Los Angeles County Museum on Fire

Italy Lends “Lion Attacking a Horse” to Getty

William Poundstone — Wed, 30 May 2012 14:52:34 +0000

Italy is making another major antiquity loan to the Getty Villa. The recently conserved Hellenistic marble Lion Attacking a Horse, from the Capitoline Museums, Rome, will be on display in Malibu from August 12, 2012, through February 4, 2013. The violent subject inspired Renaissance bronzes and George Stubbs’ echt-romantic paintings.

How Fluxus Invented Land Art

William Poundstone — Mon, 28 May 2012 03:32:48 +0000

Are you up for a land art show that includes Yoko Ono and omits Michael Heizer? Well you ought to be. MOCA’s “Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974″ is the latest Geffen Building-sized rewriting of art history. It’s got Ono and plenty of other artists you’ve never thought of in the earthwork way. How about Jean Tinguely, Isamu Noguchi, Judy Chicago, Joseph Beuys, and Lawrence Weiner? It omits Heizer—despite the fact that MOCA owns his Double Negative—because he hates group shows.

“Land Art” has become a reductive term for a handful of male American artists who used the bulldozer like Bob Ross used the palette knife. “Ends of the Earth,” organized by MOCA curator Philipp Kaiser and UCLA art historian Miwon Kwon, is multi-media and global. Many big names make cameos, and many lesser-known artists deserve a new look. Pay close attention to Patricia Johanson, the absurdist Humphry Repton.

The show is most innovative in unearthing the roots of land art. A jumping-off point is a 1965 British science-fiction novel, Brian Aldiss’s Earthworks. While waiting for a bus to Passaic, N.J., Robert Smithson bought an American paperback edition. The cover illustration, a surrealist-inflected landscape of vagina dentata, prefigures the movement’s ambiguities, gender and otherwise. Aldiss’ hero transports Sahara sand to poisoned, post-apocalyptic Europe to make soil for agriculture. The MOCA show has a half a dozen “significant” piles of dirt, expensively transported to Little Tokyo from somewhere else.

“Earth Works” became the title of the 1968 show at Virginia Dwan Gallery that inaugurated the movement. MOCA reunites works from that and other early shows. Dwan’s show included the three-legged stool of Smithson, Heizer, and Walter DeMaria—plus Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, and Dennis Oppenheim. In the early shows, land art was a subject, not a clique, with connections to minimalism and science fiction. There’s a sci-fi note to Tinguely’s Study for the End of the World No. 2, in which robots blew up a shopping cart full of dynamite in the Nevada desert, near the atomic test site. (It was commissioned by NBC news, and David Brinkley supplied color commentary.) An Isamu Noguchi wallpaper (above) looks like a plan for communicating with aliens.

Yet the proper origin of land art may be in the Nouveaux Réaliste movement and/or Fluxus. In a c. 1960 letter Yves Klein wrote, “I will raze everything at the surface of the entire earth until it is flat. I will fill the valleys with mountains, then I will pour concrete over the surface of all the continents.”

OK, that’s avant-garde manifesto boilerplate. Since Klein never intended to do it, not seriously, it can’t be compared to Spiral Jetty. At MOCA the letter is paired with a Klein blue monochrome painting in the form of a lumpy relief map. A bit of hand-waving links it to Klein’s cosmic theories and Yuri Gagarin’s 1961 space flight, wherein the cosmonaut said the earth was a delicate shade of blue.

George Maciunas claimed fellow Fluxus artist Ben Vautier as the true inventor of land art. Vautier, influenced by Klein, Duchamp, and Cage, is best known for the text painting that translates “ART IS USELESS / GO HOME” and for the Total Art Matchbox.

Fluxus is anarchic, funny, and ephemeral; land art is dead-serious and uses materials that aren’t going anywhere fast. How can there be a connection? MOCA is showing prints from Vautier’s Terrain Vague, a 1961 B&W photo series of industrial landscapes. In each image Vautier has placed a text painting of the words Terrain Vague (“Wasteland”). It’s not hard to see what Maciunas was talking about. Vautier was photographing “Passaic” (urban-fringe vacant lots) six years before Smithson was.

