Supreme Fiction

Restoration Hardware

Hans Holbein, Portrait of Erasmus, ca 1530

ART & ANTIQUES
June 2009

Restoration Hardware
by James Panero

Marrying traditional knowledge with today's technology, art conservators are uncovering long-lost masterpieces.

In September 2000 art conservator marco Grassi was attending an estate auction in Paris with an old friend, a European private collector. In the warren of salesrooms at the Drouot Hotel, mixed in with the chipped crockery and worn sofas, was a small rectangular painting in a dusty glass case. It appeared to be a copy of one of the four or five famous portraits of the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus that Hans Holbein the Younger painted from life. Yet Grassi grew intrigued by the quality of the painting. His friend asked his opinion, and on a whim he encouraged him to buy it.

When the hammer fell the next day the collector had acquired the lot for around $2,000, in line with its pre-sale estimate. Today, as a result of a decade-long process of restoration and research conducted by Grassi, the portrait, painted on linden panel around 1530, is generally accepted as a genuine, long-lost Holbein, one that would likely be worth tens of millions of dollars if offered for sale. "It was a wild shot," says the conservator, "but sometimes wild shots work out."

This past year, after a six-month review, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in Rotterdam, Netherlands (Erasmus' hometown), selected the painting for inclusion in an exhibition called Images of Erasmus. "Of course, we were very excited when we were offered this painting by Marco Grassi," says curator Peter van der Coelen. "I think the last (Holbein) portrait of this quality was discovered 150 years ago." Through the show the painting was subjected to scholarly investigation and compared to similar Holbein Erasmus portraits through loans from the Louvre, the Lehman Collection in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Kunstmuseum Basel. Most experts now accept the painting as a Holbein on par with the Metropolitan and Kunstmuseum examples, if not quite on the level of the Louvre painting or the portrait of Erasmus at the National Gallery in London (the only major Erasmus painting by Holbein not in the show). The results were a coup for the conservator.

The Holbein rediscovery and other high-profile restorations have cast a new light on the private world of art conservation. In 1991, through an analysis of its under-drawing, the British scholar Nicholas Penny identified what was thought to be a Raphael copy as an original painting by the master. In 2004 the National Gallery in London purchased this painting, Madonna of the Pinks, for œ22 million from the Duke of Northumberland. In 1968 the New York dealer Ira Spanierman purchased a dirty, unknown Italian-school painting at a Sotheby's auction for $325; soon afterward, scholars identified the work as the lost 1518 Portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino, by Raphael. In 2007 Spanierman sold the portrait at Christie's London for œ18.5 million ($37.3 million).

Grassi has made another important rediscovery of his own. In 2001 he purchased a "Circle of Pontormo" at an auction in Lyon, France, for $45,000. Again through an analysis of the painting's preparatory drawing, scholars quickly acknowledged the painting to be an original Pontormo--a fragment of the "lost" original for one of the most copied images in the Renaissance, with more than 25 known versions. When the work failed to sell at a Sotheby's auction in 2003, Yale curator Lawrence Kantor arranged for the painting to be purchased by the Yale University Art Gallery for substantially less than its low estimate of $800,000.

"This picture is powers of 10 more famous than any other painting," says Kantor. "But Marco had a great deal of difficulty persuading the art-historical establishment this was not just another copy. You will find that in auction rooms people buy with their ears and not their eyes. One scholar expressed doubts, and everyone else fell into line. This was one of the classic cases. I asked Marco permission, if the painting was bought in, if he would offer it to us. Being the gentleman he is, he did, and we were able to buy it at a very reasonable price."

Museums are now bringing the subject of art restoration to prominence with special exhibitions. This past fall the Uffizi hosted an exhibition around the 10-year restoration of Raphael's Madonna of the Goldfinch. Through Sept. 6, Kantor's Yale Art Gallery is mounting an exhibition called Time Will Tell: Ethics and Choices in Conservation, about the history of restoration in its own collection, put together by Yale's chief conservator, Ian McClure. Both of the shows reveal a profession with a troubled history, according to Grassi. During the 1960s the Yale Art Gallery, operating under a hard-line theory in vogue at the time that called for removing all retouching and overpainting, badly stripped already-damaged work. Grassi describes that enterprise as "an absolute nadir in the annals of conservation." Kantor agrees: "Yale has one of the most dreadful histories of conservation in the known universe."

A generation later the recent Uffizi restoration of the Raphael aimed for a compromise between the traditional invisible style of restoration and the former Yale approach. Here a process, developed in Florence, infills damaged areas of a painting with a technique called "chromatic section," using pointillist-like brushstrokes that are noticeable up close but appear to blend together at a distance. Grassi remains critical of the technique: "At a certain distance the whole thing vibrates in a foggy way. This restoration doesn't do a picture any service, and it's nonsense."

An American citizen born in Florence, with degrees from Princeton and the Uffizi, Grassi represents the fourth generation of a Roman family of art dealers and restorers. Along with David Bull and Nancy Krieg in New York and Simon Gillespie in London, he has become a central player in the private practice of Old Master conservation--one of those experts who work outside the conservation departments of major museums. He pursues a traditional method of restoration, believing that results should bow to the original and be invisible rather than becoming the subject of discussion. "The best intervention is the one less seen," he says, quoting the Bergamo nobleman Giovanni Secco Suardo, who published a handbook on the restorer's art in 1876. Dressed in bespoke tweeds, Grassi works in a studio overlooking Broadway and Houston Street in New York's SoHo District. His career in restoration has taken him through Florence, Lugano and, in the mid-1960s, the Villa Favorita in Castagnola, Switzerland, home of one of Europe's greatest private collections, that of Baron Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza. In the mid-'70s Grassi relocated to New York, and in 1984 he opened his current studio office, where he has served a clientele of dealers, private collections and auction houses.

Today Grassi Studio handles a select number of these clients while attending to work for Grassi's son Matteo, who runs an Old Masters gallery in Paris. The office is a hospital for old art, one that sees its share of masterpieces mixed in with more common examples. "There is a democracy in a conservation studio," says Grassi. "It's a ward in a hospital. All paintings have the same appendix. And sometimes the hardest problems are on mundane paintings." He limits himself to older work. "I would not do contemporary painting. There's a very big divide that occurs around the Second World War. Paintings by Picasso and Mir¢, technically, were not made differently from the past. The big change came with Pollock. The materials changed radically--cotton canvases, acrylics, different materials with totally different chemical and physical properties. Having come from a Florentine background, I have worked on 13th-century painting. In Rome I worked on the earliest panel painting in the West. For me, the earlier the better."

