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The financially precarious Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has retained an outside consultant group to determine how the institution can continue to survive, and whether its operation should remain linked to that of the Corcoran College of Art + Design. The gallery and college also plan to lease their adjacent parking lot to a local developer, who will erect an eight-story office building on the site, which was once slated for a Frank Gehry-designed expansion to the Corcoran. In a recent telephone interview, the Corcoran’s director and president, Fred Bollerer, said that the deal – which requires permits from city agencies to proceed — will reap around $1 million per year in rent, but will not provide more space for the institution.
While Bollerer declined to identify the developer until a deal is signed, he said that the Corcoran has hired Toronto-based consultants Lord Cultural Resources to develop ideas for the institution’s future. The college has been growing, but the museum operation is “unsustainable,” he says, adding that while there is no plan to divest the collection it is not clear what form the museum will take in the future.
Jason Edward Kaufman
Artinfo
The Corcoran Gallery’s Mantle Room has been configured in the Salon style of 18th-century Paris, with some of the museum’s best old European paintings crowding all the way up the walls. (Bill O’leary)
Museums are time machines. They let us look at all the pieces of the past they preserve. Sometimes, they also let us look at vintage looking.
Last year, when the Corcoran Gallery of Art rearranged its lovely little permanent collection, a few galleries were rehung to mimic how art was looked at for most of the last half-millennium. Many Corcoran works are now displayed “Salon-style,” with pictures of every size and style, on every subject, stacked up to the ceiling. It doesn’t make it easy to examine every one of them, the way we’re used to doing in books and slide talks and special exhibitions. But a Salon hang does produce an interesting tussle among the works themselves, as they vie for our attention – the same struggle they would have had when they were first made and collected.
A Salon hang also changes the way we negotiate the art: It turns a modern type-A viewer into a leisurely grazer. Looking at this throng of paintings, the ease and poise of an aristocratic collector, at home among his treasures, replaces the eager-beaver art historian in you, fighting for A grades.
If nothing else, a Salon hang also saves shoe leather. You can sit on the bench in a single gallery and browse among dozens of works.
Blake Gopnik
Washington Post
It was a gorgeous October day, and some of the foliage in the Barnes Foundation’s arboretum had shaded into amber. The last roses of the season were in bloom. Chrysanthemums lined the drive. There were plenty of other flowers, too, but I didn’t know their names – no more than a typical Barnes visitor knows the titles of the unlabeled masterpieces that hang, salon-style, in the gallery here.
This was to be my last visit to the old Barnes, a place I had come to know well. The Merion institution created by Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951) is being replaced, in part, by a museum slated to open on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway in the spring of 2012. The 12-acre arboretum in Merion will remain a laboratory for the foundation’s well-respected horticultural program. But the Barnes’s unparalleled collection, along with its art-education classes, will move to the new building downtown, with more amenities and presumably more visitors to enjoy them.
Julia M. Klein
Obit
A portrait of Philip IV by Velázquez as it looks now, after treatment. It is now hanging at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
For nearly 60 years the portrait of a baby-faced Philip IV by Velázquez hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s European paintings galleries, a stunning example of the only 110 or so known canvases by that 17th-century Spanish master. Majestic in size, it was rare in its depiction of a young, uncertain monarch and was the earliest known portrait of Philip by Velázquez, who, as the king’s court painter, went on to record his image for decades.
So it was quite a shock when, in 1973, the Met, reconsidering 300 of its most treasured works, declared that the painting was not a Velázquez and was probably executed in his studio by an assistant or follower.
But in the museum world, 37 years is several lifetimes, especially considering how extraordinarily technology and scholarship have advanced. Now, after a year of examination and restoration, curators, conservators and scholars have changed their minds. They are convinced that this full-length portrait of the 18-year-old king is indeed by Velázquez. The painting, which has been undergoing restoration since August 2009, will be back on display Tuesday.
Carol Vogel
New York Times
The ink is nearly dry on a $150,000 deal for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) to oversee the restoration and preservation of the city’s Watts Towers. Funding for the year-long project will come from Los Angeles’s department of cultural affairs. During that time the museum will draw up costs for the long-term conservation of the Simon Rodia-built towers, suggest potential funders and enlist the help of other local institutions, including the Getty Museum and the California African American Museum.
Director of Lacma’s conservation department, Mark Gilberg, aims to take a more holistic approach to conservation efforts, which up until now have been short-term. “We are rethinking procedures and adopting ones that will be more proactive than reactive,” says Gilberg. Initial delays regarding insurance concerns have been resolved with the promise that Lacma will not be financially responsible for any gross negligence while working on the towers.