By inserting his text painting into the landscape, Vautier anticipated the interventions of the heavy-duty land artists. He used text to comment on ravaged landscapes with a deadpan not entirely unlike Smithson’s Artforum essay, “Monuments of Passaic”. Vautier was also ahead of the curve in using photography to document an essentially conceptual piece. Land art was an activity (literally) outside of galleries and museums. But Fluxus had already been there with mail art, boxes, and happenings.

Did Vautier invent land art? I’m not ready to bet on that, but posing that kind of question is one of the best things a museum survey can do.

(Below, Alice Aycock’s Clay #2)

LACMA to Sell a Dutch Master

William Poundstone — Fri, 25 May 2012 21:12:46 +0000

LACMA is selling A Forest Clearing with Cattle, a Dutch landscape by Philips de Koninck with figures by Adriaen van de Velde, at Christie’s sale of Old Master paintings on June 6. As usual the proceeds (estimated at $400,000 to $600,000) will go to upgrade the collection.

The unusual thing about the sale is that the painting was an Ahmanson Foundation gift, bought on the advice of LACMA curators in 1986. But that was then, and this is now. In 2009 the Carters gave the museum a smaller but far more luminous Koninck, and this one is unexciting in comparison. There’s a major Koninck panoramic landscape at the Getty.

Art and Snake Oil

William Poundstone — Fri, 25 May 2012 00:07:49 +0000

What do Philadelphia’s Dr. Albert Barnes and L.A.’s Lynda and Stewart Resnick have in common? Answer: art collecting and vague medical claims. In case you missed it, the FTC has ruled that the Resnicks ran “false or misleading” ads touting the ability of their POM Wonderful pomegranate juice to prevent heart disease, prostate cancer, and erectile dysfunction. The Resnicks have gone on the offensive with a web campaign (in today’s New York Times site) that defies the Feds by reprising the very ads found most egregious (one of them below).

Dr. Albert Barnes had his own naysayers. He made his fortune with Argyrol, a patent medicine consisting of colloidal silver. It was promoted for a wide range of complaints, many the sort that weren’t discussed in Philadelphia society. The principal use was for the clap.

The packaging didn’t mention that. It contained the alarmingly modest claim that it was “non-poisonous.” (A POM Wonderful website quotes this unintended testimonial from a FTC Judge: “The safety of pomegranate juice is not in doubt.”)

Barnes was smart to sell the company just before antibiotics came on the market. Argyrol has since passed through several corporate owners and is still being made. It’s not entirely clear why. The website has a sketchy list of possible uses: “cleansing eye of germs and/or particles,” treating nose and throat ”irritation or discomfort,” and “male VD/STD prevention/disinfection.”

Argyrol offers a cream that purportedly “kills HIV/HSV2 viruses” and offers relief for herpes. The Argyrol site has a semi-coherent rant about a test of the drug’s use against HIV. It insinuates that the University of Texas tried to steal rights to Argyrol as an AIDS drug, but that it continues to be made by the Argyrol company “just the way Dr. Barnes would have wanted it.”

Colloidal silver, the active ingredient of Argyrol, can have the side-effect of turning the skin a cadaverous gray-blue color. Stan Jones, a Libertarian candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2002, got tons of free publicity because of his unusual skin tone—result of consuming too much of a homemade colloidal silver brew. Jones probably wasn’t the best walking advertisement for laxer drug regulation.

That’s one thing to be said for pomegranate juice: it won’t change the color of your skin, just your shirts, tablecloths, and carpets. Still, it’s hard to top Lynda’s 2010 defense of POM Wonderful: ”Please. We are fruit. HELLO?”

Getting back to art, consider this parallel: Barnes’ art was permanently moved to a modern structure by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, its interior a simulacrum of the original Barnes Foundation museum in Merion. The Resnicks’ art was temporarily shown in the Resnick Pavilion in 2010, a modern structure by Renzo Piano, with interiors designed to resemble the Resnicks’ traditionally styled Beverly Hills mansion. Both reconstructions were viewed as weird (“a Twilight Zone-like experience” said Tyler Green of the neo-Barnes).

How can I compare Barnes’ unparalleled collection of post-impressionists to the Resnicks’ more modest trove of 18th century masters? Easy: Both had a thing for unfashionable nudes. They bought dozens and dozens of ‘em.