Grassi Studio is lined with wooden freight boxes used to protect paintings in transit. At the center of the main lab is the large low-suction vacuum table, the emergency-room tool that adds elasticity and tension to brittle and dry canvas through a slow application of heat, humidity and pressure. "The traditional process was to reline the canvas," Grassi says, explaining the utility of the device. "But this allows you to take an original canvas and treat it so it doesn't need lining. It gives it added life." Around the room are paintings currently under Grassi's care, some on gurneys, others making the rounds from X-ray room to infrared-video station to the workstation containing scalpels, solvents and binocular microscopes. Despite the gadgetry, restoration is "a craft, in the end," says Grassi. "You are working with your hands. You have to know the chemical properties of paintings and test them. You need good light and good lighting equipment. And the most important tool is the eye. That's what really counts."

Research into a painting's provenance and an informed sense of connoisseurship are also vitally important. Although his studio is now half the size it was when it was in full operation (Grassi is winding down in anticipation of his retirement), he still retains an 18,000-volume art library, one of the largest such resources in the city. He keeps it in a wood-paneled study next door to the bright restoration rooms. "For years I did nothing but scour book catalogues--a huge investment. It was vanity, too. In fact, people used to joke that for the cost of the library I could have a car idling out front to take me to the Frick," Grassi says, referring to the art reference library at the Frick Collection, on Manhattan's Upper East Side. "But having the information is very, very valuable. And having it sooner than the next guy is more valuable."

It is this expertise that causes Grassi to be sought out by private collectors like the one who bought the Holbein. Soon after the Drouot auction, Grassi realized that no known Holbein portrait of Erasmus--or even any of the copies--featured the subject in quite the same pose, holding a closed book. The new owner sent the painting to Grassi in New York, and once he had it in the studio, he was able to analyze it under a special kind of infrared camera. Infrared reflectography can reveal features below the painted surface that are invisible under normal light. Scanning the portrait, the camera showed extensive preparatory drawing and redrawing in the area of the hands and book. Grassi describes the discovery as "the first truly heart-stopping moments of revelation."

An X-ray radiograph showed further reworking--ear flaps had been added to Erasmus' cap. "These findings pointed in one obvious direction," says Grassi. "It was highly unlikely that the portrait could be a copy. Not only was an exact prototype unknown, but copyists invariably follow the model line by line without improvisation." Other characteristics reaffirmed the authenticity of the piece. The wood of the panel was European linden, what one might expect of a painting made in Switzerland or Southern Germany, as opposed to the oak used in England and the Low Countries or the poplar one finds in Italian panel painting. The studio sent the sample to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Sciences Lab for testing. "They do it for no fee," says Grassi. "It's fantastic. It's one of those nice things for which you pay your taxes." At the same time, he investigated the provenance of the portrait, as far back as possible, and was able to trace its ownership to a prominent French family of the ancien r‚gime, the Lamoignon, who had connections to Holbein.

The evidence was adding up. The attribution came to focus on Holbein himself. What remained was the quality of the work. It might not have been a copy, but was the portrait good enough to have been painted by the master's hand, was it a product of Holbein's studio or a combination of the two? Once Grassi removed the older varnish, which is a routine procedure, "the exceptional quality and delicacy8 of the modeling, the meticulous detailing and the lustrous finish all spoke clearly to the great diligence and proficiency of its creator," he says, "whoever he might have been."

But still there was something off about it. Grassi asked the late Swiss conservator Emil Bosshard, a colleague and friend from the Villa Favorita, to examine the painting. He in turn arranged for an examination by the art historian Pascal Griener, a Holbein expert. Together they began to question the dark green background of the portrait, which contrasted with the delicacy of the figure. "The background is important because the figure has to resonate with it," Grassi says. Bosshard submitted some small pigment cross-sections to Hermann Kuhn in Munich, formerly of the Doerner Institut, for testing. The resulting microphotographs confirmed what the experts had suspected. The background, originally a light green, had been painted over more roughly in a darker shade. Since this was done early in the life of the painting, the overpaint came to form a tight bond with the original layer. This discovery posed a dilemma for the conservator. Grassi discussed its potential removal with Bosshard, who thought a cleaning procedure would pose too many difficulties and dangers to the painting.

When the painting returned to New York, Grassi ran several more tests of the overpaint layer. Finally, he devised a solvent solution that was able to soften the overpaint without damage to the material beneath. Working over the surface of the painting in tiny quadrants with the solvent, a binocular microscope and a scalpel, he was able to remove the overpaint during a period of several months. Grassi's efforts revealed the portrait in its full brilliance, for the first time in 400 years.

The decade-long restoration of this Holbein speaks to the challenges posed by a major rediscovery. The process does not happen overnight. When other rediscoveries get rolled out in the popular press as done deals, conservators such as Grassi remain skeptical. "The manner of the rediscovery is interesting. To come out and say, `I found this new painting' is like, `I found a cure for cancer.' It doesn't last long." Grassi points to the recently announced discovery of a purported Shakespeare portrait, purportedly painted from life, by the English restorer Alec Cobbe. Many critics now believe the painting was over-cleaned by Cobbe, and Tarnya Cooper, 16th-century curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London, has claimed that the work more likely represents the courtier Sir Thomas Overbury.

Careful restoration work can take years. The study and acceptance of a rediscovery by experts usually takes even longer. In the case of the Holbein, the chance scheduling of the Rotterdam show accelerated the process of acceptance. The canonization of this painting is not complete, however. More research needs to be done on Holbein's studio, in the way that scholars now understand Rembrandt's studio, notes Van der Coelen.

Yet the life of a restorer is not all rediscovered Holbeins and Pontormos. "There are certain things that give you satisfaction," says Grassi. "It can be a nondescript painting. The challenge is to resolve a problem, a structural problem, an aesthetic problem, and arrive at a solution that is acceptable aesthetically and artistically. It's great to work on a tremendous painting, but our daily life is made up of other things that can be equally satisfying."

Gallery Chronicle (June 2009)

Gabrielle Evertz, Four Reds + blue green © Gabrielle Evertz

THE NEW CRITERION
June 2009

Gallery Chronicle

by James Panero

On Op Art, Gabriele Evertz at Metaphor Gallery, James Little at June Kelly Gallery & Nicolas Carone at Lohin Geduld Gallery.

The excellent optical painters working today are the survivors of a peculiar history. Back in the mid-1960s, the hard-edged abstraction that arrived under the banner of Op Art turned into a bad trip for high modernism. No other art movement blew up and burned out quite so spectacularly.

