First-Time Director Settles In at Pérez Art Museum Miami
On a recent balmy day in his new institutional home overlooking Biscayne Bay here, Franklin Sirmans should have looked haggard.
Mr. Sirmans, a former curator, had just started his job as director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami at a time when the institution had committed to increasing its private contributions and art collection in a city without a tradition of cultural philanthropy — and with a benefactor who alienated the potential donor base by having the new building named after himself.
Art world luminaries in town for Art Basel Miami Beach were pouring across the causeway to let Mr. Sirmans know they’re pulling for him as a first-time director — not to mention one of the few African-Americans to lead a major metropolitan museum.
He had come to Miami in a climate of increasing competition for donors, given the planned Institute of Contemporary Art in the Design District, the expanding Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach and the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami.
And he was still living out of boxes — both in his office and at home — having moved with his wife and 5-year-old daughter from Los Angeles, where he was the department head and curator of contemporary art at theLos Angeles County Museum of Art, also known by its acronym, Lacma.
But Mr. Sirmans, 46, appeared at ease as he strolled through the Pérez Art Museum’s elegant building, talking about how his first hire would be a new development director; pointing out exhibitions featuring the Jamaican artist Nari Ward and the Cuban artist Carlos Alfonzo; and insisting that he is not concerned about what many see as an uphill climb.
“It’s exactly what I was hoping for,” Mr. Sirmans said. “Right city, right museum.”
People who have worked with Mr. Sirmans say he is widely respected and well liked. He came to Los Angeles by way of the Menil Collection in Houston and, before that, the Dia Art Foundation. He served as the artistic director of the 2014 Prospect New Orleans biennial and has built connections throughout the art world.
But he had never been a museum director. And while Mr. Sirmans has raised money for exhibitions and acquisitions, his fund-raising chops have yet to be really tested.
“I’m very optimistic he will be successful,” Aaron Podhurst, the museum’s chairman, said.
He added: “Do we need a larger endowment? Of course we do.”
The endowment is about $20 million and the museum has pledged to raise $50 million more. That’s a lot of money for Miami, a city with nascent cultural philanthropy.
“Do we have a tradition of giving in Miami? The answer to that is ‘no,’” said Jorge M. Pérez, whose name is on the museum and who serves on the board.
Mr. Pérez has tried to set an example by giving $40 million to the museum building, which was designed by Herzog & de Meuron and opened in 2013, including a pledge of $20 million and $20 million worth of art.
He continues to donate — most recently $1 million to the museum’s African-American fund and art for its sculpture garden. And Mr. Pérez said that all of his art would eventually go to the museum.
But the renaming of the building — formerly called the Miami Art Museum — remains a sticking point for some, because the institution sits on public land and was financed partly by $100 million in taxpayer money.
“People are not going to support a museum that a real estate mogul put his name on,” said Mary E. Frank, a former president of the museum and one of four trustees who in 2011 resigned to protest the Pérez naming.
And some of Miami’s prominent collectors continue to hammer away at the issue. Mera Rubell, who with her husband, Donald, and son, Jason, has an important collection at the museum, is one such critic.
“It confuses the mission,” she said, “because it’s the people’s museum that has his name on it.”
Even Terence Riley, a former director of the Miami Art Museum, said the naming “produced mixed results.”
“Jorge certainly stepped up at a moment that was unbelievably critical in terms of the financial health of the institution,” he said. “At the same time, precedent has shown that naming an art museum can have a dampening effect on donations as well as works of art.”
Mr. Sirmans said that he did not have a problem with institutions being named after individuals. “I worked at the Menil, I grew up going to the Frick, the Whitney,” he said. “Somebody’s got to do it.”
Still, Miami’s major private collectors have yet to throw their support behind the museum, presumably because they also focus on contemporary art and have their own exhibition spaces that rival that of the Pérez.
Martin Z. Margulies, a successful developer, recently said that he would not be donating his considerable collection to any institution.
Mr. Pérez sounded incredulous. “How does a person who’s made all his money here in Miami — this community’s allowed him to become what he is — and you don’t leave your art to the museum?” he said. “But I can’t tell people what to do.”
Ms. Rubell added that her foundation was always happy to loan works to the museum, which it has done in the past.
In addition to enlisting outside donors, some say, Mr. Sirmans needs to increase the strength and buy-in of the trustees, several of whom have been on the board since the museum’s inception in 1984 as the Center for the Fine Arts, before it became the Miami Art Museum — and a collecting institution — in 1996.
“No director can succeed without meaningful support from the board,” said Craig Robins, a trustee who is a developer and the head of the museum’s acquisitions committee. “The key is Jorge,” he said. “If it’s going to go to the next level, it’s going to be because Jorge really gets behind Franklin and they build this thing together.”
But Mr. Pérez said he did not want the museum to be overly dependent on his largess.
“The mandate is to get the community behind the museum,” he said. “It’s a city of small businesses. So a lot of the burden of fund-raising is in the hands of a few individuals.”
Many said that Mr. Sirmans’s curatorial expertise and magnanimous personality could significantly help raise the museum’s profile and financial reserve. Brought up in Harlem, where his father, a doctor, collected work by African-American artists, Mr. Sirmans studied art history at Wesleyan and wrote his thesis on Jean-Michel Basquiat.
His notable exhibitions include a 2005 show on Basquiat at the Brooklyn Museum; at Lacma, he curated shows like “Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada” and oversaw major retrospectives by Glenn Ligon and Blinky Palermo.
“He has as good an eye for art as anyone I’ve met,” Michael Govan, the director of Lacma, said.
Mr. Sirmans does not have encyclopedic ambitions for his Miami museum; on the contrary, he believes the institution should fully embrace its local connections, featuring artists from the Caribbean, South America and Latin America.
“We’re here,” he said, “and we should be able to do ‘here’ better than anybody else.”
While the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, for example, “used to be relegated to the coat room at MoMA,” Mr. Sirmans said, “here he’s our Picasso.”
On a broader level, Mr. Sirmans said that he just wanted to bring additional people in the door; annual attendance is 300,000.
“I want people who are enthusiastic and I want people who are not enthusiastic yet,” he said. “I want more people in here. I want more of Miami.”
By Robin Pogrebin @nytimes - George Lindemann Blog
The Senate Finance Committee is scrutinizing nearly a dozen private museums opened by individual collectors, questioning whether the tax-exempt status they enjoy provides sufficient public benefit to justify what amounts to a government subsidy.
Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the committee’s Republican chairman, sent letters this month to small galleries like the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Conn., and Glenstone museum in Potomac, Md., as well as Eli and Edythe Broad’s new $140 million art museum in Los Angeles, asking for information about visiting hours, donations, trustees, valuations and art loans.
Republican committee staff members said the inquiry was part of a broader effort by Mr. Hatch to re-examine bedrock institutions, including museums and private universities, that have long enjoyed preferential tax treatment.
Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah sent letters of inquiry this month to several galleries. Credit Zach Gibson/The New York Times
A broad debate about the personal and corporate tax system has emerged yet again as an important element in the presidential campaign. But little attention has been paid to the longstanding charitable deductions for museums, nonprofit theaters and other institutions — an exemption that is zealously defended by both donors and recipients.
The Hatch letter noted that “charitable organizations have an important role in promoting good in our society,” but questioned whether “some private foundations are operating museums that offer minimal benefit to the public while enabling donors to reap substantial tax advantages.”
“Such an arrangement would be inconsistent with the letter and intent” of the law, it added.
The letters were sent after an article in The New York Times earlier this year that examined the proliferation of tax-exempt private museums created by wealthy art collectors, sometimes in their own backyards. Some of the galleries severely limit public access, closing their doors to outsiders for several months at a time, shunning signs and advertisements, and requiring visitors to make advance reservations.
As investors have poured money into the skyrocketing art market, financial consultants and tax experts have said that many wealthy individuals are looking to convert their personal collections into private foundations or museums as a way of reducing their tax bills.
Founders can deduct not only the full market value of the art they buy, but also the value of cash and stocks they donate. The cost of insuring, conserving, warehousing and other expenses associated with a masterwork’s upkeep are also tax-free.
Internal Revenue Service guidelines are vague when it comes to establishing the degree of public benefit that justifies an art institution’s tax-exempt status. But public access and adequate signage are both considered prerequisites, according to previous agency rulings. There are also strict restrictions on displaying the art in a donor’s own home.
Aaron W. Fobes, the spokesman for the finance committee, said the panel’s “concerns are confined to a small number of private foundations and are not something that is symptomatic of a larger problem in exempt organizations.”
Some tax experts have questioned whether some of the small, out-of-the-way museums that are on or close to a donor’s property — like the Brant study center (founded by the newsprint magnate Peter Brant) or Glenstone (created by Mitchell Rales) — meet I.R.S. guidelines.
Philippa Polskin, a spokeswoman for Glenstone, said in an email that the museum was “gathering information in response to the questions sent by Senator Hatch and looks forward to sharing information with the committee about their efforts to build Glenstone into a world-class museum.”
