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Van Meegeren on trial (Getty images)
Why do people believe in imaginary returns, frauds and fakes?
Bernard Madoff, A.I.G. , W.M.D.’s … How did this happen? Do we believe things because it is in our self-interest? Or is it because we can be manipulated by others? And, if so, under what circumstances?
Last year, two different books on that subject appeared within months of each other. Not only did both tackle the question of fakery, they were both about the same man: Han van Meegeren, arguably the most successful art forger of all time. Edward Dolnick’s “The Forger’s Spell” was released first (Edward Dolnick’s wife is on the board of The New York Times Company), followed by Jonathan Lopez’s “The Man Who Made Vermeers.” The titles provide a clue to the different goals of the authors — Dolnick’s interest in the nature of the trickery, the spell that Van Meegeren cast; Lopez’s interest in the nature of the man who did the tricking, the man who cast the spell.
There is something compelling about two people writing about the same man at the same time, as if the authors themselves might be doppelgangers, or at least mirrored two aspects of Van Meegeren’s biography.
Both books begin on May 29, 1945. Shortly after the liberation of Holland, Han van Meegeren, a painter and art dealer living in Amsterdam was arrested for collaboration with the Third Reich. He was accused among other things of having sold a Vermeer to Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring — essentially of having plundered the patrimony of his homeland for his own benefit and the benefit of the Nazis. To save his skin — the penalty for collaborating was imprisonment or hanging — Van Meegeren revealed that the painting sold to Göring and many other paintings that he had sold as works of the Dutch masters were forgeries. He had painted all of them.
On July 21, 1945, The Times weighed in on the story: “Authenticity of Several Paintings Sold as Vermeers Is Questioned”.
The authenticity of several paintings introduced to the public as newly discovered works of Jan Vermeer, seventeenth century Dutch master, is in question and the case has become a national sensation in England. Originally many of these paintings were introduced to the public by Hans van Meegeren (sic), modern Dutch painter. Soon after the liberation of the Netherlands Van Meegeren was arrested for collaboration with the Germans and is now in prison awaiting trial. The press agency Anepaneta, which operates as a government mouthpiece, asserted a few days ago that Van Meegeren had made a statement that he himself painted the supposed Vermeers… Art experts say they are not convinced that the statements attributed to Van Meegeren are true. The director of the Rotterdam Museum said the prisoner was a fantasist who had a grudge against museums and similar institutions. A painting restorer in The Hague said that if one of the disputed works which he transferred to new canvas recently, “Pilgrims to Emmaus” [“Supper at Emmaus”] was indeed a forgery, then the painter must be considered a genius in that particular line.
“A genius in that particular line.” But what “particular line” is this? If the painting was indeed a forgery, then must the painter be considered a genius? Incredulity followed by skepticism. The Times article continued:
“If the rumors prove to be true,” the newspaper ["Volkskrant"] said, “then the best experts and completely reputable persons have been the dupes of a deception which was fashioned with unparalleled skill and in which, besides the forger himself, many middlemen must have taken part…” Van Meegeren and other major figures in the Netherlands charged with collaboration have yet to be brought to trial.
Van Meegeren was one of the “major figures in the Netherlands charged with collaboration.”
Time magazine was more forthright in their appraisal. In an account dated just 10 days after the Times article (Time, July 30, 1945), Van Meegeren is unambiguously described as a “Dutch Nazi.”
When the exquisite Christ at Emmaus was found in the linen closet of a Paris house (TIME, Sept. 19, 1938) it was one of the big art stories of the decade… Last week, a Dutch Nazi confessed that he had painted the “Vermeer” himself — and, what’s more, had knocked off six others, plus two Pieter de Hooches for good measure… The master picture-forger was one Hans van Meegeren, a little-known Dutch artist. Although he worshiped Adolf Hitler, he felt no compunction about unloading a fake on fellow Nazi Hermann Göring. Göring got Christ and the Adulteress in a trade for 173 paintings… Some Dutch art experts, who stand to lose considerable prestige over the affair, just plain don’t believe a word of Van Meegeren’s story.
But just what was it that they didn’t believe? Presumably, that he had really painted these “masterpieces” himself. They wanted him to prove it. And so, Van Meegeren was asked to paint yet one more forgery, “Christ in the Temple.” But of course, it really wasn’t a forgery. This time the authorities knew that Van Meegeren was the painter.