In 1965 William C. Seitz at the Museum of Modern Art organized a blockbuster exhibition of Op Art called “The Responsive Eye.” The artists in this show dispensed with the gestural brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism. They largely did away with the naturalism of oil on canvas. Drawing on the intensity of new acrylic paints, they used contrasting lines and complementary colors to accentuate the biomechanics of perception. The results were immediate. Although grounded in over a century of study, the flickering, throbbing, pulsating works on view required little explanation. The show set attendance records. It was a sensation—and a problem. Up against 1960s popular culture, optical art came to be appreciated for its sociological relevance rather than its formal innovation. Its designs were exploited for commercial and cultural ends.

The optical artists in the MOMA show had deep roots in the history of modern art and science. This ancestry could be traced back to Goethe’s Theory of Colors of 1810. Here Goethe first took note of the chromatic dissidence of light-dark interaction—the colors that can be observed along the lines separating white and black. Goethe also investigated the volatility of complementary (opposite) colors as arranged on a color wheel—red against green, yellow against violet, and so forth. The Divisionism of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, based on the research of Michel Eugène Chevreul, further advanced perceptual theory. Twentieth-century Constructivism connected the visual absolutes of geometric abstraction with Socialist idealism, which went on to inform the aesthetics of the Bauhaus.

Among the artists in “The Responsive Eye” was Josef Albers, a Bauhaus colleague of Johannes Itten and a patriarch of color theory who influenced a generation of artists at Black Mountain College and Yale University. Victor Vasarely came through Alexander Bortnyik’s studio, the Budapest center for the Bauhaus. Julian Stanczak and Richard Anuszkiewicz, one-time roommates at Yale, were Albers’s former students and also included in the show.

Yet just as the optical art of Russian Constructivism was appropriated (and later discarded) by Socialism, Op Art suffered a similar fate in the hands of 1960s pop culture. Serious painting was degraded into a mere fashion phenomenon. Time magazine coined the term Op Art in 1964. The facile alignment of perceptual art and Pop Art, which had infiltrated public consciousness at the start of the decade, gave optical abstraction an undeserved superficial gloss.

Bridget Riley, perhaps the most recognizable artist in the 1965 exhibition for her swirling black-and-white compositions, first noticed something wrong on her taxi ride from the airport to the MOMA opening. There in the shop windows off Madison Avenue, printed on the clothing designs, were her paintings. How the images from a yet-to-open art exhibition ended up on the ready-to-wear lines of Seventh Avenue can be attributed to Larry Aldrich, an art collector and dress manufacturer. With the acquiescence of Seitz, Aldrich purchased Op works before the show and created fabric designs for his Young Elegante line of clothing. Through his distribution of these textile patterns, which also included works by Stanczak, Vasarely, and Anuszkiewicz, Op motifs ended up on everything from lamps and upholstery to maternity wear and girdles. There was even Op cosmetics. Sears carried Op wallpaper. Pfizer used Op imagery on the packaging of its antivertigo medication.

Riley eventually sued for copyright infringement. Yet nothing could stop the transformation of Op from serious art into faddish design. The opening party for “The Responsive Eye,” heavily photographed and filmed (the young Brian de Palma made a documentary of it), featured women with beehive haircuts and Op clothing head-to-toe. Life magazine published a fashion spread of Op apparel photographed in MOMA’s own galleries. Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Women’s Wear Daily also covered the fashion extensively. As Riley noted in 1965, “‘The Responsive Eye’ was a serious exhibition but its qualities were obscured by an explosion of commercialism, band-wagoning and hysterical sensationalism.”

Art critics generally dismissed optical art. Barbara Rose in Artforum called it “mindless.” Clement Greenberg labeled it “novelty art.” Reviewing the MOMA exhibition in The New York Times, however, John Canaday praised Op’s mass appeal: “This is a very satisfying thing for a public that has been puzzled and offended by a long series of modern isms. Optical art has a combination of virtues new to modern art: it fascinates, even if for different reasons, both the esthete and the layman.”

In the later 1960s, the popular appreciation of Op affected the art a second time, as mod fashion gave way to psychedelic drugs. Commercialism had already damaged Op by the time of the MOMA show. Now acid kitsch brought it to a new low. In a survey of Op Art at the Columbus Museum in Ohio in 2007, the libertarian art critic Dave Hickey took note of this secondary appropriation by linking the art movement to drug use and sexual liberation: “What the special effects of optical art do, specifically, is introduce us to that ‘stranger [to ourselves].’ … It replaces the elite, intellectual pleasure of ‘getting it’ with the egalitarian fun-house pleasure of disorientation, of trying to understand something that you cannot.”

From international socialism to slimming fashions to acid trips, the aggressive sensuality and easy reproducibility of perceptual art proved to be its undoing. By the end of the 1960s, Op Art seemed over. Minimal sculptors like Tony Smith adopted the hard edges of perceptual painting for machined materials. Process artists like Thornton Willis restored the Ab-Ex brushstroke to painting while still investigating the perceptual ambiguities of complementary colors.

Yet Op Art never really went away as it was reabsorbed into general abstract practice. Generations of artists continued to investigate abstraction’s optical possibilities. Today the abstract painter Gabriele Evertz, who recently ended a group show at Metaphor Gallery in Brooklyn, draws a conscious connection with her Op Art forebears.[1] Evertz is an intense colorist who constructs her work out of precise vertical lines. A former student and now professor at Hunter College, Evertz is among the current generation of artists known as the Hunter Color School, initiated by E. C. Goossen in the 1960s.

Evertz tempers her optical effects with a more traditional interest in the overall mood of color. Reds, blues, and yellows alternately predominate on her canvases. Evertz also goes beyond the interference test-patterns of 1960s Op for more subtle modulations of tint, angle, and line. Colors leach and glow, but in beautiful rather than simply disorienting ways. Evertz gives perceptual art a new confidence in control and variation.

The abstract artist James Little is a painter for whom the term hard-edged is a gross injustice. His latest work is now on view at June Kelly Gallery.[2] While Little constructs his compositions in sharp angles and straight lines, his silk-like treatment of surface is uniquely his own. Little has developed his own encaustic medium, which he applies at high temperature in over twenty coats. With gestural brushwork, unlike his Op Art predecessors, Little is not easily duplicated.

For his earlier work, Little combed his shiny surfaces in rich layers of brushwork. At this latest show, he smooths out a more matte medium like the icing on a cake. The tone is softer than in previous iterations. Sharp punctuations have given way to a more even rhythm. Triangles have been compressed into more vertical arrangements. I miss some of the brushy surface, as well as the aggression of Little’s former primary palette. But the overall effect remains supremely assured. Work such as When Aaron Tied Ruth (2008) is particularly engaging and deeply enigmatic—a feeling you would never experience in work concerned with optics alone.