Since the end of September, she said, “with future reservations already received, Glenstone is tracking toward a 12-month attendance of around 25,000 visitors.” She added that the number of visitors is expected to increase four- or fivefold when a planned expansion is completed.
The Brant Foundation did not respond to requests for comment, but it had previously defended the art center’s charitable work and public service.
Other institutions that were sent a letter, like the Rubell Family Collection in Miami and the newly minted Broad museum, are on an altogether different scale, however.
The Rubells’ 45,000-square-foot contemporary art center, located in a former Drug Enforcement Administration warehouse in Miami, helped revitalize the surrounding Wynwood neighborhood when the family opened it in 1993. The center reports that tens of thousands of people visit the center every year.
Mr. Broad’s grand three-story museum, which opened in September, is one of the most ambitious ventures of its kind in recent decades. Mr. Broad, who has donated millions to other nearby cultural institutions, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, has been active in transforming that stretch of downtown Los Angeles into a cultural hub. The Broad Foundation did not respond to requests for comment, and the Rubell Family Collection declined to comment.
Several well-established art institutions, like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Frick Collection in New York, the Phillips Collection in Washington and the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, grew out of a wealthy art collector’s private purchases.
It is probably revealing that Sheena Wagstaff, who was brought to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to ramp up its presence in contemporary art, is about to make her debut at the museum’s new Breuer building with an exhibition of an artist who has been dead for more than 20 years. Nasreen Mohamedi is a beloved if little-known modernist who is sometimes called the Indian Agnes Martin, a reference to her penchant for pristine grids.
Ms. Wagstaff, a former chief curator at the Tate Modern, arrived from London four years ago to assume the influential position of chairwoman for the Met’s new department of Modern and contemporary art. On March 18, the museum will unveil the Met Breuer, better known as the former home of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Met’s annexation of the building prompted an initial burst of skepticism: The Met might seem to have enough to do collecting and clarifying 5,000 years of recorded history, without becoming yet another showplace for the art of the last three minutes.
“I think the exciting thing,” Ms. Wagstaff said, in her dramatically accented British voice, “is that American audiences will get to know that there are these extraordinary things happening in different cities, even in places like Kochi-Muziris, which is in the middle of nowhere.”
Later, when I looked up Kochi-Muziris online, a video popped up that featured Ms. Wagstaff sitting outdoors last year at an art biennial in India’s coastal state of Kerala. She was in a white blouse, her long hair woven into a braid, her outlines crisp against a summery backdrop of green foliage. “It’s a very important biennial,” she announces to the camera with the confidence of a missionary. “If anyone is watching this, you have to get here.”
In seeking to define what the Met will be as a modern art presence in coming years, it seems safe to say it will differ from its famous New York neighbors. It will not be the Whitney (where we fell in love with our first Edward Hoppers and Georgia O’Keeffes). It will not duplicate the Museum of Modern Art (in part because it’s too late to play catch up with MoMA’s peerless holdings of Picasso & Company). It won’t be the ever-expanding Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (still trying to build in Helsinki and Abu Dhabi) or the New Museum (a kunsthalle without much of a collection).
Yet, the Met’s Modern department might turn into the Tate of Fifth Avenue, with all that that implies about the British fascination with post-colonial cultures and a desire to dismantle Western-centric versions of art history.
“My work at the Tate Modern, along with my colleagues, too, was very much about re-addressing the Western canon, re-addressing the idea of what modernism actually means, and broadening and expanding that scope,” said Ms. Wagstaff, a trim, bespectacled woman of 59.
Within Ms. Wagstaff’s own department at the Met, where she oversees a staff of 10 curators, there have been many departures and arrivals. She has dismissed longtime art historians schooled in the art of European Modernism while creating such new positions as a curator of South Asian contemporary art; a curator of Latin American contemporary art; and a curator of contemporary Middle Eastern, North African and Turkish art.
To be sure, we all want to be cognizant of other cultures and sensitive to the differences among us. Yet international biennialism has become a fashion like any other, and you don’t have to be a cultural alarmist to wonder whether American audiences will warm to the Met’s global mission.
“That plays in London; it doesn’t play in America, because America was made in an entirely different way,” said Sean Scully, the Dublin-born American painter who was honored with a major exhibition at the Met in 2006. “It hasn’t colonized two-thirds of the globe, like the British did.”
Ms. Wagstaff’s office is on the mezzanine of the Modern wing of the Met, in an oblong room with blond-wood shelves. The place looks a bit anonymous, perhaps because the walls are bare, and there are no knickknacks or photographs. When I arrived, she was visibly tense. “No one has done a profile of me ever,” she volunteered. Not even during her productive 14 years at the Tate? She shook her head. “They do profiles of the top chaps,” she said.
Asked where one might find some biographical information on her, she joked, “I have a Duane Reade card, so they have some information on me, I am sure.” Then she pulled out two stapled sheets, a “mini-C.V.,” as she called it. It indicated, among other things, that she attended college at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England, and traveled to New York in 1982 as a fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Born in Colchester, England, the daughter of a career army officer, she was raised in Malta and Cyprus. An early job as an assistant to the director of the Oxford Museum of Modern Art landed her in the office of a rising star, Nicholas Serota. In 1998, Mr. Serota was named director of the Tate Britain, and Ms. Wagstaff was hired as head of exhibitions and displays. In 2001, she moved to the other side of the Thames River, to the Tate Modern, which had opened in the defunct Bankside Power Station and become a sensation almost overnight.
Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Met, who is also British, came to his choice of Ms. Wagstaff after bumping into her at various international art fairs. He had begun his career as a scholar of renaissance tapestries and, by his own admission, felt a bit out of his depth when faced with the task of a hire in contemporary art. He was impressed to learn about her work at the Tate Modern, where, he said, “she was very actively engaging with these more international investigations.” She was “looking at stuff in the Middle East and what was going on in Asia.”
Ms. Wagstaff’s husband, Mark Francis, is also in the art world. He served as the founding director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and, for most of the ’90s, the couple and their two children resided in the States. Nowadays, the children are grown and live in London, as does Mr. Francis, who is a director of the Gagosian Gallery there. He and Ms. Wagstaff have a fashionably complicated trans-Atlantic marriage. She lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side and gets to London when she can.
When the Met Breuer opens to the public, expect to find, in addition to the Nasreen Mohamedi show, “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible” — a sprawling, concept-driven, historical extravaganza with 195 objects by 127 artists (at last count) tethered to the question: When is a work of art finished? “To finish a work is to kill it,” Picasso declared, providing more than a small intimation of the non finito aesthetic that became so integral to modern art.
“It’s 550 years’ worth of art,” Ms. Wagstaff said, describing the show. “And that extends from Van Eyck and Titian up until — the most recent work is a work by Urs Fischer from this year.”
Urs Fischer? It was impossible to ignore the fact that the Swiss-born sculptor is represented by the Gagosian Gallery, where Ms. Wagstaff’s husband works.
Museums, in principle, are scholarly institutions removed from the seductions of the marketplace, and Ms. Wagstaff’s ties to the Gagosian Gallery could make the Met vulnerable to charges of favoritism. When the museum acquires or exhibits the work of an artist represented by Gagosian, the gesture is likely to boost the person’s prestige and value. But those who have worked alongside her emphasize her scrupulousness in observing rules regarding conflict of interest. “She was very careful to draw the line,” recalled Dorothy Lichtenstein, the widow of the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, whose retrospective was Ms. Wagstaff’s last show at the Tate Modern.
“Sheena said: ‘Let’s not get involved with commercial galleries. Let’s not invite them to the meetings,’” Ms. Lichtenstein said. Ms. Wagstaff, in an email, noted that the Urs Fischer loan “was handled with the artist himself and then negotiated with Sadie Coles, London,” another gallery. “Gagosian was not involved in any way.”
Since arriving at the Met, Ms. Wagstaff has established herself as someone whose taste leans toward conceptual art. Three Met exhibitions listed on her C.V. as “personally curated” were commissions for the museum’s famously scenic Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. The space is probably the most dramatic site for sculpture in New York, yet Ms. Wagstaff’s commissions do not aspire to be sculptures at all.
Her first commission, in 2013, went to Imran Qureshi, a Pakistani artist based in Lahore. It had the misfortune of opening in the wake of the bombing at the Boston Marathon. When you stepped outdoors, onto the roof, dark-red paint seemed to be spattered everywhere. It was easy to miss the allusions to 16th-century Mughal painting and feel spooked by intimations of spilled blood. The installation, the critic Ken Johnson noted in The New York Times, “isn’t adjusted to the complicated social and cultural context of the United States, which is vastly different from that of the Middle East and Pakistan.”
Last May, Pierre Huyghe, a French conceptual artist who looms large on the European scene, unveiled a piece that was so subtle that some asked where it was even when they were standing in front of it. It involved a fish tank stocked with lampreys as well as an alteration to the terrace’s paving stones: A handful of tiles were removed to expose the soil underneath.
When I confided my reservations to Mr. Campbell, saying the piece was short on visual energy, he replied: “It’s very conceptual. It’s too conceptual for some. But I think it’s great. It’s been fascinating watching the weeds grow up on the rooftop over the last six months.”