Erroll Morris
New York Times
The Stata Center at M.I.T., designed by Frank Gehry (Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Associated Press)
When architects cannot erect they write, and thus we can expect an imminent increase in publications by underemployed practitioners of the building art. However, good times or bad, producing books has been mandatory for architects ever since the modernist masters (and masterly self-publicists) Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier committed their ideas as well as their plans to print.
Frank Gehry, the most acclaimed American architect since Wright, is not a natural-born writer. To satisfy the considerable demand for personal explications of his work, Gehry, who turned 80 in February, has avoided the agony of authorship and cooperated with several interviewers on transcribed texts during the past decade. The best of them — the architectural historian Kurt Forster’s “Frank O. Gehry/Kurt W. Forster” and the curator Mildred Friedman’s “Gehry Talks” (both released in 1999) — contain valuable insights into the subject’s idiosyncratic approach to a profession he has recast as an experimental art form and advanced as a technical discipline.
Barbara Isenberg’s “Conversations With Frank Gehry” is the latest attempt to elicit the essence of his creative method in his own words. Isenberg, a Los Angeles-based writer on the arts, exhibits neither Forster’s intellectual sheen nor Friedman’s comprehensive expertise, but nonetheless offers worthwhile new information for architecture devotees and an engaging introduction for general readers.
Doubtless eager to remain in her subject’s good graces, Isenberg poses few questions of the confrontational sort that wise interrogators withhold until the end of a session, lest they be shown the door. For example, from her upbeat recapitulation of Gehry’s Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn — a large-scale mixed-use urban redevelopment centered on a professional basketball arena — you’d never know that the scheme has aroused heated opposition from community groups and planning experts, or that its future is imperiled by the current economic crisis.
Isenberg is no Oriana Fallaci, that fearless guerrilla of take-no-prisoners Q. and A., but she occasionally goads her subject into revealing responses. For example, Gehry (né Goldberg) is vexed by her query about his adopted surname. He defensively counters that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn also assumed new nomenclature, and wonders, “Why are people so interested in the name change?” — an odd complaint from the biggest name in contemporary architecture.
Until the stupendous success of Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao — which opened in 1997 and rendered his false modesty preposterous — the architect cultivated the persona of a neurotic bumbler much like Woody Allen. In “Conversations With Frank Gehry,” he finally admits it was just a pose. As he explains, “Architects in New York . . . were kind of attracted to me as long as I was subordinate to them. As soon as I came out with work that got attention, there was kind of a backlash from them. . . . They think I’m an ‘aw shucks’ guy and then I turn out to be every bit as ambitious as they are.”
Martin Filler
New York Times
Embarrassed by our former selves, we often recoil from the art we loved as adolescents. Artists we ardently fall for in our teens are frequently – and sometimes savagely – “dropped” later in life as our tastes become more sophisticated (or so we think).
In literature, such writers as J.D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, and Raymond Carver routinely suffer such a fate, while in art, Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele, and Vincent Van Gogh are perhaps the classic cases.
Francis Bacon, too, belongs in this category. For those who succumbed early to an infatuation with his violent and glamorous work, as I did, the question of whether he is really any good can be as much a test of respect for our former selves, and the special receptiveness of youth, as it is of Bacon himself.
Widely regarded as a – if not the – leading figure in postwar British art, Bacon, who died in 1992, is the subject of a major retrospective here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Over the years, he has been received in America with am bivalence. His first work to enter a public collection was bought by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1948. And the Met made Bacon the first living artist from Britain to be accorded a solo show in 1975.
But many leading US critics, offended, perhaps, by his disdain for abstraction – the idiom that established American ascendancy in art after 1940 – failed to give Bacon the lavish praise he was accorded in Britain and France.
Gary Tinterow, a curator at the Met, suggests another cause. In the catalog for “Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective,” he writes that Bacon’s “overt homosexuality was incompatible with the disguised Puritan and overtly macho ethos of many of his American contemporaries . . . at least until the 1980s” when, he says, feminism and queer studies introduced more sympathetic attitudes.
