The Blanton Museum/Austin, TX

Nothing like a bomb threat to liven up a museum visit.

There we were, at 12:30 pm, passing the Attic pottery and entering Modern and Contemporary Art in the new home of the Blanton Museum in Austin, Tex., when a young polo-shirted, chino'd musem guard asked us to calmly exit the building. Most of the guards were, or professed to be, clueless about why the museum was suddenly closing, but one guard said there'd been a bomb threat that had apparently been found to not be credible. I guess protocol had to be followed. So out we went and across the street, vouchers for a return visit in hand. Happily nothing came of the threat that I could tell.

After years of controversy, the museum has emerged to be a good looking, but not very remarkable addition to the UT campus. (The photo above, by the way, shows a lamppost outside the Blanton where everyone seems to deposit their entrance stickers, as well as those from the Texas State History Museum.) The design of the museum doesn't make much of a statement, but its limestone facade and white, open interior with diagonal skylights is pleasant, if not wildly interesting. It was supposed to be designed by modernist architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, whose projects include the Tate Gallery of Modern Art in London, but the UT System Board of Regents didn't think the design fit with the surrounding architecture--too bold, accounts have said.

The UT Master Plan calls for building in the Spanish Renaissance style, using red-tiled roofs and limestone (given that, why ask minimalist-minded modernist superstars to design your building?). After the architects and the board when back and forth, the architects quit in 1999. There's a very telling back and forth between one member of the Board of Regents and Herzog here. One of my favorite points Herzog makes is that "universities should be places that encourage change and that value innovation more than imitation." The member of the Board of Regents, who clearly hates the modern buildings already on UT's campus, replies, "We are not willing to turn our campus into a proving ground for experimental modern design." There's a good Austin Chronicle article on the controversy here. The Dean of the Architecture school resigned in protest over the whole mess (though he's still on the faculty, just not the dean anymore). The Board of Regents went with the Boston firm of Kallmann McKinnell and Wood instead.

While the style of the building may be conservative, it has some very cool and very thought-provoking art installations. There's an amazing one by Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles, called "Missao/Missoes (How to Build a Cathedral)." (His other work is worth checking out on google images.)













It is composed of a black-veiled area that you enter to look up at a ceiling of 2000 hanging cow bones with a string of 800 communion wafers stretching down from the middle and connecting the bones with 600,000 bright copper pennies.

A fascinating bit of information found on the web (you can find the post here, but this is basically it): "Built in 1987...the artwork is unique in the fact that it changes wherever it goes. The artwork is a floating piece and the coins are the smallest denomination that the country it is shown in has. In the Blanton, where the piece is currently showing, pennies are used for the coins. In another country, however, the coins may be silver or gold colored instead of copper. Cildo Meireles illustrates this cathedral as a combination of the coins representing wealth, agriculture represented by the bones, and religion represented by the wafers. "The installation draws attention to the fact that the conquest of the Americas was as much about economics as it was about religion or saving souls" (Blanton)."

Another very cool installation is one called "From Texas with love 2002." It's by Emily Jacir, who was born in Amman, Jordan. (Good article about her recent project on a very interesting blog here.) She asked Palestinians living in Israel what they would choose to listen to if they could get into a car and drive for an hour without being stopped at checkpoints (what seems so easy to us is such an impossibility for them). There's a monitor showing video footage of a vast expanse of West Texas desert through a car's windshield, and a few iPods at the monitor play the songs the Palestinians chose. These are some of them; I focused on the Western songs, which made up a decent chunk of the choices:
-"Freedom," by Jimi Hendrix
-"The Thrill is Gone," by B.B. King
-"Ishta tellak" (sorry, can't get the right accents in there) by Fairuz (Fairuz was very popular)
-"Wild World," by Cat Stevens
-"Fly Me to the Moon," by Frank Sinatra
-"Patria," by Ruben Blades
-"Autumn Leaves," by Tony Bennett
-"Get Out The Map," Indigo Girls
-"I Can See Clearly Now," Drifters
-"Message to Love," Hendrix
-"Biladi Biladi" by Sayed Darwish
-"Material Girl," by Madonna

Both of these installations are part of the museum's great Modern and Contemporary Art collection, which features a lot of paintings from the Suida-Manning collection (formed by a family of art historians). The Blanton takes a very interesting approach in mixing its Americas in an "exploration of the frontier and historic notions of what 'American' means." (Interesting article on that here.)

Here's how they do that, in a nutshell: After a gallery of works depicting the American West, complete with Frederick Remington paintings and sculptures, and some incredibly realistic paintings by Henry F. Farny, like "Council of the Chiefs" (which is not the one shown here, by the way) you move into the America/Americas permanent exhibit, which examines "how Latin American and American artists responded to and incorporated European strains of modernism in the early 20th Century." It presents a work by Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres-Garcia near a work by Arshile Gorky, and a Mark Rothko work (I had no idea that he was born in Dvinsk, Russia) by a David Alfaro Siqueiros painting of the torture of Cuauhtemoc (sp??), with the red and yellow fire painted in thick industrial paint that reaches out of the canvas. The painting tags tell you when and where the person was born, where they lived and worked for what period, when they died and where. My only wish: I'd like to know what the museum paid for each piece.

My wonderful 12-year-old nephew, Liam, had a favorite at the show, this painting by Kazuya Sakai, called "Filles de Kilimanjaro III (Miles Davis)". (I have to check with my equally wonderful niece, Jessie, to find out her favorite.) The painting is mentioned in this article, which notes that "It’s hard to get more international than Sakai, who was born to Japanese parents in Buenos Aires and lived in Mexico for a decade before the university invited him to teach as a visiting artist. He never returned to Argentina and died in Dallas. He is a Latin American artist of Japanese heritage painting a piece for an American jazz musician."