In addition to organizing temporary exhibitions, Ms. Wagstaff is charged with the not-small task of enlarging the museum’s patchy collection of 20th-century art. There is also the issue of where to house it. Now that Leonard A. Lauder has promised the Met an extraordinary gift of 81 Cubist masterworks, the museum is rethinking the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, whose awkwardly jutting spaces have been criticized since they opened in 1987. The British architect David Chipperfield will be designing the replacement, for an estimated cost of at least $600 million. The money has not been entirely secured, but new galleries, Mr. Campbell said, “will be a major incentive to collectors.” In the meantime, the Met’s annexation of the Breuer building is an eight-year agreement. Would Ms. Wagstaff like to see the Met keep the Breuer building beyond 2023? “I don’t know,” she replied. “I mean, I honestly don’t know.”
Adding to the uncertainty is the continuing drama of staff changes. When Ms. Wagstaff started at the Met, there were four accomplished art historians with the title of associate curators. All have since left and were required to sign confidentiality agreements forbidding them from speaking to the news media. The most recent departure, that of veteran curator Marla Prather, occurred quietly last summer. Ms. Prather had been working on an important show of works by African-American artists from the South, a gift to the Met by the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Ms. Prather will see the show to completion.
Asked about the staff changes, Ms. Wagstaff said: “There are good curators, there are great curators, and a lot of mediocre curators. In order to create a really great program, you need great curators. That’s what I am anticipating the Breuer program will reflect.”
Ms. Wagstaff’s mission probably has not been abetted by her personal manner. She is often described by colleagues as brusque and imperious, and I kept hearing that she fails to return messages, even from art-world biggies. “Her phone doesn’t have outgoing service,” jokes Peter Schjeldahl, the art critic of The New Yorker, adding that he was surprised when he tried to contact Ms. Wagstaff to arrange an initial tête-à-tête and never heard back.
In her defense, the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, said: “I think Americans tend to find British people kind of aloof. She also probably gets a lot of emails that don’t need an answer.”
Moreover, she does have more than a few shows that need her attention.
Her curator Ian Alteveer, for one, is focused on the art of Kerry James Marshall, a prominent figurative painter from Birmingham, Ala., whose work redresses the absence of black subjects in Western art. The survey arrives at the Met Breuer in about a year, after opening first at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
Ms. Wagstaff is also looking ahead to May and the next rooftop project. For the honor, she has tapped Cornelia Parker, a widely admired British sculptor known for installations in which shrapnel and other material are suspended in midair, as if caught in the act of exploding.
When news of the choice got out, it inspired sighs among some observers. The Met has yet to give a solo rooftop show to an American woman artist. Barbara Rose, the eminent art historian, sent an email: “You mean there is NO American artist good enough??? Maya Lin and Sarah Sze for openers are so much more interesting. And Ursula von Rydingsvard, etc. etc. etc.”
It was a fair question — and, for that matter, are there no American curators qualified to run the department? I posed that question to Mr. Campbell, the director.
“You tell your American curators to stop being such whiners,” he snapped. “This is a very competitive institution. You succeed by being good.”
Los Angeles art adviser and collector Elaine Gans was uncertain, at first, where to donate a large painting by San Francisco Bay Area artist Tom Holland. It was “one of his most important pieces,” Ms. Gans says.
If she gave it to an art museum, the painting risked being put in storage and forgotten, Ms. Gans says. A museum also might not have accepted it, she adds. So, earlier this year, she donated the painting to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
It’s a choice made by a growing number of art collectors who want to donate artwork as part of their estate plan. Instead of going the usual route and donating to an art museum, they are turning to such nonprofits as hospitals, libraries, retirement centers and nursing homes.
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More and more hospitals, in fact, have big art collections that are often based largely on donations. Hospital officials say art improves the physical and therapeutic environment for patients, their families and staff. “Studies have shown that artwork helps to reduce stress and boredom, reduces blood pressure and increases white-blood-cell count, all of which are factors in the healing process,” says Jessica R. Finch, art program manager at Boston Children’s Hospital. The hospital has been building a collection—now reaching 5,000 pieces—since 1996, she says.
One of its most significant pieces is a ceiling-hung glass work by Seattle artist Dale Chihuly. “It was from a corporate art collection,” says Ms. Finch. “The corporation couldn’t sell it, because it was so large, and offered it to us.”
Donors of artwork to hospitals often have a personal connection to the institution. Ms. Gans’s three children were born at Cedars-Sinai, and her husband has served on several boards at the facility. Its collection, established in 1976, has more than 4,500 artworks, says the curator, John T. Lange. “I like the hospital’s belief that people there should have something nice to look at, and I wanted to support that,” Ms. Gans says.
Tax considerations
Such gifts typically involve tax considerations for the donors, and certain rules that must be followed to maximize the tax benefits. In order for a donor to receive a deduction for the full-fair-market value of a gift, for example, the recipient organization must show that its use of the artwork is related to its tax-exempt purpose. If there is no related use, the donor’s deduction will be limited to his or her cost basis for the artwork.
‘Dandelion Seed,’ a kinetic sculpture by Bill Wainwright, was donated to the Boston Children’s Hospital by a collector.
‘Dandelion Seed,’ a kinetic sculpture by Bill Wainwright, was donated to the Boston Children’s Hospital by a collector. PHOTO: JESSICA R. FINCH
Another consideration should be whether a recipient might quickly resell a donated artwork. According to IRS regulations, if the recipient charity sells the donated item within three years, the donor’s tax deduction is changed from fair market value to the taxpayer’s original buying price, which most often is lower. The purpose of this rule is to insure that the charity actually wants the donation and is not simply enabling a sizable deduction for a taxpayer.
Security concerns
Donors also may want to know that their gifts will be protected and cared for by the recipient. Some institutions have separate fine-art insurance policies that cover damage and theft. Others, such as Hebrew Home at Riverdale, a nursing home in New York’s Bronx borough that was founded in 1917, cover their art and other building contents under a blanket building policy.
Security at a hospital or nursing home tends to be directed at patient safety, not the protection of artwork present. But reports of damage and theft are rare, and other precautions are often taken.
Hebrew Home, for its part, doesn’t install any artworks in its Alzheimer’s wing, as patients “don’t have the same filters as other people and may try to touch or smear it,” says Daniel Reingold, president and chief executive officer of RiverSpring Health, which operates the facility.
Extreme values
For very valuable artworks, an art museum still might be the most appropriate recipient of a donation, and if not a major city museum then perhaps a regional institution or a college museum.
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Jennifer Finkel, art curator at the Cleveland Clinic, a nonprofit, academic medical center based in Cleveland, Ohio, oversees a collection of 6,000 objects throughout that organization. Ms. Finkel says that “a Picasso painting wouldn’t be appropriate for us. It might be too fragile or too valuable, and we want to be responsible for the works in our collection.”
On the other hand, when a piece that has been donated to Cleveland Clinic increases dramatically in value, it can be a very welcome event.
Ms. Finkel recalls a Milton Avery painting donated to the hospital back in the 1950s. Some 30 years later, its value had risen to such a degree that when the hospital decided to sell it, she says, the proceeds paid “to furnish an entire new building with art.”
We’re 15 years into the new millennium, but our museums don’t seem to be aware. They’re stuck in the late 20th century, the Arrogant Age, with its love of gigantism in architecture and art. Frank Gehry’s 1997 Guggenheim Bilbao, a sky-reacher with a sasquatch footprint, scaled to accommodate colossal Richard Serra sculptures, epitomized that love. Mr. Gehry’s 2014 Vuitton Foundation museum in Paris, a glass galleon packed with bland blue-chip cargo, reconfirmed it. So we’re still waiting, scanning the horizon for a new kind of museum, a 21st-century museum, to appear.
How will we know it when it arrives? There will be no single model, and there shouldn’t be. Art and life, which are equally a museum’s business, are too complicated to be reflected in any one mirror. The new museum won’t be defined by architectural glamour or by a market-vetted collection, though it may have these. Structurally porous and perpetually in progress, it will be defined by its own role as a shaper of values, and by the broad audience it attracts.
A new version can’t arrive too soon. Existing ones are, in crucial ways, stagnant. Broad attendance numbers may give the opposite impression: Major urban museums in the United States are getting crowds in the door, but diversity isn’t coming in with them. Despite the dramatic increase in minority populations in this immigrant nation over the past half-century, and a wave of multiculturalist consciousness, our major art museums remain largely the preserve of better-off whites, a group that is losing its majority status in urban settings.
And, more recently, there is evidence of significant shifts within that core audience, as once-shared pools of knowledge and interest change. These changes are most graphically evident at so-called encyclopedic institutions, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In them, non-Western art has always been a hard sell. But increasingly, so are formerly reliable stretches of Western art.
The Met’s European painting galleries, although splendidly reinstalled a few years back, get relatively light foot traffic, partly because the cultural references in much of the work have lost currency. Even a generation or two ago, the myths and religious subjects that form the basis of, say, Italian Renaissance painting would have been familiar to a general public, thanks to surviving public school variations on a “classical” education. But with changes in schooling in a country that has grown increasingly secular, viewers of art predating Impressionism typically don’t know what they’re looking at.