Heizer Rock in Christo Drag

William Poundstone — Tue, 22 May 2012 21:10:02 +0000

The LACMA rock has been wrapped in silky green fabric in advance of the June 24 dedication of Levitated Mass. Evidently the museum plans a literal unveiling. The theatrical note seems un-Heizer-like, but this project’s media attention has already taken land art into strange new territory.

How a Watteau Got Its Attribution Back

William Poundstone — Mon, 21 May 2012 13:40:01 +0000

We live in the golden age of reattribution. Connoisseurs once made their name by arguing that “Leonardos” and “Rembrandts” were copies or works of followers. Now the tone of the room is that the pendulum might have swung too far. The Met recently decided a downgraded Velézquez it owned was authentic. Ditto for Yale. The Kimbell bought an old-new Michelangelo.

Los Angeles museums are poorly supplied with storerooms of dubious old paintings to upgrade. But the Getty got into the action recently by buying one of the most fantastic reattributions of all: a large and well-preserved Watteau, The Italian Comedians. New York and Yale’s new Velázquezes won’t add too much to our view of the Spaniard’s career peak. The Getty Watteau—if it is a Watteau—is a game-changer. It would be a major addition to the artist’s oeuvre, from the most important phase of his short working life. It’s the only thing in America bearing comparison to the great Gilles in the Louvre (above right).

Getty painting curator Scott Schaefer believes the Italian Comedians to be entirely by the hand of Watteau. That was the mainstream opinion for most of the painting’s long history. Today it’s somewhat radical. In the past century the painting has been attributed to Watteau’s pupil, Jean-Baptiste Pater, and to the fairly obscure Philippe Mercier.

There is no doubt that The Italian Comedians is an old painting, understood to be a Watteau in the 18th century. It’s not however among the many Watteau paintings engraved in the years after the artist’s 1721 death. In 1726, a Watteau Italian Comedians was auctioned in London. It couldn’t have been the famous Italian Comedians in Washington, for that was owned by Watteau’s London physician, Richard Mead, until 1754. Schaefer theorizes that the auctioned painting was this one, created during Watteau’s London sojourn.

The Getty painting’s first certain appearance is at the 1774 auction of the Du Barry collection. It was sketched in the auction catalog margin by Gabriel Saint-Aubin, the noted draftsman of Parisian life. The buyer of the Getty painting was another great French artist, Hubert Robert.

Saint-Aubin may have been the first skeptic. A penciled note, “False,” in the catalog margin has been taken to mean that Saint-Aubin doubted the painting was by Watteau.

In 1890 the Italian Comedians was auctioned as work of Jean-Baptiste Pater. Yet it was subsequently exhibited as a Watteau in museum shows in Berlin (1910) and Paris (1929). These rare public appearances led some critics to propose that the painting was an unfinished Watteau completed by Pater. Eighteenth-century biographies say that Pater completed Watteau’s unfinished paintings after his early death, at age 36. Not stated is which or how many paintings.

Pater is not known to have done faces like those in the Getty painting. Watteau’s faces are like Fellini’s. He invented fascinating and flawed characters that you wonder about. The Getty’s white-suited clown is not the one in the Louvre painting, though he could be the brother of Watteau’s Ceres in the National Gallery of Art—the 30-year-old brother who still lives at home.

Pater’s faces are more like Bratz dolls: caricatures of a certain moment’s notion of youth and stylishness. The Frick Collection has a small Pater, Procession of the Italian Comedians (below left), that is close in subject to the Getty painting. The Frick Pierrot is even wearing a skullcap, as in the Getty painting. Yet Pater’s faces seem generic in comparison.

At any rate, in June 1976, the Getty painting was again auctioned as a Pater. Five months later the owner flipped it, selling it as a work of Philippe Mercier.

Though not a pupil like Pater was, Mercier knew Watteau’s work well. He was one of those commissioned to create reproductive prints of Watteau’s paintings. Mercier also did his own original paintings of comedia dell’arte actors and other subjects. Armand Hammer bought a set of Mercier’s Five Senses, and they were shown at the Hammer Museum for a while. At right below is Taste. Check out the lady who’s had tee many martoonies. The complex faces in the Getty painting seem out of Mercier’s league. (I’d imagine that the Merciers were among the 92 works returned to the Hammer Foundation in 2007.)