Today the power of paint, on full display in optical art, comes as a welcome tonic to a period in art dominated by Pop and Dada sculpture. Next up: Tim Bavington, a Hickey protegé born in 1966, whose chromatic work draws on Gene Davis. Bavington will be featured in his third solo exhibition at Chelsea’s Jack Shainman Gallery in September.

Finally, a note about time, and an artist who bends it. Born in Little Italy, New York, in 1917, Nicolas Carone is a second-generation Ab-Ex painter who studied with Hans Hofmann, knew Frank Sinatra, and introduced Cy Twombly, Joseph Cornell, and Robert Rauschenberg to the Stable Gallery, where he once worked. For twenty-five years, beginning in 1964, Carone taught at the New York Studio School. He later established his own painting school in Italy. Yet from 1962 to 1999, Carone largely kept his own developing art from public view. Now in his nineties, he is back with extraordinary fresh, youthful work. Mixed in with examples from the 1950s, Carone’s latest work is now on view at Lohin Geduld Gallery.[3]

A one-time representational painter, Carone is imbued with the history of classical art. In his sculpture, a few examples of which are on display in this show, he takes Italian stones and carves them into lost relics, bits of travertine figures rubbed and worn as though excavated from the bottom of the Tiber. The tactile crudity calls to mind the late sculptures of Elie Nadelman. Carone’s paintings similarly alternate between figural composition and abstract design, where the human form emerges and disappears from view. The best work here is almost entirely abstract. Carone’s line dips and curves without embellishment, carving out hints of the figure and moving with its own energy across the surface. Where Carone has rubbed out some areas of pigment, the line appears to dive beneath the picture plane. Ranging from classical painting to de Kooning, Carone’s diverse artistic influences emerge and disappear from view just like the figures in his compositions.

At Lohin Geduld there is the sense of encountering an emerging Abstract Expressionist artist for the first time. Like his lost Roman statues, his Old Master compositions, and his abstract designs, Carone is an anachronism and a thoroughly contemporary artist all over again.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “Color Exchange: Berlin–New York” was on view at Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, New York from March 27 through April 26, 2009. Go back to the text.
2. “James Little: De-Classified” opened at June Kelly Gallery, New York, on May 7 and remains on view through June 9, 2009. Go back to the text.
3. “Nicolas Carone: Abstraction/Figuration: Works on Paper” opened at Lohin Geduld Gallery, New York, on April 30 and remains on view through June 6, 2009. Go back to the text.

Some Like It Haute

PSYCOLOGY TODAY
May-June 2009

'Some Like it Haute'
by Adelle Waldman

Beyond hard-edged

James Little, When Aaron Tied Ruth (2008), Oil and wax on canvas, 72 ½ x 94 inches

James writes:

In May 2005 I wrote about an exhibition that stopped me in my tracks. The show was called “Raising the Bar” at Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg, Queens, with paintings by Thornton Willis and James Little.

Stop the presses! Hold that headline! Run a retraction! All of two pages ago I doubted whether painting would ever be “back.” But yes, Virginia. Painting is Back. At the Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg, “Thornton Willis and James Little: Raising the Bar” has become the sleeper hit of the season, with a run extended now into May. I caught these two painterly statesmen just hours before deadline. With richly brushed surfaces of oils and wax, James Little proves that not all hard edge is created equal: the vibrating colors and racing lines of Exit Strategy (2004) dazzle the eye. Thornton Willis, meanwhile, has worked through Minimalism and Cubism since the 1970s to arrive at a totemic synthetic of modern painting. Dog Fight (2002), my favorite piece of the show, even evinces Beckmann. Willis builds up heaping layers of Cubist castoffs, drafting marks, and colored planes. Little lures us in with sensuous surfaces of silk and quicksand, and colors as sharp as needles. The two play perfectly together—a double-stroke engine in paint and a humming dynamo of potential.

Readers of this space will be aware of my continued interest in Willis, who recently finished a second solo show at Elizabeth Harris Gallery. Now James Little is back with his own solo exhibition at June Kelley gallery in Soho. I went to the opening last night and will have more to say about it in my next gallery chronicle. Little’s treatment of surface is unique. He builds up his painting surfaces with twenty coats of encaustic, a combination of pigment and wax that he formulates and brushes on at high temperature. No mere masking-tape hard-edger, Little needs to be seen in person. His exhibition will be on view through June 7.

Gallery chronicle (May 2009)

Pablo Picasso, Portrait de l’homme à l’épée et à la fleur (1969) © P.A.R. Photo by Marc Domage

THE NEW CRITERION
MAY 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

Stop the presses: the Gagosian Gallery has put on the best gallery show of the season, maybe the year. How could it be that this gallery, which for years epitomized the overindulgences of contemporary art, has mounted “Picasso: Mosqueteros”?[1] I shall discuss this momentarily. But first the show. This large exhibition in Chelsea of the paintings and prints of late Picasso is breathtaking. The Picasso biographer John Richardson has selected and arranged the work in the gallery himself. Many of the best paintings come from the collection of Picasso’s heir Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. The gallery has published a sumptuous catalogue with an extensive essay by Richardson on Picasso’s last years at his country estate of Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins, on the French Riviera. (This being Gagosian, there is also a daft essay by the contemporary-art bogeyman Jeff Koons.) For those of us eagerly awaiting the final fourth volume of the Life of Picasso from the eighty-five-year-old Richardson, the catalogue is a tempting treat. But the show itself is the real feast. Here Richardson makes the case for the value of the last years of the artist’s life. As Picasso entered his tenth decade (he died in 1973 at the age of 91), he went into overdrive. His high-performance output “constituted a Great Late Phase,” according to Richardson, “one in which he felt free to do whatever he wanted in whatever way he wanted, regardless of correctness, political, social, or artistic.”

The press has been gushing over the show—and rightly so. It has been twenty-five years since the last (and the first) exhibition of the late paintings of Picasso came to New York. Enough time has passed that it is easy to forget we had many of the same discussions on the revelations of late Picasso a quarter of a century ago. Late Picasso is forever being rediscovered.

The 1984 Guggenheim show, organized by Gret Schiff and originally booked for the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, almost never saw the light of day. There was limited interest in the subject. A 1973 exhibition on late Picasso at the Palace of the Popes in Avignon was a summer flop. Robert Hughes called it “more process than product.” He also slammed the show with a one-line dismissal: “Picasso appeared to have spent his dotage at a costume party in a whorehouse.” The 1980s gave late Picasso a warmer welcome. During his lifetime, people had been “incinerated in the furnace of Picasso’s psyche,” as Richardson describes it. A decade after his death, the feminist reaction to the superman artist, following the 1964 publication of Françoise Gilot’s tell-all book Life with Picasso, had dissipated. Tastes were also changing. The bloom was off the rose of high abstraction. Picasso always “loathed” abstraction, according to Richardson. “He never painted an abstract painting and he wanted to make his painting even more representative.” By the 1980s the manic representational brushwork of Picasso’s fast and furious final years came to be seen as the harbinger of neo-expressionism.