The 21st-century museum is going to have to find ways tell them. And this may well demand particular curatorial skills, such as ever more imaginative storytelling, and the use of quasi-ethnological approaches to presentation. Even in a media-driven age, much art is, at some basic level, personal. People made it, reacted to it, treasured it in ways we can identify with. But art is also intrinsically political, designed to shape a view of the world in empowering ways, ways that write certain people and ideas into the record and leave others out. We need to see art from both perspectives.
Museums like the Met are themselves grand history-writing-and-editing machines. Spectacle is built into them. But if they’re going to become 21st-century institutions, they’re also going to have to function in the mode of university teaching museums. Experimental — interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, self-critical, heterodox — approaches to art will have to be tried out if an audience for history, which is only as alive as our sense of investment in it, is not to be lost. (For a comparative look at some recent methods, I recommend Peggy Levitt’s “Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display,” just out from University of California Press.)
Whether any amount of inventiveness can arrest the current retreat from art’s past is, of course, a question. Again, the metrics are paradoxical. Whereas other branches of the arts, like classical music and ballet, are attracting fewer and fewer young people, museums are attracting many, yet the interest of those visitors appears to be specific and narrow: contemporary art. And because the future lies with this audience, museums are shaping themselves to it by acquiring and exhibiting more and more contemporary work.
I speak generally: The fact that older art has become hard to acquire, for reasons of price, scarcity and legality, is also a factor. But the reality is that, along with perennial favorites like Vermeer, van Gogh and Picasso, contemporary art is one of the few surefire draws. Even unlikely institutions are getting the message: not long ago, the Morgan Library & Museum did a Matthew Barney show.
This being so, you’d think that a new museum devoted to contemporary art would be the place to find a 21st-century paradigm, but so far, no. The Broad, which opened with tremendous fanfare in Los Angeles this fall, is not a contender. A classic example of a private museum transformed into a public monument, it is devoted to the collection of the multibillionaire Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe, longtime Los Angeles residents who began buying seriously in New York in the early 1980s, when stars of a slightly earlier era, like Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, were working in SoHo, and younger figures like Jeff Koons had emerged in the East Village.
Did the Broads shape the market or follow it? Either way, their collection follows the commercial mainstream so closely as to read less like a “personal choice” than an investment portfolio. Although many of their purchases date from the 1970s and ’80s, when some of the most innovative work was in film, photography, performance and various modes of Conceptualism, the couple heavily favored painting and sculpture. And almost everything in their holdings is by white men. If you were to read art history from this collection, black and Latino New York and Los Angeles barely existed, nor, apart from a patch of Western Europe (Germany), did any world beyond the coastal United States. This is not only a 20th-century museum; it is also one that dates in spirit to the pre-Conceptualist, pre-feminist, pre-black-power early 1960s.
A short time ago, you could have said the same of two pre-eminent New York institutions, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, which have only recently made efforts to enter the 21st — which, by definition, means global — century.
The Guggenheim is doing this in a half-measures way through a program called the UBS MAP Global Art Initiative. Beginning in 2012, with funding from the Zurich-based financial services company UBS, the museum hired three short-term curators, each with expertise in contemporary work from certain geographic locales: South and Southeast Asia; Latin America; and the Middle East and North Africa. Their job was to buy a certain amount of art from within each region and organize a group show of it, after which the work would enter the Guggenheim’s permanent collection.
Two of the exhibitions have taken place, with Middle Eastern and North African art still to come. The Asian and Latin American work was, over all, well chosen, if familiar; with the curators departing once their contracts are up, what are the prospects for further and more adventurous additions? In short, the UBS initiative feels like window dressing, a way to “globalize” the Guggenheim cosmetically without committing the museum to anything.
The MoMA equivalent, called the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives, or C-MAP, seems more substantial. An extension of the museum’s longstanding International Program, C-MAP is hard-wired into the museum as it calls on staff curators to research seldom-tapped areas in the existing collection and, working with colleagues and institutions abroad, to bring that art to light in exhibitions.
The first of these, “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde” in 2012-13, was a revelation. Even scholars familiar with the period hadn’t seen some of the earlier paintings, made during periods of post-Hiroshima upheaval. The current show, “Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980,” also introduces fascinating material. Much of it, Conceptual and radically political, forces a rethinking of the vaunted pre-eminence of the Western European and American work of that period that MoMA has staked out as prime turf.
If C-MAP’s energy can be sustained, and its purview extended, the museum has a chance of breaking out of the parochial definition of Modernism on which it was founded. MoMA is still a thoroughly 20th-century place: it buys as the market directs; its record with diversity is poor; its master narrative is obsolete. Yet a corner of the institution is showing signs of 21st-century life.
Even that cosmopolitan corner, though, has a limited reach, because it’s part of a museum that a significant population of Americans, defined by class and ethnicity, will probably never visit. And that population is growing larger every year. A museum can either accept the reality of us-and-them-ism as a given, or it can try something proactive and start taking art to where people are, turn itself into a museum without walls.
There have been isolated, one-off examples of museums operating in this mode from the 1980s forward, and some come immediately to mind. In 1995, under the sponsorship of the Newark Museum, the artist Pepón Osorio created an extraordinarily moving two-channel video installation called “Badge of Honor” in a storefront in a working-class neighborhood in Newark.
The piece, which was about a Latino father in prison communicating with his young son at home, was later transferred to the museum, and then to the Ronald Feldman Gallery in Manhattan. It had a very different resonance in each setting. It was particularly powerful at its original site, where its subject was a lived one. It got people talking about the social issues it raised, and about the fact that contemporary art was the means of raising them.
The Queens Museum, which has a history of fluid reciprocal relationships with communities in its ethnically rich borough, has supported many long-term projects outside its walls. Beginning in 2011, in conjunction with Creative Time, it sponsored what amounted to a year-and-a-half-long performance piece called Immigrants Movement International, conceived by the Cuban-born artist Tania Bruguera.
As part of an international project intended as a practical gesture of solidarity with people living illegally in countries not their own, Ms. Bruguera rented a two-story house in Corona, Queens, a neighborhood that was home to many new arrivals from Ecuador and Mexico. Living upstairs, she opened the first floor as the movement’s community center. Seven days a week, with a tiny paid staff and a roster of volunteers, many of them artists, the center provided free legal aid to undocumented immigrants, as well as language classes, health workshops and art lessons. It also ran discussion groups on how to bring the cause of civil rights for immigrants to the public eye.
Puzzled at first, members of the community embraced the center, its founding principle of performance as politics and the idea that they were participating in a living work of art that existed outside their local museum but was part of it. (This summer, Ms. Bruguera was named the first artist in residence at the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.)
Across the globe, 20th-century museums in the Bilbao mode continue to rise. That sounds like what we’ll be getting when the Saadiyat Cultural District, built on an artificial island off Abu Dhabi in the Persian Gulf, is finished in the next few years. It will include a Guggenheim franchise designed by Mr. Gehry and a Louvre Abu Dhabi, described by its architect, Jean Nouvel, as a “universal museum,” with “galleries enabling comparisons and contrasts between artworks of different historical periods and geographical areas,” with contemporary art in the mix.
Sound old? It is, including the fact that the audience envisioned for these museums is effectively preselected: an international leisure class for whom the island’s museums, luxury hotels and shopping malls are being built.
So the new 21st-century museum — where walls are dissolvable, access is open, and art is invited to tell us who we are as an arrogant, exclusionary but possibly teachable culture — is still awaited. Millenniums are artificial markers. But, like New Year’s resolutions, they can be put to practical use to spur invention and to strengthen a resolve to turn old thinking around. Invention and reinvention can start anytime, like now.
Wendell Castle Is Still America's Furniture Maverick
Wendell Castle is restless. That’s the first thing you realize when you enter his sprawling cedar-shingle studio compound—a former wheat- and soybean- processing plant he purchased in the late 1960s—in Scottsville, New York, just a short drive from Rochester. The multilevel, 15,000-square-foot space (one-third of which was added over the years to accommodate Castle’s metastatic operation) is a hub of artistic activity.
Everywhere you look there are employees drilling, sanding, computer modeling, or carving his latest—and increasingly massive—art-furniture pieces with big-boy toys, ranging from utterly manual carpenter clamps to a 5,000-pound ABB robot named Mr. Chips. Evidence of Castle’s creative output, six decades’ worth of archives (from his pioneering foray into stack-lamination carving to his early mold-form fiberglass experiments and radical Italian and Deco-inspired ’80s heyday to his new digital breakthroughs) is sprawled about various storage areas and showrooms. And if he needs a break from it all, there’s an on-site sculpture garden, an elevated paddle tennis court, and a small fleet of classic cars, which, depending on the day, might include a 1985 slant-nose Porsche 911 Turbo, a 1949 Mg TC, or his gem, a 1970 robin’s-egg-blue Jaguar E-Type convertible that would make even James Bond drool.