Tinterow’s claim is as ridiculous as it looks (homosexuality was far from unknown in American art between the 1940s and the 1980s). But it is fair to say that Bacon’s psychological complexity, his combination of intense charm, queeny wit, and instinctive perversity, can seem very British (although he was actually born in Ireland) and, to some American observers, perhaps, alienating.
The Met show, which originated at London’s Tate Britain last year, does not make an open-and-shut case for Bacon’s greatness. It includes too much early work, and too much late work. The early paintings, from 1944 to 1962, which made such a big impression on observers at the time, look histrionic and bloated (big canvases with not much going on). The late ones lack tension, depending on arbitrary mannerisms and sensation-craving effects.
But there are two rooms filled with works of devastating force – and that ought to be enough for anyone.
Part of what makes these works, painted between 1962 and 1976, great is Bacon’s introduction of bright, saturated colors to his carefully designed and fastidiously painted backgrounds.
The early works, including the series of screaming popes that Bacon later dismissed, quite rightly, as “very silly,” tended to set isolated figures in transparent enclosures against black or gray backgrounds, often with vertical striations, vaguely suggestive of veils, prison bars, or the rows of spotlights used as ghostly extensions of architecture at Nazi rallies.
The contrast between the near-monochrome sobriety of this early work and the sumptuousness of the post-1962 colors is extreme. But nowhere in the lamely dutiful introduction to the catalog by curators Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens is color discussed.
Certainly it is strange to think of this supreme painter of human agony and despair as a connoisseur of royal purples, lush spring greens, phallic pinks, perfumed mauves, and commercial oranges. But Bacon was a great colorist who, like Matisse, came to understand the impact that large areas of saturated tints could have.
In paintings like “Lying Figure” (1969), “Triptych – In Memory of George Dyer” (1971), and the Matisse-like nude “Henrietta Moraes” (1966), Bacon set up thrilling tensions between the rectilinear areas of flat, unmodulated color he used for his backgrounds; the liquid, bulging outlines of his figures, which cast shadows like spilled blood; and the scumbled, layered brushstrokes he used to convey flesh.
The commentary on Bacon focuses always on the flesh. Bacon was, after all, a connoisseur of mortality and an avid student of gruesome medical textbooks, scenes of cinematic violence, and photographs of abattoirs. But in his great period, all these elements are splendidly interwoven.
A gambler, Bacon liked to play up his reliance on chance. But his orchestration of all the various elements in his paintings was so carefully controlled that the operations of chance were surely minimal. He began his creative career as a designer of modernist rugs and furniture in the vein of Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, and Eileen Gray, and it’s hard not to see the carefully plotted designs of his later canvases, especially the great triptychs, as vestiges of this period.
Sebastian Smee
Boston Globe
Bacon in 1951, photographed by Cecil Beaton. (Photo: Courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s)
Francis Bacon, whose centenary is being marked by a Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective opening this week, is the Irish-born English artist whom the English consider their Achilles: a truculent hero rising from the turbulence, an outlaw god. Indeed, the first word of Homer’s Iliad comes to mind when thinking about his paintings and tumultuous life: “Rage.”
Those who knew the artist—some of them his friends—described him variously as “devil,” “whore,” “one of the world’s leading alcoholics,” “bilious ogre,” “sacred monster,” and “a drunken, faded sodomite swaying nocturnally through the lowest dives and gambling dens of Soho.” Bacon was no kinder: He called himself a “grinding machine” and “rotten to the core.” This hasn’t stopped admirers and critics alike from proclaiming him “the greatest painter in the world,” “the best … since Turner.” Never one to spare hyperbole, Robert Hughes wrote, “This painter of buggery, sadism, dread, and death-vomit has emerged as the toughest, the most implacable, lyric artist in late-twentieth-century England, perhaps in all the world.”
For me, Bacon—who may be the only artist sharing a name with one of his main subjects, meat—has always been more of a cartoonist. He’s an illustrator of exaggerated, ultimately empty angst. His early accomplishments are undeniable, and the Met’s survey of 66 paintings and a cache of never-before-seen source material is peppered with high points, especially the signature paintings of the forties and fifties: Canvases with twisted masses of faceless flesh and otherworldly homunculi, creatures of the id posed in living-room wastelands and Stygian prisons. The best of this work shrouds you in a sulfuric gloom where strange powers transform human souls into delirious monsters. These paintings make audiences stare as if they were looking at animals in a zoo, trying to come to terms with these merciless inhuman presences. You’ll see this at the Met: people blankly gaping in wonder.