In March 1984, Jed Perl wrote a definitive essay on the subject of late Picasso in these pages, titled “Picasso’s finale.” “In the 1950s,” he wrote, “Picasso seemed an old hedonist fading away in the glare of the Mediterranean sun. The work of the last five years reveals a very different man: the wisest bacchant of them all.” Hughes remained circumspect: “No exhibition in memory has been so full of eyes (or of anuses and genitals, his other fetish objects)… . Picasso’s last decade contains little that can compare with his work in the 30 years after 1907, when his transformation not only of modernist style but of the very possibilities of painting was so vast in scope, deep in feeling and authoritative in its intensity.” Both critics came to agree with André Malraux’s understanding of the artist in Picasso’s Mask (the title of Malraux’s 1974 book). “I must absolutely find the mask,” Picasso told Malraux.

The raffish cast of characters in Picasso’s final paintings represents the artist’s masked personae, avatars of his artistic ego and totems against death, a fifty-two-painting deck of death cards shuffled through the history of art. With his voluminous output, Picasso tried to deal every possible hand to the hangman. He was “so frightened of death—you could never mention his will to him,” says Richardson. Following surgery in the spring of 1966, Picasso never took a day off from painting, drawing, or printmaking. He constructed two additional studios at Notre-Dame-de-Vie to accommodate his production. In the last three years of his life alone, Picasso may have painted up to four hundred paintings. Richardson has discovered that around his ninetieth birthday Picasso painted six huge paintings in less than one week. The final years represented “an amazing burst of volcanic energy. He wanted to somehow assimilate the whole Western figurative tradition and Picassify it.”

The great relief comes from how Picasso chose to Picassify his own late work. Picasso’s bull-and-anus motif had grown tedious. His over-sexualization of the visual world had become a cartoon-like cliché, one urinal scrawl after another. The parade of battered wives in his portraits was also growing dreary, as Picasso himself came to recognize. Today’s blond beauty, everyone knew, would become tomorrow’s succubus, a vagina-dentata gorgon forever gnawing at Picasso’s pathetically vulnerable Andalusian arch masculinity. His daughter Paloma once remarked that “people were happy to be consumed by him. They thought it was a privilege.” Maybe so, but it grew increasingly unappetizing to watch Picasso consume his cannibalistic meals. He was that child-Titan forever licking his chops and showing his plate cleaned of limbs and noses.

The final years took a different turn. As Picasso became more housebound in Notre-Dame-de-Vie, he introduced new and various forms of visual stimulation. He projected Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, featuring the Amsterdam musketeers (the “Mosqueteros” of the Gagosian title), on his studio wall. He was a movie buff. He watched television. Picasso turned his attention away from reality, his personal sexual reality, reality as filtered through cubism and expressionism, and focused on these new influences. Rather than devour the lives around him, he began to chew on the more palatable (palettable?) legacies of Rembrandt, Velásquez, Goya, El Greco, and van Gogh.

Kenneth Clark has described a major artist like Picasso, burning through his final stage, as someone who paints in an “unholy rage.” On the surface, Picasso appeared to do just that. His furious production at Gagosian seems simply mad. But the show ends up oddly apollonian. Picasso was attempting to scare off death while at the same time diligently preparing the decor for his own pharaonic tomb. Compared to his earlier work, there is less visceral rage in these final paintings and more consistent energy. The Gagosian paintings are mainly enormous playing-card portraits of kings, jacks, and jokers popping up in a roll call of stock art-historical characters. The show is an Old Master museum hall perceived through Picasso-colored glasses.

“How could these unashamedly outrageous paintings,” Richardson asks, “with their farcical irony, their caricatural baroquerie, their glut of genitals, their science-fiction time warp and subversive black comedy, be reconciled to the accepted precepts of art history?” The answer is that these conservative paintings are pure art history, a survey course by the aging don offered up in titles like the Dutch-figured Tête d’homme du 17^ème siècle de face (1967).

The show begins with Femme assise dans un fauteuil (1962). This turns out to be a straight portrait of Picasso’s mistress Jacqueline, the only one of its kind in the show. It is the earliest and most real work on view—different in a different way from the rest of the paintings. (The remaining exhibition is different in much the same way.) Portrait de l’homme à l’épée et à la fleur (1969) is a later standout, an interpretation of a Velásquez dwarf-portrait but here masked and wearing a flower in his hair (which Richardson believes to be a reference to hippie fashion).

Now for a word about the venue. Look closely at the provenance of one of the paintings and you will notice that Homme à la pipe (1968) is on loan from the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Collection. These are the same Cohens who put Damien Hirst’s shark in the Metropolitan Museum. They are collectors who have themselves become poster children for the overinflation of interest in terrible contemporary work. Their guide on this journey has been the gallery owner Larry Gagosian. In his catalogue essay, Gagosian writes, “The opportunity to present Picasso’s work in a contemporary gallery such as ours epitomizes just how relevant and thought-provoking his work continues to be today.” With seven high-profile galleries around the globe, Gagosian has an imperial understanding of promising markets, and he knows how to occupy them. He has applied his Midas touch to some of the most undeserving artists of our times. Late Picasso, far from undeserving, fits his bill of sale as well. The late period offers up a clutch of available work of similar quality by a name-brand artist, allowing for an inflation of comparable prices. So long as this translates into scholarly exhibitions free of charge, more power to him.

Finally, a word about an upcoming show in Connecticut.[2] The classical realist Edward Minoff has done for the seascape what Jacob Collins has accomplished with the figure. A former graffiti artist and professional cartoonist who has dedicated his life to classical art after meeting Collins in the late 1990s, Minoff has become a master of the breaking wave and an authority on the rolling surf. In his paintings, green translucent waves perfectly curl up in arcs and dips and ripples. Minoff grew up observing the beach at Fire Island, Long Island and continues to make his studies there: topographical studies of water and wind, color studies of misty sunlight at dawn, compositional studies of ideal moments of flood. He never works from photographs, one of the precepts of Collins’s schools and something that separates the work from photo-realism.

Until now Minoff has worked small, perfecting his seascapes over five years in jewel-like horizontal compositions. Starting last October, Minoff determined to take on a more epic seascape composition in the manner of Collins’s “Eastholm Project,” which I wrote about in June 2008. Along with several smaller paintings, including some poetic moonscapes, Minoff will be unveiling his eight-foot-wide painting, Waves, at Cavalier Galleries in Greenwich this month. I recently paid a studio visit to see Minoff apply the finishing touches. With his growing ambition and focused talent, Minoff is an artist to watch and enjoy.