After a short blitz through this fun house, Castle asks if I want to grab lunch. It’s a balmy July afternoon, so we hop in the Jag, cruise over to Main Street, and slide into one of the cream-colored Naugahyde booths at the Scottsville Diner. This wood-paneled, Everywhere, U.S.A., greasy spoon is a study in suburban Americana—where everyone in the joint knows Castle’s name—so it is probably a little jarring to the locals when the godfather of American studio furniture is moved to tears over cheeseburgers and sodas within five minutes of our arrival. This last scene was not part of my plan—typically, you serve up the softballs first and then work around to the potential tearjerker—but there was no damming the flood of emotion after I asked the 82-year-old éminence grise the most perfunctory of studio-visit questions: What made you want to be an artist?
“That’s hard for me to talk about,” says Castle, choking up, his inflamed eye sockets rivaling the lipstick-red rims of his signature Anne & Valentin eyeglasses. His emotion, of course, is understandable: Finding your way from the conservative climes of Blue Rapids, Kansas, to the highest echelons of the blue-chip art world (by crafting fine art furniture, no less) seems all but impossible—then or now. In fact, as a child, the closest Castle ever got to creating sculpture or furniture was crafting soapbox-derby cars, tree houses, and model airplanes with the tools lying around his father’s workshop. A vocational agriculture teacher, the elder Castle educated local farmers on machinery repair and the logistics of crop rotation, as well as basic carpentry and blacksmithing, allowing young Wendell to tag along from time to time.
“He was a jack-of-all-trades, and not very good at any of them, but I was always around people who were making or fixing things,” Castle recalls. While it was assumed that he and his siblings would matriculate at a college, art was never considered a possible career choice. “My parents were adamant about my not being an artist, so I convinced them that industrial design was not art, it was industry, which of course was not true,” says Castle. “My grade school, junior high, and high school had no art classes, so I never had anyone look at my artwork or say I had talent. I did draw, but no one valued it. Whenever I finished drawings, they’d be in the wastebasket by the next day. It never even occurred to me I would ever be interested in art.”
However, in his sophomore year at the Methodist-leaning Baker University in eastern Kansas—a school he did not care to attend—Castle got the opportunity to take an elective. “I selected art for no particular reason, but I was really good at it right off. I could draw people, landscapes, and the teacher took me aside and said, ‘You’ve got to get out of this school.’ I went to the University of Kansas within a month,” he says, a second round of tears welling between his salt-colored mane and goatee. “He basically saved my life.”
Though it’s not a story he often tells, it’s illustrative of his core beliefs in the mysteries of the cosmos and its unlikely Venn-diagram intersections with artistic practice. “My life is random, but I’ve been in the right place at the right time a few times,” observes Castle, who paid for his schooling—after defying his parents’ wishes—by enlisting in the army. “I was on a train to New Jersey to get on a troop ship bound for Korea, but I had gotten very sick in basic training. I had pneumonia, and the train was nearly there, but they put me in the hospital. I was reassigned to Germany, which was a pretty lucky break, because I met a guy who was the battalion artist. I wasn’t aware the battalion even had an artist, but it turned out his tour of duty was almost over, so I applied for his job and he gave it to me. I made signs for an officers’ party or stuff like Keep the Mess Hall Clean and did some illustration for the battalion newspaper. It was a good deal, because when you had an actual job in the army, you didn’t have to pull guard duty.” While the winds of fate may have placed Castle in opportune situations—and out of harm’s way—his indefatigable work ethic and willingness to take risks are the true engines of his storied career.
“I think what the public sees now is the output of someone who has 10 ideas a day multiplied by 365 days a year. He never stops,” says Marc Benda, whose New York gallery, Friedman Benda, has represented Castle over the past decade, a period that some would argue has been the most prolific of the artist’s life. In the past year alone, Castle opened his fifth, and perhaps most ambitious, solo exhibition at the gallery in the spring— preceded by a solo at Carpenters Workshop gallery in Paris last fall—while his work has been all but ubiquitous at art and design fairs from London to San Francisco. Meanwhile, he just published his catalogue raisonné with the Artist Book Foundation; his daughter, Alison Castle, an editor at Taschen, is working on a documentary about her famous father; and this month marks the opening of the first museum exhibition to focus on his digitally crafted, robot-carved chairs, lamps, and tables, “Wendell Castle Remastered,” at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). Of course, nobody—not even Benda—expected such epic late-career energy when he first met Castle in 2002.
“At that time, Wendell was considered a towering figure of the 1960s and ’70s, an enormously important person, but people felt he was fading into the sunset,” says Benda. “In the first conversation I had with him, I asked him what he wanted to do, and he told me that he drew every day and had new ideas every day, and all he wanted was to realize those things. Everything else was secondary. I realized very quickly he didn’t just have ideas but groundbreaking ideas that needed to become part of the contemporary-design dialogue.”
Castle never set out to conquer the furniture world. In fact, were it not for a snide remark by a professor in a sculpture workshop at the University of Kansas, he might well have spent his days casting bronzes. “The sculpture studio had some power tools, and I was going to make a simple cabinet to keep art supplies in, more or less a box with a door, and the teacher came along and said, ‘You’re wasting your time on furniture? Get back to making sculpture,’” recalls Castle. “I thought, I’m going to get one over on him. I’ll make a piece of furniture and disguise it as sculpture well enough that he’ll believe it.”
In short order, Castle crafted the Stool sculpture—and then the Scribe stool—with walnut gunstock offcuts from a local factory. Capping the cuts in old piano key ivory and ebony, respectively, the works were functional as seating for only the slightest of users—“They’re not as comfortable as sitting on a fence,” Castle jokes—but their delicate, bonelike design not only won over his instructor but also won prizes and went on to be exhibited around the world. In fact, the dean of fine arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), Harold Brennan, caught a glimpse of the early work at the Craft Museum in New York and sent a letter to Castle’s tiny Manhattan studio in the spring of 1962, urging him to apply for a teaching job. “The program was very Danish at that point, and they had a Dane running it, and Brennan didn’t think they should be doing Danish anymore. He thought a sculptor would be a good idea, even though I wasn’t very well qualified,” says Castle, who got a position at RIT (where he is currently the artist in residence) and moved to Rochester that summer. Though he had planned to return to the city in two years’ time—and his staying led to a divorce from his first wife— he never looked back. “I liked it; I had a great studio, and I didn’t want to leave. And I liked teaching, the enthusiasm of the students and how they think about things is interesting to me.”
“For a young person, he was very confident in his vision and what he wanted to do, even if he was going off the normal course of action,” says Alyson Baker, director of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut, which explored the early part of Castle’s career three years ago with “Wendell Castle: Wandering Forms—Works from 1959–1979.” That early confidence allowed Castle to identify unlikely (if wandering) concepts, processes, and forms. So did, he argues, his lifelong battle with dyslexia. “It was a huge trouble in school, but I realize now that dyslexia is probably beneficial for artists. I think you see things differently than they are,” says Castle. “Misinformation is good.”
If Castle’s gunstock stools served as his opening salvo for translating misinformation into art—most of which succeeds, ironically, by presenting aesthetically pleasing visual conundrums to the viewer—his early foray into stack-lamination carving laid the battle plans for one of the most unlikely careers in contemporary furniture. Rather than carving from a single piece of hardwood, this craft process calls for stacking, gluing, and clamping boards into layered forms that are then carved into a desired shape.
It was cheaper, quicker, and offered more possibilities at a more monumental scale than the classical technique of liberating a form with mallet and chisel from a single block of raw material. While it was unheard-of in a fine art context at the time, it’s now common practice for many star designers, including Julia Krantz, Joaquim Tenreiro, and Jeroen Verhoeven (who uses the process sort of in reverse, famously bonding 741 layers of CNC-cut plywood slices together to make his iconic Cinderella table, one of Castle’s favorite works by a contemporary designer).
“Rather wonderfully, the process was inspired by a manual Wendell had as a kid that showed how to make a duck decoy,” explains Glenn Adamson, director of MAD. “You get this stepwise model duck, and then you shave down the corners. He realized he could make any shape he wanted to using that technique.”
Spurred by the organic forms of modernist icons like Jean Arp, Henry Moore, and Constantin Brancusi, Castle began shaping idiosyncratic pieces from these stacked-oak boards that questioned the very nature, purpose, and potential of studio furniture. A sensual three-person settee floated like a cloud over a single leg (or perhaps ankle) attached to a puddling base. His Wall table resembled a worm supporting itself between two 90-degree planes. He also carved chests for blankets and stereos that resembled ripened produce falling or rising from a stem, and epic seven-foot-tall mahogany and cherry lamps that mimicked the fruit, or tulips and mushrooms, as well as biomorphic desks and tables whose planar surfaces rose like waves from serpentine blocks of stacked white oak and walnut. After exhibiting work in Milan in the early ’60s, Castle began experimenting with mold-cast, color-infused fiberglass—most memorably in his Molar chair and Fat Albert lamps that put an American spin on the work he’d been seeing in Domus by Ettore Sottsass and Joe Colombo. Though they were marginally successful at the time, they are now comeback hits, thanks to a reproduction deal he inked with R & Company in the late aughts. Regardless of the market, they’ve been iconic since their debut: Designer Karim Rashid found the work so intriguing as a teenager that it later served as the inspiration for his “blobject” concept and Blob chair. “These fluid-like objects, created with new materials, spoke about a soft, ethereal, and technological world,” says Rashid, who especially loved Castle’s Molar chair and Cloud shelf. “I always loved the ’70s works that were in the genre of Eero Aarnio, Luigi Colani, Verner Panton, and Olivier Mourgue. This work appealed to me because I have always had an affinity for organic forms that are an extension of us and nature.”