To understand Bacon’s impact, look no further than the young Brits emulating him. Jake and Dinos Chapman place tortured figures in glass cases; Jenny Saville’s contorted Gargantuas are direct descendants of Bacon’s golems; Tracey Emin works with blood and guts; Sarah Lucas gives us spooks and deformities. Damien Hirst not only makes vitrines straight out of Bacon—he puts meat and carcasses in them. Like Dalí and Munch, Bacon is an artist we love when young. Tantalized by the urgency, angst, weirdness, blood, sex, and bodies, we think, That’s me! That’s how I feel!
You might have reconsidered feeling like Bacon if you’d lived in his skin. His love life is a study in emotional privation and degradation. “We are meat,” he often remarked—understandable, given his adolescence. Bacon, who was given morphine as a child for his asthma (the ailment that contributed to his death in 1992), always knew which way his erotic compass pointed, which is not to say that he approved of its inclination: He called his homosexuality “a defect” and a “limp.” And no wonder. When Bacon was 16, his father—the artist derisively called him “a failed horse-trainer”—caught the boy wearing his mother’s underwear. (“Fishnet stockings were an essential part of the artist’s wardrobe for most of his life,” one biographer notes.) As punishment, the father had him horsewhipped by the stable hands, whom, Bacon later claimed, he then had affairs with. Bacon Sr. asked a family friend to “straighten the boy out” by taking him to Berlin. The man complied—and subsequently bedded the younger Bacon, then abandoned him in the city that W. H. Auden called “a bugger’s daydream.”
Endless liaisons with rent boys and society types followed, until Bacon’s predator-prey notion of love and his “desire to suffer” reached new heights, in 1952. At the age of 43, he met a former RAF pilot, Peter Lacy, in London’s Soho. They spent a lot of time in Tangier, a refuge for gay men looking for freedom. “I’d never really fallen in love with anyone until then,” Bacon said. “Of course, it was the most total disaster from the start.” Bacon couldn’t live with or without him: “Being in love in that extreme way,” he said, “being totally obsessed by someone, is like having some dreadful disease. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.” They experimented with the far reaches of S&M. The end was horrid, too. On the day before his first Tate retrospective opened, in May 1962, Bacon learned Lacy had been found dead, almost surely from drinking.
Less than two years later, Bacon met George Dyer—reportedly when Dyer broke into his studio to rob him. For the next seven years the relationship rocketed up and down, then history repeated itself. On October 25, 1971, the day before Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris opened, Dyer overdosed and died in their Paris hotel room. Bacon, then 61, was again devastated. No wonder he talked about “the destruction” of love.
Jerry Saltz
New York Magazine
The great architect Frank Lloyd Wright was hyper-sensitive to the nature of place, like this home built in Wisconsin (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation).
There’s a major new show here at the Guggenheim Museum on the work of America’s greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.
If, like this writer, you’re a Wright fan, there’s tons of stuff to look at. No less than 64 of the master’s buildings are here in the form of drawings, models, photos, even computer simulations. The show is a grandma’s attic of Wrightiania, and you’re sure to be fascinated by stuff you’ve never noticed.
If you’re not such a fan, though, and you don’t already know your way around Wright’s work, I’m afraid this exhibit will seem random, confused, and pointless.
The occasion for the show is a double anniversary. Wright died at 91 in the same year the Guggenheim opened, 50 years ago, in 1959. The museum, one of his most famous creations, has just completed a massive $30 million, three-year renovation.
It must have seemed like a great idea. But an anniversary isn’t an agenda, and this show doesn’t have one. Instead it settles for rehashing every cliché you’ve ever heard about Wright.
Start with the title: “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward.” The idea here is that Wright designed his buildings by first planning the interior spaces, and only then shaping the exterior appearance around them. Well, hey, sure he did that. In some of his early houses, indoor space pinwheels outward from the center, morphing into porches and courtyards and gardens and binding indoors and outdoors into a single harmony.