 

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “Picasso: Mosqueteros” opened at Gagosian Gallery, West 21st Street, New York, on March 26 and remains on view through June 6, 2009. Go back to the text.
2. “Edward Minoff” will be on view at Cavalier Galleries, Greenwich, Connecticut, from May 14 through May 28, 2009. Go back to the text.

Montclair responds

James writes:

Lora Urbanelli, the director of the Montclair Museum, appeared on WNYC today along with Arnold Lehman of the Brooklyn Museum to discuss their institutions' responses to the economic downturn. While we wait for the audiocast of this interview to be posted online, Urbanelli's appearance gives us another chance to review her letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal that appeared last Thursday:

In"Another Art Museum Puts Its Collection on the Block" (Leisure & Arts, April 15), James Panero engages in a serious discussion of the nature of deaccessioning and the responsibility that museums have to their communities to uphold their trust. The Montclair Art Museum's collection policy and plans came under review and he takes issue with our decision to deaccession selected items from our collection during a time of financial crisis. This is indeed a complex and topical issue that no museum undertakes lightly.

After a careful and strategic review of its operations and finances, the Montclair Art Museum has announced a comprehensive plan, of which deaccessioning is a part, addressing both short-term and long-term needs. The full description of this plan may be found on our Web site: montclairartmuseum.org. The deaccessioning component of the plan, part of a long-term strategy in place for many years, attempts to identify items that are duplicative, of lesser quality than objects already in our collection by the same artist, or are not consistent with the collecting mission of the museum. This effort will help to build our endowment for the future purchase of works of art.

Deaccessioning for acquisition funds, linked with the pressures put on our endowment by the market, has certainly created a complicated combination of circumstances. Nonetheless, our actions were undertaken after consulting with the president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. We are and have been following policy and conducting these transactions in a completely transparent manner.

Our responsibility is to ensure that the Montclair Art Museum's dedication to Native American and American art and culture can be served through new acquisitions, while assuring its ability to mount inspiring exhibitions and provide educational programs over the long term.

Lora Urbanelli

A "serious discussion"? A "complicated combination of circumstances"? It is reassuring to see that Urbanelli has taken more away from my article than certain online critics (here and here). These critics have merely nitpicked the details of the story rather than discuss the issues and implications of the case. But as I've already written, I forgive them. Professional jealousies keep this story in the spotlight.

Which brings me to Urbanelli. From my first conversation with her, which was courteous and high-minded, to the Journal letter, Urbanelli has been up front about the financial contingencies behind her deaccession. Urbanelli says she wants to be "transparent." This deaccession was first announced by Montclair, let's remember, in what the museum called a "financial security plan." Urbanelli justifies the sales by claiming that she is operating within the guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), the peer-review organization that advises museum propriety. True enough. As I argued in my initial Journal editorial, AAMD's signoff, by allowing a permanent collection to be liquidated for financial considerations, reveals a fundamental flaw in museum governance.

Where Urbanelli has been less than transparent, I believe, has been in her claim that the sales are primarily a result of curatorial housekeeping with only ancillary financial benefits. "The deaccessioning component of the plan," she writes, "part of a long-term strategy in place for many years, attempts to identify items that are duplicative, of lesser quality than objects already in our collection by the same artist, or are not consistent with the collecting mission of the museum."

So long as AAMD allows art acquisition funds--generated from sales--to serve double duty as banking instruments, all museums sales must be questioned. For the Montclair sales, I have expressed my doubts that their cull has been the result of pure curatorial decision-making, done outside of financial concerns. (The financial temptations of deaccession should be regulated away, argues former Whitney and SFMOMA director David Ross, and I agree.)

From my initial investigation I noticed that certain items in the Montclair sales appear in a book of highlights published by the museum--a strange place to see "duplicative" objects or works of "lesser quality." Now the blogger Lee Rosenbaum has gone the extra step of following through on more of the specific works up for auction. The results are even more alarming. Take a look at Rosenbaum's excellent reporting here and here. Rosenbaum undercuts Urbanelli's high-ground claims and casts the Montclair sales in further ignominy.

Why should this concern us? Because as I wrote in my Journal editorial, deaccessioning for financial gain addresses a short-run problem at the expense of the long-term public trust.

Hard edged in Brooklyn

Gabriele Evertz, Red + the Spectrum (2008) 

James writes:

Lately I have become interested in contemporary abstract painters who make abstraction the subject of their work. These artists, often through variations of hard-edged color contrasts, do more than merely "abstract" the visible world. They concern themselves with pushing abstraction's formal potential. Thornton Willis, one of these artists, just completed his latest run at Elizabeth Harris Gallery; I wrote the catalogue essay for the show (and participated in a video profile of the artist). James Little will open at June Kelly in Chelsea on May 7. Consider my calendar marked.

This past month, a four-person exhibition called "Color Exchange: Berlin/New York" has been on view at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. This will be the show's final weekend. Catch it if you can.

I went to Metaphor to see the work of the Berlin-born Gabriele Evertz, a scholar of color and line. The three other painters in this show, all accomplished, use abstraction for its allusive depth: Julian Jackson makes cinematic flashes and gauzy colored landscapes; Susanne Jung offers up austere monochromes that read like blizzard whiteouts, Gabriele Schade-Hasenberg builds up glazed surfaces that obscure secrets beneath. Evertz's work, however, operates entirely on the surface through an interplay of dominant and recessive colors and the width and angle of lines. It reaches out, rather than pulling you in. Seen in person these paintings come alive through intense harmonic disturbances. Evertz pushes color's potential in new and interesting ways. I've never encountered anything quite like it. The term "Op Art" would not do it justice. Her Red and the Spectrum (2008), five feet square and the largest work in the show, is a sublime visual terror (you can see what it looks like above, but be aware that this painting's optical effects do not work in reproduction). This user-driven art is activated entirely by the sense of sight, and supremely accomplished. It deserves to be seen in person.

Responding to the Montclair critics

James writes:

Over the weekend, the former director of the Whitney Museum, David Ross, published a letter in the Wall Street Journal seeking to apply the lessons of my Montclair editorial to the rulebook for all museums:

Museums will lose the public trust if they evolve into vehicles for holding long-term assets until they are needed for the purposes of loan repayment or assessments of credit-worthiness. In fact, lenders and bondholders should be prohibited by law from accepting acquisition-specific endowments as security in any form. That would take the idea of misusing collections off the boardroom table, and would go some distance toward securing these collections for future generations.

That's good advice. But alas, it looks like not everyone got Ross's memo.

