public on city owned land in 1857 and a year later Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand it.  They are the ones credited with creating the park.  The land had to be taken by the right of eminent domain and some renters and squatters did have to be evicted first.  This displaced 1600 individuals, but if they had waited… today it would be millions. What foresight to have built a park so early on.

I grew up in New York and I know Manhattan quite well.  I was lucky enough as a child to live on Central Park South and got to know the south end of Central Park though I was always jealous of all my friends who used to sleigh on the 79th Street hill and I was alone on one smaller and nearer to 59th Street.

Later in my life there were opportunities to live on the Upper East Side and then the Upper West Side.  For the past decade we were in the most convenient neighborhood I have ever lived in for the amenities of life but not near my park.

A few months ago we came again within a very short distance of Central Park and I am hit by how much I missed it.  It is truly an oasis in this mad city.  When I was a kid I felt I had it to myself and there were all these places I could go and when I saw no others I was sure I had made discoveries.  In the mid 1960’s, however, when Tom Hoving was Parks Commissioner he did for Central Park what he later did for the Metropolitan Museum… though some may say did it to Central Park and the Met.  He opened them up so that they really belonged to all the people.  It was as if the park had been newly discovered and it seemed to instantly become overrun with humanity.

A short while later in the 1970’s the park deteriorated and was not being kept up. It probably had not needed as much attention before the throngs arrived. The Central Park Conservancy, a private not for profit group went into partnership with the city to keep the park in good shape and replant when and where necessary.  The Conservancy bears the lion’s share of these expenses and has been a great success.  It has all been kept in tip top shape.

Happily no mayor or legislature has allowed developers of any sought to change the park with few exceptions.  The Metropolitan Museum did make a mild incursion when they installed the Primitive Wing on the left and the Temple of Dendur on the right of their edifice.

When tourists come to town we, of course, talk about the museums but also Central Park.  As a matter of fact, if you walk Museum mile you have the park on the other side of the street the whole way!

Aside from the playgrounds which you would expect in the ten block walk between the Frick and the Met.  You will find the Bethesda Fountain, where so many congregate on the weekends but actually everyday.   On a hot day some will climb into the fountain or you might find a harpist by the lake.

From there a few steps will take you to the rowboat rental for the lake which is a good size on which to spend an hour or two searching out the area.  There is a restaurant on the lake where you can have a scenic meal or you can grab a snack at the fast food counter on the park side.

Across the road is the model boat pond where the younger folk bring their own remote control boats or rent one by the hour.  There too, snacks and light lunches are available.

As you follow around the pond you will find the Alice in Wonderland Statue upon which the kids climb and invariably have their pictures taken.

A bit further on is the statue of Hans Christian Anderson by which in the warmer months you will often find a storyteller reading to the younger children.

This has been merely, what the real estate people call, “a peek at park” (ie if you crane you neck out a bedroom window there is a very small view of the park).  There is so much more to do and see even in the short walk or bike ride that I have described.  One could easily devote a weekly blog just to Central Park and the goings on there.

Those Were the Weeks that Were

Penelope left Santa Fe to join me in New York for just over two weeks.  You already know the main reason: our Grand Opening for the new gallery, but there was also the visit of family from England, and it is the season when the New York Art World is bustling.

There was the Fine Art and Antique Dealer’s fair at the Armory for which Penelope serves on the vetting committee; dealers had receptions for exhibitions in their galleries such as Otto Naumann hosting a sculpture exhibition by Tomasso Brothers Fine Art, based in London and Leeds.  And the auction houses held sales of import such as Sotheby’s much-touted sale of works of art from the New York apartment of Edmond and Lily Safra which in spite of a number of buy-ins, the 1,225 lots yielded over 45 million dollars.

Of the many galas that occur every day in New York we pick out just a few that are very important to us and, of course, they need to work out with our travel schedule.

The Frick Autumn Dinner, which is the museum’s biggest social event of the year, was very special to us this year.  The out going Director, Anne Poulet, and the incoming director, Ian Wardropper not only went to the Art Institute of New York University at the time Penelope was there, but we have been in touch with them professionally and personally ever since. 

Director Emerita Anne L. Poulet, Frick Director Ian Wardropper, and 

Chairman of the Board of Trustees Margot Bogert; photo: Christine A. Butler

A few days later the Frick held another more intimate event for the Fellows of the Frick to introduce the new director and we did stop by again just to show our support and then had to rush off to another event that evening.