The problem is, Wright spent most of the 20th century bragging about how he was doing exactly that. This is not an appropriate theme for a new exhibit. It’s an old-fashioned view of an artist who in truth is as relevant today as ever.
I’d rather have seen an exhibit, for instance, titled “Frank Lloyd Wright: Environmentalist.” Wright believed in building from local materials, not from costly stuff shipped halfway around the world as is common today. Often his buildings grow from the trees and rocks of the site they’re built on.
In a world that today is sinking into universal sameness, Wright was hyper-sensitive to the nature of place. He built two houses for himself, both of them in this show. The one in Wisconsin is as different from the one in Arizona as the northern forest is different from the southwestern desert. Each is carefully attuned to the local site and the climate they live in. And the one near Phoenix, Taliesin West, is an especially masterful example of sun control by natural means – surely a lesson for a world that is wasting its energy resources.
The yawn-provoking theme, though, is only the beginning of problems with this exhibit. It’s a poor fit, for example, in the Guggenheim interior, which, of course, consists mainly of one endless sloping curving ramp. The heart of the Wright show consists of drawings, more than 200 of them. These are laid in glass vitrines, sometimes horizontal and sometimes tilted up like an old-fashioned drawing board. Rectangular tables on a curving ramp are awkward and they ignore the museum Wright actually intended. Wright designed the Guggenheim primarily for paintings and sculptures, which would be displayed on the vertical walls of the ramp (and skylit in his original conception). The museum works well when it’s used that way, especially for artists such as Miro, Kandinsky, and Calder who employ bold colors that carry across the space of the atrium and become part of the architecture.
Robert Campbell
Boston Globe
Perfectionism, as a way of life, tends to be self-defeating. New research suggests it may also be deadly.
That’s the conclusion of a Canadian study of senior citizens just published in the Journal of Health Psychology. Researchers conducted psychological tests on 450 elderly residents of southern Alberta, and then kept tabs on them for 6½ years. During that period, just over 30 percent of the subjects, who ranged in age from 65 to 87, died.
Perfectionists — that is, those who expressed “a strong motivation to be perfect” and revealed a tendency toward “all or nothing thinking” — were approximately 51 percent more likely to have died during the life of the study than those with more reasonable self-expectations. Those who were rated high on neuroticism — for instance, those who reported often feeling tense — did even worse: Their risk of death nearly doubled compared with those with a more relaxed disposition.
In contrast, “risk of death was significantly lower for high scorers in conscientiousness, extraversion and optimism,” reports lead author Prem S. Fry, a research psychologist at British Columbia’s Trinity Western University. She notes that previous research has found that “perfectionism exerts a great deal of stress on health,” while optimism “is viewed as a stress-alleviating factor.”
“In short, our findings confirmed that conscientiousness and extraversion are health-related dimensions that are enabling in their effects, and perfectionism and neuroticism are disabling,” she concludes. “It is noteworthy that these associations endure well into late life.”
The findings have interesting implications for seniors’ health care providers and caregivers. They suggest physicians and family members are well-advised to be vigilant in noticing perfectionist tendencies, and understanding of the physical and psychological toll they can take.
The desire to pursue a favorite task or hobby at the same high level one achieved in previous years is very understandable, and in many ways commendable. But at the same time, it’s important to be cognizant of the stress such an effort can produce and the negative health effects that can result.
Tom Jacobs
Miller-McCune
Medieval paintings depicting Thomas Becket’s murder were rediscovered by builders 30 years ago
The paintings in the ruined church of St Nicolas in the Spanish town of Soria tell the story of the murder of the English Archbishop Thomas Becket.
The story of Becket is told in most British classrooms as part of medieval history lessons. He is remembered as the Archbishop of Canterbury who stood up to a king and for his trouble was murdered by the king’s knights while he was praying.
The murder was to turn Becket into a saint. It was also one of the first big showdowns between the Roman Catholic Church and a European monarchy.
King Henry II never forgave himself for his role in the murder of his political foe and his guilty conscience found its way to Spain. His daughter, Eleanor of England, married the Spanish King, Alfonso VIII.
As a way of asking God to forgive her father, Eleanor commissioned paintings of the murder of Becket to adorn the walls of a church in the northern Spanish town of Soria.