The art critic for the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Knight, usually sound on the issue of deaccession, had a momentary lapse of reason over my editorial. In a blog posting called "Bada bing: A hit job on a New Jersey art Museum?," Knight claimed that his "eyes bugged out" after reading my editorial "five or six times now."

First off, let me review the charge that my article was a "hit job." Knight claims to have "fact-checked" my story and found it "strictly circumstantial," but it seems that he did little more than pick up the telephone in California and make a long-distance call to representatives of the museum. Well, I talked to the museum representatives at length too, but I also visited the museum on several occasions, obtained the Christie's sales prospectus, and interviewed sources close to the museum both on and off the record. For example, I have it on good authority that the museum's deacessioning campaign has increased by ten times in the past six months. I also have sources knowledgeable of the museum's collection who have questioned the purported redundancy of key works in the sale (certain works even appear in the museum's published book of highlights from its collection).

This deaccession therefore did not strike me as wholly the product of a careful and deliberative process. It needs to be examined more closely under the light of day, which was the purpose (and I am happy to say, the result) of my editorial. Unlike Knight, who seems to care about little more than attacking a journalist's reputation (I notice he goes about collecting only the evidence he wants to hear), I have an affection for the Montclair Museum and the art inside it. I've done the heavy lifting to find out what's happening at the institution. Why would I take out a "hit job" on a museum I care about?

In fact, the only "hit job" is the one Knight decided to take out on me. I can't say why he did it, nor do I really care. By identifying me in his first paragraph as the managing editor of "the conservative culture magazine the New Criterion," as though this were relevant to the facts of the case, I can only assume that Knight had his feelings hurt by Hilton Kramer twenty years ago and now I'm paying for it. As long as he spells my name right, I appreciate the attention, but I am concerned that Knight's attempted rub out will distract us from the real subject at hand: the future of a small New Jersey Museum with an important permanent collection, and the implication of its actions on the stewardship of art in the public trust across the country. So let's step out of the henhouse for a moment and out of earshot of tongue-clucking bloggers like Tyler Green and review the facts of the case.

Knight says he read my article "five or six times." If he doesn't want to try a seventh, let me help him understand my editorial—I expect we are in agreement on most of the key points:

1) recent deaccessioning campaigns at several museums have betrayed the public trust. I discuss this not to reveal some "nefarious plot," but to put the Montclair story in context. In a general interest publication such as The Wall Street Journal, such a discussion is not "boilerplate," but exposition.

2) The Montclair art museum is engaging in a deaccessioning campaign. Since other campaigns at other museums haven't always gone well, let's therefore look at this case closely.

3) Well, as it turns out, this campaign is being done (in whole on in part—the ethics of the case are still the same) in order to back the museum's bonds.

4) In fact, when pressed, the Montclair museum director is upfront about this contingency. She defends her actions by claiming that the peer-reviewed organization AAMD has no problem with the sales.

5) Now this raises a greater question--if museums are forbidden from collateralizing their bonds with the art on their walls, is it appropriate that they should be able to sell the art and use the proceeds to back their bonds?

Knight writes that "opinions are nice, but they're better when built atop some reported facts." My editorial had both. Let's move on from quibbling and have a substantive discussion about the opinions I expressed and the issues I raised. Let's also help deaccession dissenters like the former Montclair trustee Cherry Provost have their day in the court of public opinion. David Ross got it right.

Another museum puts its collection on the block

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 15, 2009

Another Museum Puts Its Collection on the Block
by James Panero

Another day, another deaccession. On March 23, after a "strategic review of its operations and capitalizations," the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, N.J., announced a new "financial security plan." In what has become an all-too-common practice in the art world, this plan will include the sale, or "deaccession," of 50 works from the museum's permanent collection, among them a Jackson Pollock drawing valued at $300,000 to $500,000 and several Hudson River School and American Impressionist works with estimates ranging from $25,000 to $300,000, according to a prospectus prepared by Christie's. The auction house believes the sales will generate between $2.9 million and $4.3 million for the institution, which says it will use the funds for future acquisitions. Presented as curatorial housekeeping, but in fact motivated by financial exigencies, the Montclair sales -- if allowed to proceed -- will set another sorry example of an institution cashing out on art in the public trust.

p>Opened in 1914, the small, neoclassical Montclair Art Museum has long boasted an impressive collection of American art, with a sizable selection of work by Hudson River School painter George Inness, who settled in the town at the end of the 19th century. The museum has also acquired and displayed a large collection of Native American art and mounted critically acclaimed exhibitions. A show exploring the influence of Cézanne on American art, 10 years in the making, is scheduled to open this September. An exhibition of Wyeth-family paintings is now on view.

In the stewardship of its permanent collection, however, Montclair has left a more questionable legacy. The museum has often treated its record of local philanthropy as trade-in art. Nobody knows this better than Cherry Provost, a former trustee who grew up in the shadow of this suburban museum and still serves on the art committee.

"I've said it repeatedly: A museum is not a private collection," she maintains. Over the years, her words fell on deaf ears as the museum sold off one part of its collection after another. "We had a snuff bottle collection of the first order," Mrs. Provost says. "I tried to save it. We also had a fabulous collection of early American and English silver -- to die for! And we had some lovely sideboards. Really good American antiques. And it was wonderful to have a sideboard. Well, the sideboard went."

That wasn't all. This past January, the museum shipped off its 6,000-volume art library as a gift to a local college, Montclair State University -- one of its many emergency actions, which include layoffs and reduced business hours, designed to shore up expenses. The museum says it also plans to sell its costume and rug collections and is determining what to do with its sizable Native American holdings.

By narrowing or "refining" a collection through deaccession, a museum can perform a valuable function. It can free up from storage work that may be second-rate or repetitive and return it to the marketplace, there to be purchased by an individual or institution that could make better use of it. A museum can furthermore raise money in a restricted endowment from the sale, to be used for the purchase of art that might better serve its mission. Peer-review organizations such as the Association of Art Museum Directors issue guidelines that define such acceptable practices. The AAMD also forbids museums from using the sale of art in their permanent collections to pay for general operating expenses or to underwrite loans with the art on the walls. Such rules are designed to prevent museums from treating their art collections as ATM machines, sources for fast money that should have been raised and managed in other ways.

Even before the economic downturn, however, museums had been finding ways around AAMD in a power struggle between directors and trustees, who want to unlock the value of their collections, and the museum-going public, which feels betrayed by the institutions that are designed to preserve and honor donations.

Museums have claimed, for example, that the art in their permanent collections suddenly does not fit their mission statements, even if the work has been on display for generations. Museums have decided that certain works of art are of secondary importance because they are rarely shown, although this record of exhibition may merely reflect the taste of the curators. Museums have also declared themselves to be schools or libraries, not bound by the rules of AAMD. As permanent collections have been put up for sale, the auction houses, of course, have only profited from the row.