This was for an old friend, Karl Katz, who likes to take credit for bringing Penelope and me together to work on the CINOA exhibition, The Grand Gallery, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and subsequently get married more than 36 years ago.  At the time he was in charge of special exhibitions; later on he ran the Met’s department for Film and Television.  When he left the Museum he started MUSE Film and Television, a not-for-profit that produces films on the arts.  I served for many years on its board of directors.  This year the theme of the gala dinner was “Artists Rights = Human Rights”.  The dinner commenced with an impassioned speech by Artist Shirin Neshat, an Iranian  photographer and video-artist, who came to the U.S. 30 years ago.  Her work addresses social, political and psychological dimensions of the woman’s experience in contemporary Islamic society.  Then we saw clips from films produced by MUSE about Ai Weiwei among others.

Later in the week we went to the Neue Galerie to attend the opening of the exhibition of the private collection of its co-founder, Ronald S. Lauder.  It is really an incredible collection of works of art.  It goes back to the medieval period but the primary focus is Austrian and German from1900 through the 20^th century and onto the present day.  This amazing exhibition represents just a part of the vast Lauder collection.

The next evening there was a gala in honor of Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder given by the World Monuments Fund for all their services to the preservation of art and architecture throughout the world.  The keynote speaker was Mrs. Colin Powell.  She and her husband have known the Lauders for 25 years and travelled with them often.

Jo Carole is chairman of FAPE, The Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies, whose mandate is to enhance the U.S. image abroad through art displayed in and created for our embassies. Ronald has restored many cultural and religious institutions in Vienna as well as Central and Eastern Europe.  The Tempel Synagogue in Krakow, Poland is just one example.

The final event of our whirlwind tour was the Private Art Dealers Award dinner this year honoring the Museum of the City of New York.  The director, Susan Henshaw Jones, accepted the award from PADA’s president Robert Simon and both gave the perfect length, i.e. short, humorous speeches.  Proof of the success of the evening was that unlike many gala dinners most people stayed to chat and meet all those that they had not spoken to at cocktails!

What an exciting and exhausting fortnight! 

Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe

How can I resist this one?  During the last few months in Santa Fe I have been writing about photography and Georgia O’Keeffe.  I come back to New York and at the Metropolitan Museum, “Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe” opens!

Alfred Stieglitz at 291, 1915

Edward Steichen (1879–1973)

Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was an amazing photographer, founder of the Photo-Secession movement, editor of Camera Work as well an important dealer in photographs and modernist paintings.  In 1929 he gave the first group of photographs accepted as art by the Metropolitan Museum which kicked off their photo collection. He had a number of galleries, the first being “291” which was his address on Fifth Avenue and the last was “An American Place”.  In 1933 he gave another group of photos and more were given after his death by his widow Georgia O’Keeffe along with including paintings, prints and drawings totaling about 400 works of art. 200 of these are shown in this two-part exhibition.  First one finds a small gallery of photos from the initial donations which include works by Stieglitz as well as Pictorialist masters whom he showed in his gallery.

Part two of the show is far larger and includes, photographs, prints, drawings and paintings by the artists Stieglitz represented during his career.   Artists such as Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, John Marin not to mention Brancusi and Kandinsky.  Can you imagine the excitement that Lisa Messinger, exhibition curator and catalog editor as well as other curators who had worked with the Stieglitz collection over the years felt?  Finally, they could see this treasure trove that had been dispersed among the museum’s departments for generations, brought together in a single show.  No matter how many times you flip through the images there is no substitute for seeing the works together on exhibition.

Marsden Hartley’s “Portrait of a German Officer” (1914)    

Charles Demuth’s "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold" (1928)   

Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Cow Skull Red, White and Blue” (1931)

Stieglitz like many dealers was his own best client: the treasures he had include  amazing iconic images that are in the show such as Marsden Hartley’s “Portrait of a German Officer” (1914), Charles Demuth’s "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold" (1928) and Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Cow Skull Red, White and Blue” (1931)

Having said all this, the other side of the coin is that rooms full of a single artist's work, just because they were part of a dealer’s stable and came from his collection, might seem a bit much… I always want to see a tight edit.  As I have said before, however, there are many ways to view an exhibition and those who created it make their decisions.

One editorial decision that seems most apt is that Stieglitz's wife and muse, Georgia O’Keeffe comes as a climax in the last gallery.  As I walked into that space there were several of O’Keeffe’s more erotic plants and a young man said in a stage whisper to his friend, “Look at that vagina!”  Whatever turns you onto art is, in my opinion, a good thing, though the artist would have taken great exception to that comment.  She always denied any sexual connotations in her work.

Stieglitz was able to put together an incredible collection and thanks to his eye for quality the collection itself becomes a work of art.