When Rashid was still in diapers, Castle’s work fortuitously caught the eye of maverick dealer Lee Nordness, who curated the seminal traveling exhibition “Objects: USA,” which helped propel craft beyond the mainstream into the realm of fine art. “I was the first craft person he ever exhibited, and he did well with sales,” says Castle, who had a groundbreaking New York solo debut with Nordness in 1968. This early success encouraged Nordness to find other makers and expand the craft contingent of his Madison Avenue operation with the likes of Lenore Tawney, Dale Chihuly, and Peter Voulkos. “It was a lot of freedom because I had made fairly outrageous pieces. They look conservative today, but they were big, bigger than a lot of furniture at the time. In a sense, I never focused my career in terms of making things sellable. I’ve almost done the opposite.”
When Castle finally settled into a rhythm with his stack-lamination process, he essentially blew up his practice (one of many about-faces in his career) in the mid 1970s. At the time, he was teaching a still-life drawing class at SUNY Brockport. “One day I took my sport coat off and threw it over the back of a chair and said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to draw,’” recalls Castle. “I drew it, too, several times, and I noticed that in my drawings, I didn’t try to implicate the fabric’s texture. I just drew the coat and the chair so the chair had the same texture as the coat, and it made me think they could be the same thing. Being a person who worked with wood, I thought, Wouldn’t it be cool to carve that chair and coat out of one thing.” Merging classical furniture forms (coatracks, desk chairs, a demilune table) with still-life objects (keys, coats, hats, gloves) in one solid carved piece, Castle resurrected the Italian Renaissance motif of the woodworking still life by composing elements with an attention to detail reserved for a Dutch Old Master painting or a set design. While these meticulously carved trompe l’oeil sculptures failed to sell during a 1978 exhibition at Carl Solway gallery in New York, they quickly sold out in a subsequent show with Alexander Milliken, and are now highly coveted on the secondary market.
“I understand it now better than I did at the time,” says Castle of the impulse for this foray into realism. “At the time, I wanted my work to be accepted, appreciated, displayed, sold on an equal level with sculpture. Then I said, ‘What’s the opposite of this?’ ”
Castle created some of his most conceptual and technical work in this vein—notably Table with Tablecloth, 1978, and Ghost Clock, 1985, two shrouded forms that feel like the sculptural forebears of David Hammons’s tarp paintings—in the late ’70s and early ’80s, but by then he was already pivoting again to a more decorative, Memphis group–inspired style of highly ornamental (borderline cartoonish) work. Though it was market- driven to a large extent, there are undoubtedly many iconic pieces from this colorful period, including a suite of painted and veneered pieces (chairs, a piano, and a desk), inspired sets of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, his beloved Star cabinets, numerous rare wood clocks, and his infamous Pope’s chair, conceived after Milliken suggested that Castle make a chair for John Paul II’s 1987 tour of the United States.
“Milliken seemed to think there should be this special chair made for the pope and asked me to do a drawing. The pope saw a drawing, and he hated it and said, ‘I’m not sitting in that,’ ” recalls Castle, with a laugh, as he shows me the disarticulated and extremely dusty chair in his attic, which sort of resembles the Design Star version of the Island of Misfit Toys. “But I went ahead and made the chair anyway. I’ve torn it apart since, but I’ve been thinking I might redo it in some way.” While Benda was thrilled to hear about this idea, Castle doesn’t really acknowledge the period as a success, and it was roundly avoided by both the Aldrich and MAD for their exhibitions.
“I think that certain phases of my work were failures, even though there were some good pieces,” Castle admits. “In the ’80s, when I was doing the so-called fine furniture with the Art Deco influence, I was encouraged by Milliken, and he loved that kind of work and it did sell; it was challenging because of the type of craftsmanship, but in hindsight I shouldn’t have been doing that at all. It’s not always necessarily good to be facile.”
Another regret for Castle during this period was leaving Milliken to work with the collector-turned-dealer Peter Joseph. “Peter commissioned me to do quite a lot of work, then we became more friendly, and then he became upset that Milliken was taking 50 percent of all this work. He thought he was overpaying, and then he came to me and asked if I’d do 100 percent of my work for him,” recalls Castle. At the time, Joseph was opening his own gallery and furnishing a 10,000-square-foot Park Avenue penthouse and a large Southampton estate. “Between furnishing his two homes and the gallery, he said, ‘I’ll buy everything you make.’ That was unfortunate because I liked Alexander Milliken a lot, and he was really pissed that I would do that, but I couldn’t say no because it was almost double the money. But in hindsight it was a good move only financially.”
In fact, it even proved financially troubling after Joseph died of cancer in 1998. The dealer had been arbitrarily inflating Castle’s prices, creating what the artist calls a “false economy” by prearranging to buy the biggest and most expensive piece in any given show—at a greatly reduced price from the retail figure—for himself. “When it all collapsed, it did in almost everyone who showed with him,” says Castle, who had been ramping up his studio apparatus, hiring more and more assistants to meet the demand for the hundreds of pieces (including a now famous library) that Joseph commissioned. The bottom really dropped out after Joseph’s widow, who wasn’t a fan of Castle’s work, dumped nearly all of it on the market at once. “I was competing against myself,” he says. Castle remained in a fallow period for years after, until Benda and his partner, Barry Friedman, came into the picture. “Artists have to be selfish to the point where they are able to create and put out into the world whatever they need to put out, and in Wendell’s case it was the opposite—he wasn’t selfish enough for a long time,” says Benda. In order to resurrect his practice in the wake of the go-go ’80s and ’90s, Castle posed a simple question to himself: What if I had no employees and had to do everything myself again?
“The answer was pretty clear, I would do exactly what I did when that was true in 1962,” he says. “Partly because of my age, I’m not going to be experimenting with too many radically different directions, so I need to focus on what is the best.”
Long before Castle enlisted Mr. Chips, the robot, to do his carving, he presented a seminal work—the Triad chair—to Benda, which was pivotal according to the dealer. “He showed me a lot of drawings, and I was thrilled to be in dialogue with him, but I wasn’t yet on the wagon in the way I was with Ettore Sottsass, whose last show was dedicated to Mondrian. Ettore said he had wanted to do an homage to Mondrian his whole professional life. Wendell was doing an homage to himself,” says Benda. “This Triad chair combined all the virtues of his practice, and it was composed of these volumes that were undeniably him, but it didn’t look like a knockoff of 1965 or 1975; there was something when you looked at it, you knew it was a piece made in 2006. You could trace our professional relationship back to that chair. He started thinking forward again instead of back, harnessing all the things he’d learned before.”
Tacked up on the walls of the various workshops, offices, and showrooms of the Scottsville studio—including Castle’s personal studio, where he still breaks out a file from time to time—you’ll find numerous poster prints of “My 10 Adopted Rules of Thumb.” More gestural than gospel, the notion for the rules originated with a phrase Castle heard during a 1990 artist talk that ventured into Zen Buddhism. He later tweaked the aphorism, which is now known as Rule 10: “If you hit the bull’s-eye every time, the target is too near.” These rules now seem to offer spiritual guidance for his current approach—especially Rule 5: “The dog that stays on the porch will find no bones”—and he’s even planning to add two more when he narrows down the most illuminating koans from a list of 50 he’s been amassing for years.
“He’s a risk taker and he gets bored easily. He always wants a new challenge,” says Adamson, noting that Castle’s willingness to continually move the bull’s-eye certainly played a part in the artist’s decision to buy Mr. Chips four years ago, which in turn prompted MAD to give him a show. “I thought that was so amazing, that at his age he would be expanding his tool kit in this radical way, engaging with these automated digital manufacturing techniques and using a robot as his primary carving tool after all this time; it seemed absolutely astounding to us. The basic idea of the show is: What happens when a maker’s skill goes digital? There’s also the comparison of his early breakthrough work with this new breakthrough—50 years apart.”
Citing Paul McCarthy’s massive walnut bookends as facsimiles, Castle argues the robot has allowed him to explore depth, volume, and interiority to degrees that simply aren’t possible by hand. While Mr. Chips doesn’t increase Castle’s output—programming can actually take longer than hand-carving—it does help with crafting editions made in mirrored unique multiples. It also increases precision immensely. For the most recent Friedman Benda show, “gathering Momentum,” the artist explored (and exploited) his love of ellipsoids, which dates back to early fascination with auto design and illustration, by using phallic, football-like bullets to suspend sensual flower-evoking seating elements that are undeniably sexual in form and title (Above, Beyond, Within; Temptation). He also took a page from William Burroughs with his new Misfit chairs, which are essentially parts cut from two or three separate chairs that are then reassembled to make a new collaged piece. “I wouldn’t even think of making stuff like this in the ’70s because it would have been ridiculous to make a chair that weighs 800 pounds because nobody could move it,” he says. “But I don’t worry about that now because anybody who is going to buy this piece isn’t going to move it anyway.” In other words, rooms are now designed around Castle’s furniture, not the reverse.