In 2006 the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., sold $68 million of its collection of older art in order to raise its endowment for contemporary work, claiming the older art did not fit its mission statement. In December the National Academy Museum in New York sold two valuable Hudson River School paintings to fill a budget gap, proclaiming its primary status as an art school. In a case earlier this year that attracted national attention, the trustees of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., announced plans to shut down the school's Rose Art Museum and sell off the entire collection to raise general revenue. Legislation now under consideration in New York state would codify AAMD's most basic recommendations into law, allowing for the possibility of greater enforcement.

On Nov. 20, 2008, the Association of American Museums issued a statement designed to protect our nation's permanent collections in times of crisis: "There is increasing pressure on museums to capitalize their collections and to use them as collateral for financial loans to the museum. The AAM Code of Ethics for Museums requires that collections be 'unencumbered,' which means that the collections cannot be used as collateral for a loan."

Yet while museums are forbidden from "capitalizing" their collections, or using the value of their art as collateral for a loan, nothing in the AAM or AAMD rules explicitly prevents museums from selling their art along certain subjective guidelines, earmarking that revenue for future acquisitions, and then using the endowment money raised from the sales to back their loans. In both cases, art in the permanent collection has been capitalized. By taking the extra step of selling the art first, however, museums avoid the censure of AAMD while still underwriting loans that may go to general operating expenses or the next vanity expansion project.

This dangerous gap in the guidelines -- one that puts our nation's permanent collections at risk -- the Montclair Art Museum now plans to exploit. In 2001, the museum undertook a massive $14.5 million expansion that more than doubled its size and saddled it with debt. Now, as its overall endowment has dipped 25%, to $6 million from $8 million, the museum risks not having enough cash on hand to back its loans. That's where this deaccession comes in -- to raise cash to satisfy the requirements of its bank bonds. What's most troubling is that nothing on the books is designed to stop it, even though Montclair is liquidating art in its permanent collection to raise the aggregate collateral for its loans -- precisely what AAMD claims to oppose.

In an interview, Lora Urbanelli, the new director of the Montclair Museum and a member of AAMD, is upfront about the exigencies of her deaccession: "We took out tax exempt bonds at a certain time in our history. And when you do that -- we are diligently paying them off -- but whenever you do that, as part of the agreement, you agree to have a certain amount on hand in an endowment fund. At times when our endowment is flagging, we go below that line. So this is a creative way to keep the endowment full and to stay above the water line to grow our endowment for acquisitions -- just so we are in the good graces with the bond covenants. All the bank wants to know is that the endowment is a healthy one for the size of the institution. There's nothing untoward. There is nothing to hide. The deaccessioning that we're about to do has been more or less in the works for years. What we're doing now is considering an acceleration of a process. . . . The AAMD sees no problem with the way we are handling this situation."

Ms. Urbanelli presents her deaccession as a convenient way to solve her museum's financial problems. AAMD may never have anticipated this particular case of cash for art, but Montclair is nevertheless overstepping a more basic tenet of ethical conduct. The "decision to deaccession a work of art," according to AAMD, "should not be made in reaction to the exigencies of a particular moment."

The exigencies in the Montclair care are reason alone to question the sales, not to "accelerate the process," as Ms. Urbanelli maintains. If allowed to proceed, a museum will have found another way to monetize its collection without consequence, exposing another failure in the way our arts institutions police themselves. "I'm not saying every one of those paintings is a masterpiece," Mrs. Provost, the former Montclair trustee, notes of the auction, "but I've been involved with voting a lot of those paintings in. And there's a reason for every painting." As one museum after another announces deaccession plans as done deals -- "accelerations of a process" that take advantage of lax regulations -- patrons such as Mrs. Provost are right to become concerned. Montclair gives us another reason to worry about a future of art in the public mistrust.

Unsentimental Education

ART & ANTIQUES
April 2009

Unsentimental Education
by James Panero

Brandeis University’s plan to deaccession its entire art museum causes a furor.

Brandeis The students of Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., have been enrolled in a crash course in museum ethics and the realities of the art market. On Jan. 26 the trustees voted unanimously to sell the permanent collection of the school's 48-year-old Rose Art Museum, which houses one of the finest collections of modern and contemporary art in New England, valued in 2006 at about $350 million.

Brandeis is facing financial difficulties—its endowment dropped from $712 million to $540 million in six months and several of the university's top supporters were victims of Bernard Madoff. Against the wishes of the museum's director, Michael Rush, and his board of advisers, the trustees identified what they thought would be a valuable and easily liquidated asset that was not essential to the university's core mission of education. "We don't want to be in the public museum business," explained president Jehuda Reinharz to The Boston Globe.

Since the Rose has functioned for nearly five decades as a teaching museum deeply integrated into the school's curriculum, Reinharz's critics have wondered out loud whether Brandeis intends to remain in the education business at all. "If Brandeis stands by its mission statement... then the Rose Art Museum is as important to the school as its library," wrote three high-profile curators who are Brandeis alums--the Nasher Museum's Kimberly Rorschach, the Metropolitan Museum's Gary Tinterow and the Whitney's Adam Weinberg--in an open letter to the university.

"Art cannot be treated as a liquid asset," says Rush. "History will record this as a desperate action that flies in the face of all intellectual and ethical standards." It would also be another alarming reminder to donors and patrons that museums can no longer be trusted as stewards of their own permanent collections.

Reinharz has attempted to weather the massive public relations backlash by admitting that he mishandled the announcement and by assuring his faculty and student body that there is no time-table for the sale of the art.

In the current economic climate, many observers have wondered if the proposed sale even makes economic sense, especially considering that most of the works are postwar and contemporary. At the top of the market, a few of the Rose's prime pieces--Andy Warhol's 1964 Saturday Disaster, Roy Lichtenstein's 1962 Forget It! Forget Me! and Robert Rauschenberg's 1961 Second Time--could have fetched tens of millions each.

Would a Rose sale realize much less than the 2006 valuation and adversely affect established price benchmarks? Not necessarily, says dealer Richard Feigen. "If the quality is what I think it is, particularly with that provenance, then it won't adversely affect the market. The whole art market hasn't turned down just for certain trendy contemporary art," he says. "Prices are still very high for things that are fresh to the market, like the Brandeis collection would be. There's money out there looking for a place to park and doesn't know where to go."

Yet even if Brandeis manages to cash in on its permanent collection, Feigen cautions, the damage to the institution would be just as permanent. "Were I a trustee I would be opposed to this. The museum is part of the character of the university and the fabric of patronage in this country. The paintings won't be recoverable, nor will Brandeis be able to recover its reputation."