The Getty painting’s last private owner was “Commander” Paul-Louis Weiller, a World War I flying ace who survived being shot down by the Germans to live to the age of 100. The catalog for the 2011 auction of Weiller’s collection lists The Italian Comedians as a work of Watteau’s circle. At the sale that was changed to “Watteau and a close follower.” It sold for the equivalent of $2 million, which was 20 times estimate. The buyer was London dealer Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox. The Getty had already arranged for a right of first refusal.

The high auction price reflected a new piece of evidence. In the Getty painting, Pierrot’s figure is based on a Watteau drawing that has a downcast head. X-rays have shown that the Pierrot in the Getty painting also had a downturned head originally. Then it was painted over to confront the viewer. That’s evidence that (a) the painting is an “original,” not a copy of a lost painting; (b) whoever painted it had access to Watteau’s drawings; and (c) that painter felt qualified to “improve” on a Watteau drawing. The simplest explanation is that Watteau himself painted Pierrot’s head (at very least).

Some of the skepticism about the Getty painting centers on the sky. One thinks of Watteau’s skies as opalescent. The less sultry Getty sky has a nicely-observed dusk effect, but it’s hard to find a close parallel in another Watteau painting. Furthermore, the Getty has removed old, yellowed varnish, revealing a cooler, bluer tonality. The result is presumably closer to the painting’s original appearance, but it complicates A to B comparisons. Museums tend to leave yellowed varnish on Watteaus because of their delicate condition.

This isn’t a new bone of contention. In the 19th century the Goncourt brothers complained that Watteaus were wrongly being assigned to Pater on account of supposedly atypical clouds or color. The Goncourts argued that Watteau’s range was greater than appreciated and that he “did not even leave his pupil the proprietorship of two or three tones of colour.”

For the time being, The Italian Comedians is the Getty’s Polish Rider, a star painting with a big name and a certain amount of mystery attached. It anchors the Getty’s grandest room of 18th-century paintings, opposite the Lancret Dance Before a Fountain. There are very few Watteaus anywhere big enough to command a room like that. It is labeled a Watteau (rather than the more cautious “Attributed to Watteau.”)

Museums prefer sure things. So does the art market. When logic and evidence fail to convince, the last resort is a head count of experts. At any given time, there are only a handful of specialists whose opinions really matter. That’s not to say that anyone can objectively prove that the experts are right. Like astrologers or tabloid psychics, the connoisseurs can’t all be right because they disagree.

Before buying, Schaefer polled ten leading Watteau scholars. They ran 7 for it being at least partly by Watteau, versus 3 for it not being a Watteau.

As a right-brain thing, connoisseurship can’t be put into words. Still, everyone tries. At the time of the 2011 auction, International Herald Tribune critic Souren Melikian faulted the painting’s “startling clumsiness” and faces he found “stereotyped” and “effete”. Less than a year later, James Cuno was praising The Italian Comedians as “extraordinary,” and Schaefer described it as “sensitive and humorous… brilliantly conceived, emotionally compelling, beautifully painted.”

Former Getty Museum director John Walsh once said, “I work in a field—art history—that is rich in adjectives, poor in provable statements.”

The Huntington Goes Contemporary, Mildly

William Poundstone — Fri, 18 May 2012 19:27:10 +0000

The Huntington, which just added a rare Renaissance sculpture, has put on view several newly acquired works of contemporary sculpture and design. One may be the first Huntington artwork made in this millennium: a monumental Teardrop with Calligraphy “Zero” (2010) by Mineo Mizuno, a gift of museum supporters.

Mizuno studied at Chouinard and began producing large ceramic pieces in the 1990s. This Teardrop’s glazed surface repeats the Japanese character for “zero.” It references Western misperceptions of Zen-as-nihilism as well as the Mitsubishi-built Zero Fighter warplanes of World War II. Mizuno’s father was a pilot lost in the war. (Click here for a 2011 real estate agent’s tour of Mizuno’s Atwater village studio, with teardrops aplenty and Truffula tree landscaping.)

Also in the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery of American Art are two Harry Bertoia bronzes that complement the large Sounding Sculpture (c. 1970s) in the garden outside. Both are gifts of Robert Jensen Dau.