“It’s a different language from five years ago,” the artist says. His 2010 series of darkly titled rocking chairs—inspired by the tilted-wheel motion captured in Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s iconic 1914 photograph of a Bugatti race car—radically defied perception, and seemingly gravity, but even they aren’t fast enough to keep up with his latest forms.
“To push the work further, I wanted to work large and bring in these other potential problems, like things having to be disassembled, because you couldn’t get them through the door. The solutions have opened up real possibilities,” says Castle. “We haven’t even scratched the surface of what we can do.”
For MAD, he’ll do his best to push the envelope. He’s constructing a massive lamp that “eliminates the ceiling, kind of this monument to the technology he’s working with now,” says Adamson. There will also be a massive one-seat chair attached to a peanut-shaped chest of drawers, which is currently being assembled in one of the smaller finishing workshops, as well as an epic 16-foot-long dining table called Suspended Belief, only in a plaster-model form at the moment, that floats off a cluster of treelike, eight-foot-tall ellipsoids. He was even thinking of making a 30- to 40-piece total environment—an extension of his two-story 2013 installation, A New Environment, which was based on Environment for Contemplation, the foam-padded, Flokati-lined reflection chamber he made in 1969—but he realized that, no matter how perfectly he selected the wood (he works primarily in ash these days), he would be able to assemble it only once. “You could make it in fiberglass, but I planned to put a chair inside, so there would have to be a lot more happening in that chair; it should be air-conditioned, maybe there’s a TV, some stereo equipment,” says Castle, his mind running wild, as Mr. Chips makes some precision cuts on a chair while his daughter, Alison, films in the background. Going forward, he hopes to work more in glass (he’s currently crafting a series of weighty martini glasses for Corning, which mimic his ellipsoidal chairs) and perhaps do another massive room install, but with his 83rd birthday around the corner, there is no time for anyone else’s vision but his.
“These days I’m thinking this way: I want the things that I make to have a life of great length. Whoever buys whatever I’m making now, they’ll get divorced, move, die, and the things will go somewhere else, so I really want to entertain ideas that have the chance for many lives,” he says, noting that while he wishes this glut of attention could have come a couple of decades ago, he’s perhaps better equipped now to appreciate the adoration. In fact, when he’s home on the weekends, he claims he’ll put on jazz records and dance by himself—when nobody else is looking.
“I love what I’m doing so much. It’s so exciting, so much fun,” he says. “There was always some hesitancy about going too far in the past, but now there isn’t. I have all this wonderful freedom.”
Matthew Barney’s Most Punishing Tour: ‘River of Fundament’
The studio of the artist Matthew Barney in Long Island City, Queens, sits amid a collection of cookie-cutter warehouses where the most infernal sight is usually a chained guard dog, no Cerberus he. But at various times over the last several years, the studio was transformed into a version of a netherworld so hellish that even Mr. Barney, who has a stomach for such things, approached his limits. There were, for example, the dead pigs being devoured by maggots. And the eviscerated cow carcass, lying in a shallow pool. “That water was really pretty nasty by the end,” Mr. Barney recalled recently.
The tableaux were created for “River of Fundament,” a movie almost six hours long that is the most ambitious undertaking by Mr. Barney since the “Cremaster” cycle, the symbol-saturated films made beginning in the mid-1990s that established him as one of the most important artists of his generation. As with those films and much of his work since the early days of his career, the new film functions on its own but also as a dynamo for spawning, shaping and superimposing meaning onto a body of sculpture. That body, about 85 works and more than seven years in the making, is on display for the first time in the United States, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The exhibition opened Sept. 13 and is to be the only American stop for the work, shown first in Munich and Hobart, Tasmania.
The film and sculpture are structured around a creative reading of Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel “Ancient Evenings,” set mostly in 13th century B.C. Egypt, a monumentally ambitious book that was pummeled by critics, though sometimes with grudging respect for Mailer’s attempt to haul the Book of the Dead into contemporary letters. Harold Bloom called it an “extravagant invention” but added, “I don’t intend to give an elaborate plot summary, since if you read ‘Ancient Evenings’ for the story, you will hang yourself.”
It’s probably wise advice to follow when talking about “River of Fundament,” too. Mr. Barney may have never met an elaborate liturgy that didn’t interest him — “Cremaster” is structured around Masonic rites, Celtic myth and Mormonism, among other belief systems — and his work has been deeply shaped by anatomical metaphors. “River of Fundament” finds both sweet spots, centering on Mailer’s deeply carnal version of Egyptian cosmology in which the dead seeking reincarnation must pass through a river of feces — a stand-in for a colon, in which sustenance is processed into waste that has the power in turn to fertilize new sustenance.
Mr. Barney said he labored to pare the sex and scatology that Mailer piled onto almost every page. But the film — arranged around live performances filmed in Los Angeles, Detroit and New York — still goes much further than the “Cremaster” series in forcing the viewer to confront the corporeal, featuring, among other things, defecation, urination, anal sex, a gurgling colostomy bag and a scene in which a bird emerges from a vagina. The film’s story may be Egyptian, but the adjectives it most readily conjures are Latinate: excremental, cloacal, mephitic.
And since its release last year, its critical reception — while not Mailer bad — has not been particularly kind. “The hooey and the high points are hopelessly intertwined,” Jed Perl wrote in The New Republic. The Hollywood Reporter said: “Barney owes us more inspired imagery in exchange for six hours of lives that we are not likely to wrest back from the rulers of the Underworld.”
In much the same way that the movie is about human life in its most elemental and sometimes violent states, the sculpture that grew out of the movie seems — more than anything Mr. Barney has made before — almost primordial, as if some of it were cast up by the earth itself. In two extensive interviews, one at his studio and another at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s sprawling Geffen Contemporary space in Little Tokyo just after installation was completed, Mr. Barney, 48, said that for several years he felt he had worked himself into a conceptual corner making sculpture tied closely to the narrative of his films and that he couldn’t see a compelling way to continue. His last major piece was “Drawing Restraint 9,” a Japanese-influenced story about characters aboard a whaling ship, made in collaboration with Björk, his romantic partner for many years (from whom he had a highly public split in 2013; her newest album “Vulnicura,” which she calls a “complete heartbreak album,” is about the breakup.)
The highly unlikely way out of the creative corner for Mr. Barney ended up being “Ancient Evenings.” He had cast Mailer in the “Cremaster” series, and Mailer, who died in 2007, became not only a mentor but also a kind of peculiar American demiurge in the Barney pantheon. Mailer asked Mr. Barney to read the Egyptian book, something he resisted at first partly because he felt that the material seemed too close to work he had already done and partly because he tends not to read fiction. “I don’t really read for pleasure,” he said.
But the book, set at a time when Egyptians were making great advances in metal working, casting and the development of alloys, gave him a way to begin thinking about materials and the history of sculpture in ways he hadn’t previously — in effect, to think about a project in which sculpture would drive filmmaking more than it had in the past. “In many ways, the real leads the artificial in ‘River of Fundament,’ ” Mr. Barney said one damp summer morning in his studio, wearing heavy black boots, Dickies work pants and a pristine Detroit Tigers cap. “I’ve always had an interest in colliding the natural and artificial, but I think what makes this work different from what I’ve done before is that the natural is foregrounded.”
Across the way sat a piece bound for Los Angeles that illustrated the point. It looked like a liquid metal explosion frozen in mid-bang, which is pretty much what it is. It was made at the Walla Walla Foundry in Washington, a highly regarded contemporary-art-making space, using a new — and highly volatile process — in which molten bronze is poured into a pit filled with a mixture of clay and water. The metal protests violently as it cools, resulting in forms that look like an Abstract Expressionist atom bomb but also like a species of underwater fern. “The thing I like about these is how they almost border on a hippie sensibility,” said Mr. Barney, whose work has probably never once been described as bordering on a hippie anything.
“There is some control over the form, but very little,” he added appreciatively.
In interviews, Mr. Barney is often deeply uncomfortable with questions about the meaning of his work or about his own life in anything other than metaphorical terms. But he is more expansive about the new project, at least about his artistic motivations, particularly filming in Detroit, with its visions of an American netherworld. “The first visits there were the most important to me in figuring out what the project was going to be about,” he said. “It’s a place where you see every layer of history exposed, like an open wound.”
The water-cast sculptures relate to the movie in that they can evoke the Nile or the tears of Isis that flood it annually. But they seem much more about Mr. Barney trying to find a way to give himself permission to use bronze, a material he has never worked with. “Before this I don’t think I would have ever been interested in using bronze because of its — well — loadedness,” he said. “It just carries so much historical weight.”
