Top five favorite art blogs of 2008

In the spirit of year-end list-making, and in the grand new tradition of bloggers endlessly referring to each other and themselves, I present my five favorite art blogs from 2008:

1. The Art History Newsletter. Issues and breaking news from the academic and museum worlds (yes, there is breaking news in academia!). So geeky and wonky, and entries are very well chosen. I love it.

2. Modern Art Notes. Critic Tyler Green has useful analysis--and some great scoops--about museums, galleries, and the people who love (and hate) them. Frequently updated and loads of good links.

3. Eco Art Blog. The title pretty much says it. My only request: more frequent posts, please.

4. Eye Level. The Smithsonian American Art Museum's blog. 

5. The Two Percent. Based on the premise that only 2% of current gallery shows in Chelsea are worth viewing, this site recommends the best stuff. Check out the video tutorial for gallery-going newbies on the home page--it's both funny and helpful. Extra added bonus: a list of restrooms in the neighborhood.

Barbara Probst at MMOCA

MMOCA (say it with me: "EM-moca!") is the Madison [Wisconsin] Museum of Contemporary Art, which reopened in a snazzy new/refurbished Cesar Pelli-designed space in 2006.

One current show is of photographic tableaux by German-born Barbara Probst. In her carefully crafted photo shoots, she takes several images simultaneously, all of which are very different from each other. Each photo suggests an entirely different scene: an urban street, an introspective kid, a fashionable woman. This notion of capturing multiple experiences of a moment isn't new, but Probst executes it in a particularly striking manner.

Barbara Probst: Exposures, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Chicago's Columbia College, is on view at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art through March 8.

Plagens on politics and Koons

In the December 22 issue of Newsweek, Peter Plagens compares the Bush 43 presidency with the oeuvre of Jeff Koons, and Plagens isn't pleased. He describes Koons's Hanging Heart as "a cloying cliché presented as profundity." He continues:

"Much as the Bush administration has waved off an intimacy with Big Oil and professed down-home empathy for regular 'folks,' Koons likes to pretend that he's not an avatar of irony for billionaire collectors. "

This short essay by Plagens is spot on and utterly apt. With the exception of 2000's Puppy installation at Rockefeller Center, I'm not a fan of Koons's work--I find it too cynical and knowing, and the slick surfaces are not all that interesting to look at. Thanks, Mr. Plagens, for phrasing it so well.

Out-of-office reply

I'm away from New York for a bit, so won't be posting on what's on view in Gotham for a few weeks. Until then, dispatches from the Midwest and other bright ideas.

Fun museum stats

I learned of these nifty features on the websites of the Indianapolis Museum of Art & the Getty from one of my favorite art blogs, Modern Art Notes. The museums have posted stats detailing, among other things, where visitors to their websites go, what paintings they look at, and how long they stay. Great fun from a visitors' services point of view. Google analytics = amazing.

Another favorite painting

During my recent trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I revisited one of John Singer Sargent's greatest. He got this 1899 portrait of the Wyndham sisters absolutely, wonderfully right. (The full title of the painting is The Wyndham Sisters: Lady Elcho, Mrs. Adeane, and Mrs. Tennant.) It's a gorgeous example of a nineteenth-century grand manner portrait. Lush paint handling, a terrifically "casual" composition, an opulent setting appropriate to the commission. Delicious! And the painting is grand--nearly ten feet tall and seven feet wide. Laid on the floor, it would be much larger than my kitchen.

The painting usually hangs in the museum's American Wing. But since that area has closed for renovation, it has hung with European paintings in the nineteenth-century galleries; portraits by Anders Zorn and Giovanni Boldini currently flank it. This placement--at the end of a series of rooms, dominating the wall and the gallery--gives the Sargent the drama it deserves. Back in the American Wing, it was hung at the bottom of a short staircase, difficult to see from a decent distance. 

This new venue for the painting underscores the artificiality of the American/European division imposed by the Met--to be fair, a division that many museums (and college and university curricula) adhere to. While Sargent was born in the United States, most of his training and career occurred in Europe; the Wyndham sisters were British and their portrait was set in their family's London home. So why does the painting usually hang in the American Wing of the museum? Because Sargent is claimed by historians of American art as one of their own, along with Mary Cassatt and J.A.M. Whistler, two other famous Americans who spent most of their careers abroad. I believe these three have been held up as premier American painters to bolster the the argument for American art as a whole. 