Today the church of Saint Nicolas is a complete wreck near Soria’s main square, but three decades ago, builders were stabilising the ruin when they re-discovered these medieval paintings in excellent condition.
Disappearing fast
Since then a glass panel together with a wooden board have been the only protection for these beautiful works of art that are otherwise exposed to the open air.
Luis Romera has been campaigning with a group of locals for several years to get the paintings properly restored. “The paintings are important because there is nothing like them in all Spain,” he says.
“It is intriguing enough to find a painting in a medieval church depicting a murder, and even more so when it is in Spain, and this is more to do with the history of England!”
Luis says this shared history needs to be saved but that it has to be done quickly before the paintings completely disappear.
When the Soria town council agreed to reveal the Thomas Becket paintings to the BBC and a small gathering of local media, it was clear what Luis meant. Compared to photos taken when they were rediscovered in the late 1970s, half of the work has vanished.
During the last 30 years, no-one has taken responsibility for this rare medieval treasure. Part of the problem is that even in Soria, many of the locals don’t seem to know about the paintings.
Talking to people in the street, the typical response to inquiries about the Thomas Becket paintings was: “What paintings?”
The ruined church was still in the hands of the Roman Catholic Church until about five years ago when it became the responsibility of the town council.
In a bid to boost tourism, the town council has been campaigning to secure state funding to restore the historic centre of Soria. Tied up in that slow process of bidding for the big bucks, the paintings looked doomed to disappear.
But the Mayor, Carlos Martinez, has announced a restoration project that might start in time to save the Becket paintings.
“No-one can be proud of the state these paintings are in,” says Mr Martinez. “I think it’s now up to the town council to take responsibility as the owner of this ruined church,” he says.
“We’re contributing about half a million euros to restore the ruined church – including the crypt area and the paintings.”
The results of the efforts, he believes, will be visible during this year.
Luis Romera and his supporters hope it is not too late. In the meantime, the paintings have been covered up again with their glass panel and wooden protective board as they await a possible final restoration.
Danny Wood
BBC News
We human beings have a long history of proposing theories to unify disparate truths. This yearning to find a transcendent meaning for separate bodies of evidence may be one of our distinguishing traits. You have probably noticed this impulse in your own life: a series of experiences prompts the sense that something is hidden in the bundle of them. Your inner smarts work on the challenge—rationally, via various unconscious processes, and even while sleeping. The “Aha!” moment of identifying the deeper pattern in the evidence is satisfying and joyful; it launches a whole new set of possibilities for you as a person, as an artist.
I see the separate disciplines and fields within the arts and arts learning in that light because, although they seem to comprise disparate bodies of truth, my gut tells me that meaningful, unifying, common truths await, hidden in plain sight. Truths, that when embraced, can change the status quo.
You would be hard pressed to argue that we are a unified field. Practitioners of different art forms just don’t think of themselves as part of a larger functional entity. Even though multidisciplinary performances and presentations are increasingly common, the various artistic tribes compete more often than they cooperate, believing that the concerns they share are less significant than the ones they face on their own. A regional theater company looks at a choral ensemble and does not see much resemblance; a string quartet looks at a small dance ensemble or a struggling art gallery and does not see itself mirrored there.
Likewise, the divisions within arts education never seem to resolve. We waste energy on the same familial tiffs we have had for decades: disciplinary instruction vs. arts integration, arts education for art’s sake vs. arts education to produce other benefits, certified arts instructors vs. teaching artists, in-school learning vs. all the learning that happens outside of school—and what about the granny who plays the ukulele? These old hostilities, prejudices, and cross-purposes persist within a culture of scarcity, eroding the expansive, inclusive impulses that got us into arts-learning in the first place.
As a consultant, I have had many opportunities to try to build local arts partnerships and consortia; the usual strategy is to identify common goals and thereby foster a joint commitment to actions that will lift all the organizational boats together. Sometimes progress is made, and there are inspiring examples of success in a few cities; more often, the separateness of the participants is palpable and pervasive, caution and distrust remain entrenched, and the proposed partners have no shared language. This last point takes a while to surface, and is hard to admit—each doesn’t really know what the other is talking about, or the separate fields don’t agree on some fundamental point. You don’t believe me? Try discussing with an artist from another discipline what you think creativity really is.