Other pieces are made using a veritable periodic chart — zinc, lead, copper, gold, silver, iron and sulfur. And wood also appears for the first time (“I told a friend of mine once that if I ever did a piece in wood he should shoot me”) in a ship-like sculpture based on a movie-set facsimile of Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights apartment, a kind of spiritual limbo where much of the Pharaonic plot unfolds.
“For me the work is like going to the underground — it’s really archaeological,” said Philippe Vergne, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art. “I think he has in many ways brought something to the history of sculpture and of filmmaking and narrative that was not there before.”
For the show — curated by Okwui Enwezor of the Haus der Kunst in Munich and coordinated in Los Angeles by Lanka Tattersall — the museum constructed a large, completely enclosed movie theater inside the Geffen, where screenings of the film, which Mr. Barney made in collaboration with the composer Jonathan Bepler, will take place several times a week. Mr. Barney said he very much hoped visitors would see the sculpture before or after seeing the film, despite the film’s length and the uncompromising subject matter.
“I think it does push the limits of what people can take, but it should be like going on a journey that affects you physically,” he said. “By the time you’re finished, you should be tired enough that you’re seeing the scenes in the third act in a very different way.” (When I saw the movie alone in a screening room in New York, Mike Bellon, the producer and a veteran Barney studio hand, walked in as the lights were coming up and said, only half-jokingly: “I’m glad to see you’re still here.”)
While Mr. Barney’s work still has affinities with that of 20th-century and contemporary artists like Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Lynda Benglis, you get the sense — underscored in the exhibition by the addition of two ancient Egyptian pieces borrowed from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — that he is more and more drawn to the premodern than to the art of his time. (Mailer once described “Ancient Evenings” as having “no tone of the present.”)
Shaun Caley Regen, whose Los Angeles gallery gave Mr. Barney his first solo exhibition in 1991 and is now showing a selection of water-cast sculptures, said: “I think there’s a clear line between what he was doing in the early ’90s and what he’s doing now, but it’s gotten much more operatic, more epic. He’s totally out of any place he’s ever worked before.”
You also get the sense — as vast as the scope of the “Cremaster” project was — that Mr. Barney is swinging for the fences with “River of Fundament,” risking failure far more than he has in the past, with the shade of Mailer as his defiant guide. “One of my big reasons for being drawn to Norman was what I thought of as his willingness to fail, to risk a kind of failure that was useful to the rest of us,” he said. “Knowing Norman, I’m sure he would roll over in his grave to hear me say that.”
Is Eli Broad's New Museum More Than Just a White Elephant?
“There was a time when it was said that if you wanted to make it as an artist, you had to make it in New York," said Eli Broad. “That's no longer the case."
The billionaire philanthropist was speaking at the Broad, the new private museum in Downtown Los Angeles that he commissioned with his wife Edythe to showcase their over 2,000-work collection. Over 85,000 tickets have reportedly already been reserved to view the acclaimed collection, which houses works by artists including Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari,Barbara Kruger, and Jeff Koons.
When the doors of the museum, a $140-million structure designed byDiller Scofidio and Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, open to the public on Sunday September 20 (admission is, and always will be, free), it will not only be a historical moment for the Los Angeles art scene, it will be a game changer.
So how much of the storied collection is on display? "About 15 percent; if you don't include what's displayed from our storage windows," said Joanne Heyler, the museum's director and chief curator. "Over time, there will be many in-depth displays of many of the artists that are part of the collection that are not on display today."
"My colleagues [in the art world] say to me, 'I can't stay away from LA very long, without missing something essential,'" Ms. Heyler said talking further about the definitive shift from other cities, like New York, to Los Angeles. "To me, that's the real key."
The new museum is awe-inspiring and breathtaking. Rooms are dedicated to various artists, such as Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami, and Damien Hirst. The ground floor entrance area is deliberately sparse with only a couple of pieces on display. But this minimalist approach allows the viewer to immerse herself in the architecture. Whether you're a modernist or not, it is undoubtedly beautiful and deserves your full attention.
Why is the Broad one of the best museums in North America? Consider the following:
The Collection
"Los Angeles has become one of four major cultural capitals in the world, together with NY, London and Paris," said Broad, "and I think Los Angeles has really become the contemporary art capital of the world." With that in mind, when you walk through the museum and see Lari Pittman, Warhol, Kruger, and Koons, it becomes very difficult not to bend to Broad's definitive statement.
The Storage Vault
Past the elevator, over a stainless steel railing and through a steep stairwell, a patch of glass offers a peek into the museum's storage area known as "the vault," which offers 21,000 square feet of collection storage space. Slat upon slat of art storage panels line up in meticulous, methodical perfection. It is almost a separate art installation in itself giving the viewer an intimate behind the scenes look at the heart of the museum.
The Curation
Heyler has been with the Broads for over twenty years. She is the yin to their artistic yang. Her curation of the art on display (and heaven knows she's familiar with every piece in the vault) is personal and intrinsically flattering—in a completely professional way—in the sense that she knows the art intimately; she can determine what piece will or will not complement the next.
The Architecture
It may have cost $140 million and many years, but it's worth it. Working hand in hand with the Broads, Diller Scofidio + Renfro have created a space that is akin in scope to something like the Guggenheim, but more user-friendly, challenging, and approachable—from the ground up. On the Los Angeles front, the Getty may be approachable and LACMA offers many an interactive opportunity (see Chris Burden), but the Broad offers a level of intimacy, despite its large scale, like no other museum in LA County.
The Vibe
The Broads have been collectors for over 50 years. Like fellow influential collector couple Dorothy and the late Herb Vogel, their devotion and love for the art that graces these walls overflows into the very heart of the museum itself. The staff adore the couple, and have come to love the art as well. Many staffers gushed over their favorite pieces, only to switch gears halfway through their description. This lyrical love of art is apparent everywhere, from the first floor to the third, making the experience all the more enhanced by the loyalty and commitment of the entire team.
The App
Keeping up with the Millennials, et al, the Broad offers not one but four audio tours, including one that enlists artists Barbara Kruger and John Baldessari, among others, to weigh in on the art of their peers. There's also an audio tour just for children, led by longtime art and education advocate, LeVar Burton.
"It took me a little by surprise," said Ms. Heyler who discussed her favorite pieces with us, albeit slightly, "not because the artworks aren't spectacular, which they are. But there is a wall on the third floor that has three 60s Lichtenstein paintings; there's a Mondrian-referencing painting on the left, a black-and-white flower based in the center, and one of his classic comic strip blondes on the right. I think formally. . . it looks beautiful."
Planning ahead, you can get 30–45 seconds in the Yayoi Kusuma installation, tripping the light fantastic. Do yourself a favor—don't take your phone. By the time you attempt to get the perfect selfie, time will be up and you'll have done yourself a terrible disservice. On the flip side, since the Broad is eternally free to everyone, there's always another chance for a photo opp.
Despite its controversial past, a UK panel rules that Pierre-Auguste Renoir's The Coast of Cagnes will remain the property of the Bristol City Council.
The Spoliation Advisory Panel, which reviews claims for cultural objects at British institutions that may have been sold by Jewish owners under duress in Nazi Germany, has determined that the Renoir canvas was sold due to debt, rather than pressure from the authorities.
An unknown buyer purchased The Coast of Cagnes in 1935 at an auction in Berlin, from Margraf & Co., a Berlin art dealership owned by Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer from 1929 – 1937. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, "systematic anti-Semitic harassments and violence were unleashed upon the Oppenheimers," reports the panel.
The Oppenheimers quickly fled to France, and the Nazis attempted to collect inheritance taxes on the sizable estate of the previous owner, Albert Loeske, who transferred his business to the couple when he died in 1929. Loeske's fortune was estimated to be approximately £5-10 million, according to a 1931 report by the Canberra Times.
The Renoir was among the works sold at auction to reportedly settle this debt. However, the report notes, "there is no evidence as to the price the Painting achieved at auction, and no conclusive evidence of what happened to the proceeds of the sale. Without more, it is a matter of some speculation that the proceeds were paid to the tax office in order to discharge the tax debt levied on the Oppenheimers following their inheritance from Mr Loeske."
Jakob died in France in 1941, and Rosa was later killed at Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, though their three children survived.
The Spoliation Advisory Panel's report reviewed this evidence and concluded that "in all the circumstances, the panel finds that the moral strength of Margraf's claim is insufficient to justify a recommendation that the painting be transferred or that an ex-gratia payment be made," reports the Guardian.
Leopold Moller, the last owner of the painting, escaped Germany in 1939, and bequeathed it to the Friends of Bristol Art Gallery when he died in 1999.
The Spoliation Advisory Panel's decision is surprising, but not without precedent. This past spring, a German panel found that the sale of the Guelph Treasure in 1935 by a quartet of Jewish art dealers "can not be considered a forced sale." The ownership dispute remains ongoing.
Although almost 50 countries have pledged to support efforts to return Nazi-looted artwork and valuables to their rightful owners and heirs, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and the World Jewish Restitution Organization have found such efforts lacking.