Marisa Mazria Katz
The Art Newspaper
In a Times’ report on MOCA’s controversial decision to whitewash an antiwar mural it had commissioned for the Geffen Contemporary, museum director Jeffrey Deitch discusses his reasons for painting over the artwork.
Blu, the Italian street artist who created the mural, could not be reached for comment by press time. But after the story went to press, I received the following e-mail, addressing the question of whether he considers the removal of his mural censorship:
It is censorship that almost turned into self-censorship when they asked me to openly agree with their decision to erase the wall. In Soviet Union they were calling it ‘self-criticism.’
Deitch invited me to paint another mural over the one he erased, and I will not do that.
Jori Finkel
Los Angeles Times
Sullivan Center, Chicago (Photo: Michael Tercha, Chicago Tribune)
A towering achievement: The record-shattering Burj Khalifa, which soars a half-mile above Dubai’s desert floor, took its place as one of the world’s great skyscrapers — not simply a technical feat but an aesthetic one as well. Chicago architect Adrian Smith and his former colleagues at the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill avoided the trap of a Frankenstein monster with a classic Chicago synthesis of architecture and engineering.
A dialogue of masters: London architect Norman Foster struck up a marvelous architectural conversation with the late Frank Lloyd Wright in his precisely honed Fortaleza Hall in Racine, Wis., the first major construction on the S.C. Johnson campus since Wright’s iconic research tower of 1950. Foster’s multipurpose building, whose centerpiece is a luminous atrium housing a replica of a historic plane, superbly juxtaposes today’s extroverted, lightweight construction with Wright’s conspicuously inward-turning architecture.
Blair Kamin
Chicago Tribune
Foster’s Gherkin tower
Sir Norman Foster, the British starchitect behind London’s iconic Gherkin tower and the master plan of Abu Dhabi’s mega-green Masdar City, reportedly has been selected to design Apple’s new campus in Cupertino.
That’s according to El Economista. Citing anonymous sources, the Mexican newspaper reports that Apple and Foster + Partners “have spent months working closely in the design of future U.S. giant city.” Details are murky, but El Economista paints a picture of a sprawling eco-utopia, with renewable-energy resources, green materials, and a tunnel-bound transportation network. They’re calling it “City of Apple.”
The story comes less than a month after news broke that Apple purchased a 98-acre property about a mile from its existing main offices at 1 Infinite Loop. The site is directly across the street from 50 acres the company bought a few years ago and announced as the location of a second campus.
Suzanne Labarre
Fast Company
Frank Stella named the pieces in his series after towns in New Hampshire. Pictured “Moultonville II.” (Photo By Steven Sloman)
The always exemplary but never quite lovable work of Frank Stella is one of the enigmas of modern art. Rarely do you encounter people who feel passionately about Stella. They are impressed — how could they not be? — by his intelligence, his range, and the consistent audacity of his work. And they recognize his place in the pantheon.
But they almost never express the sort of deep-seated enthusiasm you routinely hear expressed about his peers — people such as Donald Judd, Barnett Newman, Dan Flavin, or Jasper Johns.
In contrast to those other artists, whose work, even at its most apparently cerebral, suggests burning conviction and private necessity, there’s always been something synthetic, arbitrary, and not quite real about Stella’s work. That may be ironic, given Stella’s forceful personality (“I never felt that minimal,’’ he told me in a 2003 interview), and the premium he has always put on reality. His most famous statement is: “What you see is what you see.’’
Sebastian Smee
Boston Globe
Mark Bradford with his work “Scorched Earth” (2006). (A.J. Zanyk/The Ohio State University)
Of the opportunities once facing Mark Bradford, who is 6 foot 8, hoop dreams were probably among the more viable ones.
In the mid-1970s Mr. Bradford, then a teenager, shocked everyone — including himself — by growing 10 inches in a single summer. Strangers on the streets here in his hometown kept badgering him with unsolicited suggestions. “They would say, ‘If I were your height, I would be a basketball player and make a million dollars,’ ” Mr. Bradford said in an interview in September at his studio.
Instead he became an apprentice in his mother’s beauty shop. “It was my first defiant act,” he said.
Now 49, Mr. Bradford has the physical stature and refined, fluid movements of an athlete. But the endpapers he once used for curling hair have since found their way into his abstract collages, with titles referring to musicians like Tupac Shakur and Smokey Robinson. These, along with his political, spoofy videos (in one he’s in a Lakers-inspired purple-and-gold hoop skirt, attempting to dunk a basketball), and mammoth paintings made from layers of glued-together posters torn from the fences of abandoned lots near his studio, have earned Mr. Bradford a 2009 MacArthur grant. And a 10-year survey of his paintings, sculptures and video installations, organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, has recently opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where it will remain through March 13.
Dorothy Spears
New York Times