The current painful economic constriction may be the catalyst we need to change our habits of thinking and jump us out of our ruts. As Rahm Emmanuel said when he was appointed White House Chief of Staff: “A crisis is too good an opportunity to waste.”
Eric Booth
Springboard for the Arts
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s trustees voted unanimously yesterday to proceed with a new building designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano – a plan that has stirred up opponents who want a carriage house at the back of the museum preserved.
The purpose of the construction project is to relieve pressure on the existing building, which houses a shop, a cafe, performance space, and offices. The plan calls for demolition of the carriage house, erected by Gardner in 1907. The museum building opened in 1903.
It became a focal point of debate last week, when several staff members and experts associated with the museum suggested it may have been more central to Isabella Stewart Gardner’s vision than the museum’s leadership had realized or acknowledged.
They cited a recent essay by Robert Colby, a former curatorial fellow at the museum with a PhD in Renaissance art history from London’s Courtauld Art Institute.
The Gardner museum’s director, Anne Hawley, said Colby’s essay, which built on research published by former director Rollin Hadley in 1978, contained nothing new. But Trevor Fairbrother, a freelance curator and former staffer at the Museum of Fine Arts, wrote in a letter obtained by the Globe that Colby’s findings “make it certain that the Carriage House . . . constituted a key element in the founder’s vision of Fenway Court . . . “
If officials who approved the construction project had seen the information in Colby’s essay, they probably would have preserved the carriage house, he wrote.
One of the regulatory authorities, the Boston Landmarks Commission, said on Friday that it was reviewing Colby’s findings. Last night, the commission could not be contacted. No one at the museum was available for comment. A statement from the museum said the board recognized the museum had met “a critical internal benchmark in its capital fund-raising.” It said the vote marked “the final formal approval the museum needs.”
“This project is first and foremost about preserving the palace and the collection,” John Lowell Gardner, chairman of the Board of Trustees and great grand-nephew of Isabella Gardner, said in a prepared statement. ” . . . This project is a harmonious marriage of preservation and progress.”
The museum has not disclosed the project’s cost, but it has been reported to be in excess of $100 million.
Sebastian Smee
Boston Globe
For years, school systems across the nation dropped the arts to concentrate on getting struggling students to pass tests in reading and math. Yet now, a growing body of brain research suggests that teaching the arts may be good for students across all disciplines.
Scientists are now looking at, for instance, whether students at an arts high school who study music or drawing have brains that allow them to focus more intensely or do better in the classroom.
Washington County schools Superintendent Betty Morgan would have liked to have had some of that basic research in her hands when she began building a coalition for an arts high school in Hagerstown. The business community and school principals worked together, and the school will open this summer, but even at its groundbreaking a man objecting to the money spent on the school held up a sign of protest reading “Big Note$ Wrong Music.”
Scientists and educators aware of the gap between basic research and the school systems are beginning to share findings, such as at this month’s seminar on the brain and the arts held at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum.
The event was sponsored by the new Neuro-Education Initiative at the Johns Hopkins University, a center designed to bridge that gap.
Brain research in the past several years is just beginning to uncover some startling ideas about how students learn. First came the proof, some years ago, that our brains do not lose brain cells as we get older, but are always capable of growing.
Now neuroscientists are investigating how training students in the arts may change the structure of their brains and the way they think. They are asking: Does putting a violin in the hands of an elementary school student help him to do math better? Will learning to dance or paint improve a child’s spacial ability or ability to learn to read?
Research in those areas, Harvard professor Jerome Kagan said, is “as deserving of a clinical trial as a drug for cancer that has not yet been shown to be effective.”
There aren’t many conclusions yet that can be translated into the classroom, but there is an emerging interdisciplinary field between education and neuroscience. Like Hopkins, Harvard also has created a center to study learning and the brain.
Much of the research into the arts has centered on music and the brain. One researcher studying students who go to an arts high school found a correlation between those who were trained in music and their ability to do geometry. Yet another four-year study, being conducted by Ellen Winner of Boston College and Gottfried Schlaug of Harvard, is looking at the effects playing the piano or the violin has on students who are in elementary school.
Liz Bowie
Baltimore Sun