American art is too often treated as the poor cousin of European art, aesthetically impoverished and utterly beholden to the sophisticated relatives across the pond. The current shuffle at the Met serves as a happy reminder that the two are wholly interrelated, far more than most art historical categorizations allow. Hooray for mixing it up! (image source)

Art around the LES, part 1

In a previous post, I promised to follow up on last month's special section in the New York Times about the art scene in my neighborhood, the Lower East Side. This is the first of a few posts in which I visit some of the galleries that the Times surveyed. The Grey Lady could only give each space a line or two, so I want to spend a little more time at some favorite spots.

For starters, a couple of the places I tried to visit were closed. What kind of commercial gallery is closed at 3 p.m. on a Friday?  Maybe for installation (in which case a sign would be useful), but just plain shuttered up and locked tight? Attention, gallerists: please make it easy for visitors to stop in and, you know, visit. On the upside, the places I did visit were staffed by very friendly & knowledgeable folks. The rarefied gallery world gets a bad rap for being chilly and unapproachable, so it's good to see that stereotype challenged.

First stop: Smith-Stewart Gallery 's small space is home to videos and an installation by Katie Gilmore (at left). Gilmore erected sheetrock partitions and summarily knocked through them; monitors on the walls play videos of the artist, wearing party clothes, destroying other such projects. The results are often funny--I loved a video clip of a high heeled shoe punching through a wall. Kind of lady-superhero-kicks-low-rent-butt. And the titles of these pieces are also funny: Between a Hard Place, Walk This Way. Totally coincidentally, Gilmore is included in the group show at Apexart I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Gilmore's show at Smith-Stewart is through January 18, 53 Stanton Street.

A few blocks away, at Thierry Goldberg Projects (5 Rivington Street), the paintings are food related, and not entirely happily. Hayv Kahraman paints highly stylized women slaughtering a lamb, a ritual traditionally performed by men in her native Iraq; the series ends with a tableau of lambs' heads on a platter. And I-Ling Eleen Lin depicts a dinner party you would never, ever, want to attend. (It's the image at the far left in the link). Through December 21.

Finally, across Sarah D. Roosevelt Park to Kumukumu at 42 Rivington Street. The gallery's inaugural show is "Bun," and it's about rabbits. That's right. Every artwork is about bunnies. Photos of bunnies, sculptures of bunnies, paintings of bunnies. (But no video--maybe because the subjects kept hopping away?) It all works because it surprises that so many artists--Vik Muniz! Kiki Smith!--have turned to the theme, and because the show is just the right size. Any larger and we'd get rabbited out.  

My favorite painting of the day

My previous post was about a cabinet in the Met's current show of highlights from de Montebello's reign (we'll so miss that delightful accent!). But to return to this blog's focus on American art, today I give a shout-out to a gorgeous Thomas Anschutz painting in the same exhibition. A Rose features the skillful paint handling of the best late nineteenth-century portraiture--the sheen of the skirt's fabric, the nap of the rug, and all that good tactile stuff. But Anschutz, bless him, gives his sitter (Rebecca Whelan, whose father was a trustee of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Anschutz taught at the Academy) a personality. (photo source)

She doesn't smile or simper all compliantly, as so many portrait sitters of the period do. Instead, her expression is more complicated, and it isn't particularly inviting. Anschutz suggests that she's not just a delicate & lovely specimen of nature, despite the flower on the sideboard behind her. Thank you, Anschutz, for granting this sitter more psychological weight than, say, Thomas Wilmer Dewing's elegant, vacant ladies.

Fabulously weird at the Met

So I went through the show of acquisitions from Phillippe de Montebello's years as the museum's director, and I stumbled across this nineteenth-century French cabinet. 

The photos don't do the outrageousness justice. The piece commemorates a military victory in the fifth century A.D. against Attila and his Huns; the bronze details suggest war and physical power. But this iconography itself is not so strange--lots of art refers to great historical battles. What is so bizarre about this cabinet is how over the top the artists went. The sculptural axe along the top of the piece (included in the photo detail) extends a good four inches out from the surface, and it looks sharp. It's not a real axe, exactly, but if it separated from the rest of the relief, it could probably do serious damage to the poor person who tries to pull a shirt out of this armoire. (Not that this kind of object would be used in a bedroom, but still).

Other nutty elements in silvered bronze:  hairy, cloven oxen hooves; bug-eyed creatures with hummingbird wings and frog feet; and in the central panel, the victor's chariot running over a slain opponent.  Astonishingly strange in all the right ways. (photo source)

The exhibition itself is huge, and it features only a very few of the objects that the museum acquired during de Montebello's tenure. In his 31 years as director, more than 84,000 pieces came to the museum--my calculator says that's around 2,709 objects each year, or more than seven objects each day (including weekends and holidays!). This huge amassing of stuff may be a testament to de Montebello's skill at cultivating donors. But it says more about the sheer size of the museum. And its acquisition budget.