Another Brick in the Vault

William Poundstone — Wed, 16 May 2012 17:53:07 +0000

The “Vault”—Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s storage space for Eli Broad’s Grand Avenue museum—is now rising quickly. See also The Broad’s construction cam.

Huntington Buys a Renaissance “St. George”

William Poundstone — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:39:04 +0000

The Huntington’s Art Collector Council has acquired a polychrome St. George and the Dragon, attributed to Giovan Angelo del Maino, one of the pre-eminent Italian sculptors in wood. The St. George, 27-3/4 inches high, is dated 1522-27. It was once in the collection of J.P. Morgan (who also owned most of the Huntington’s Renaissance bronzes). The attribution to del Maino is new, proposed by Giancarlo Gentilini of Perugia University and the Huntington’s Catherine Hess. There’s only one other del Maino in the U.S., a Massacre of the Innocents relief at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (below).

Also acquired by this year’s Council is a Barbizon painting, Sunshine and Shadow, by Constant Troyon (bottom). Dated from the 1830s, it was auctioned last May for $40,625, doubling the estimate. It shows the influence of Constable, down to a white horse.

Both purchases reaffirm a commitment to neglected parts of the collection. Like many Gilded Agers, Henry Huntington began collecting Barbizon art, but almost nothing has been added in that field, or in Arabella’s beloved Italian Renaissance, since the Huntingtons’ time. The St. George is to be a focus of a new room of Renaissance art opening this summer.

Lancaster MOAH Debuts New Building

William Poundstone — Mon, 14 May 2012 17:27:26 +0000

The Lancaster Museum of Art and History (MOAH) is hardly known south of the Grapevine. Established as the Lancaster Museum/Art Gallery in 1986, it reopened this month in a new building, an extensively reconfigured bank with 20,000 square feet. The marquee opening exhibition, ”Smooth Operations: Substance and Surface in Southern California Art,” is cheekily billed as “the first post-Pacific Standard Time exhibition in southern California.” It pairs vintage Finish Fetish pieces with works by younger artists working in the plastic idiom. Though small—occupying MOAH’s “great room” of a central gallery—the percentage of exceptional works rivals the PST shows.

Start with Judy Chicago. One PST takeaway was how interesting and enigmatic the early Chicago was. In the 1960s Chicago used feminism as a trojan horse to be carried within the walls of minimalism.

There’s only one Chicago piece in Lancaster, but it’s a classic. Bronze Domes (1968) is a tabletop still-life of plastic hemispheres/breasts. It looks back to Lee Miller and forward to Charles Ray (how weird is it to use a table as pedestal for a tabletop still life sculpture?)

Another inspired choice is Frederick Eversley’s 1971 Venice Sky. It’s a lens piece the color of sea and smog, supplied with a blue aureole at the center. I’d rate Venice Sky better than any of the lens sculptures recently exhibited in PST (or acquired by Alice Walton).

“Smooth Operations” has good-to-defining works by Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, and Craig Kauffman. A 1965 VASA (Union 76 Station) is from his best, most-Anne Truitt-adjacent period.

The show’s younger generation spans Eric Zammitt, son of Norman. At left is Eric’s Untitled (Plank One), 2012, a gift of the Eglash collection. It builds on the horizontal L.A. horizons of Norman’s paintings.

Philip K. Smith III’s Faceted Disc I (2012, right) crimps origami folds into a something like a Robert Irwin disc.

On the museum’s second floor is a small room of local history and “The Painted Desert,” a show of mostly traditional paintings of the Antelope Valley. This is more engaging than you might expect. The region’s dramatic scenery and glowing skies have produced a school of plein air painting. This isn’t sappy “California Impression” but a Highwayman-like art of sensuous extremes. At bottom, an untitled Sally Thatcher from the MOAH collection looks like your basic motel-room painting until you realize the sky is a cloud study of Constable subtlety.

The nexus of the Antelope Valley school is the otherworldly “Kirk’s Rock,” depicted in half a dozen paintings. That’s Kirk as in Captain James T. Kirk. The triangular crag appeared in multiple episodes of the original Star Trek. Each time it represented a different planet—never this one.