One quirky thing the museum does in its free audio guide is have Austin business owners (as well as UT professors, who make insightful comments) comment on paintings. So while you're looking at Domenico Paola's "Allegory of Youth" you're hearing the owner of Austin hair salon Anew comment on the woman in the painting and the symbolism of the hourglass. For him, the hairstyling client is the canvas, we learn, and God's gift to us is that he lets our eyesight get worse as we grow older so we can't see our decay so clearly, ha ha ha. He shows up again later, commenting on the subject's dress in "Portrait of a Man," by Nicolas de Largilliere. His focus here is on the "incredible center part" in the man's hair, and how it centers you, the viewer, with the person's body and face. O-kay. Thanks for that.

We also get a local landscape designer commenting on the flowers in Sebastiano Ricci's "Flora." "That's a yadda yadda flower, native to yadda yadda," etc. I like the attempt to connect the local community with the art in such a direct way, but the comments were not enlightening. Maybe a better idea would be to have a two-tier audio, where pressing No. 1 gets you the curator/expert's comments and then pressing No. 1a gets you the local businessperson's additional comments. Of course, here I am, blathering on about my views on art and I'm no expert, but people who are reading this have actively chosen to read it (perhaps with my prodding, but nevertheless!).

Additional stray Blanton info:

Right across the street is the Bob Bullock (yes, Sandra is related to him, or so someone told me) Texas State History Museum. You can also walk to the Ransom Center, which is another good UT art collection. And the State Capital is nearby.

There will be more Blanton to love soon: Once an adjoining building that will house a museum store, cafe, auditorium, classrooms and office space is completed in 2007, the Blanton complex will top Harvard as the largest university art complex, at some 180,000 square feet. Right now, it has more than 17,000 works of art in its collection. The museum site tells us that "In 1988, the Blanton established the first full-time curatorship in Latin American art in the country. The move solidified the role of the art of Latin America in the collection, and the collection continues to draw significant gifts to this day." The writer James Michener and his wife Mari have been big art contributors and financial supporters of the museum for decades.

Happy Goldsworthy

The perfect Goldsworthian holiday picture!*












*You might not want to break the ethereal mood by sharing the title: "Icicles, joined by saliva."

The Fabulous Frick

For high-quality art in a beautiful setting, the Frick Museum in New York (between 70th and 71st Streets, and Madison and Fifth Ave.) cannot be beat (that's Henry Clay Frick at the left, with granddaughter Adelaide, in 1918). Right now, you can enjoy a tiny (size of a modest walk-in closet) but wonderful Cimabue and Early Italian Devotional Painting mini-exhibit (closes Dec. 31), a Tiepolo exhibit (downstairs) and Masterpieces of European Painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art, which has closed its permanent exhibit while it undergoes an extensive renovation (it has loaned the Frick 14 works; exhibit closes Jan. 28).

CIMABUE. The exhibit has to be tiny, since there is very little work remaining by Cenni di Pepo, better known as Cimabue (roughly translates to “Ox’s Head”--umm, possibly not a highly complimentary moniker?) There’s something like only four portable works attributed to Cimabue. The Frick exhibit unites one panel from its collection with one discovered in a private collection in 2000 (it is now owned by the National Gallery in London). The image below is not one from the Frick--it's an earlier Cimabue and far more stylized, and you can't get the full sense of it from this image--but it's a striking painting nonetheless.

Wikipedia says the Frick's Cimabue panel, “The Flagellation of Jesus," was purchased in 1950 and long considered to be of uncertain authorship. But in 2000, the National Gallery in London acquired a Virgin and Child with many similarities (size, materials, red borders, incised margins, etc.) The two pictures are now thought to be parts of a single work, a diptych or triptych altarpiece, and their attribution to Cimabue is fairly secure.

While the Flagllation is owned by the Frick (and is the only Cimabue in the United States), the Virgin and Child is in the U.S. temporarily. For a short time, the two works can be viewed side-by-side. The pair are believed to date from 1280.”

The Cimabue exhibit is a jewel. It's an example of the Frick's incredible attention to detail that on the two Cimabue panels, the small clasps that jut a few centimeters onto the painting are painted to track with what is beneath them, so don't interrupt your visual experience at all. (Although since I noticed them, maybe they do.) But it's a very thoughtful touch. The museum also provides clipboards with a catalogue covering Cimabue works (and others), which lets you indulge your curiosity right while you're looking at the paintings. Another thing I love about the Frick is that your $15 admission fee gets you a free audio guide to their permanent collection--and, if you ask, you can get a list of local eateries from the gift shop if you're not familiar with the neighborhood. My sister and I opted to walk up to the Whitney Museum on Madison and 74th and eat at the restaurant there, Sarabeth's, which is good--and located right next to one of the Whitney's gift shops (a convenient stocking-stuffer shopping stop).

CLEVELAND MUSEM OF ART EXHIBIT. One of my favorite games is trying to decode the symbolism in paintings and the Frick's tags for its paintings are always interesting and informative. So there's The Cleveland Museum of Art's Nicolas Poussin's "The Holy Family on the Steps" (1648), with Joseph off to the side, studying a compass--an allusion, the Frick tells us, to the carpenter's trade and a traditional symbol of God the universal architect. (The writeup on the Cleveland Museum's web site says that "The representation of Saint Joseph is unusual, for he is depicted more as an architect than a carpenter.")

Another Cleveland pic on loan to the Frick is Jacques Louis-David's "Cupid and Psyche." Cupid has an incredibly mischievous smile, and the model was James Gallatin, the 19-year-old son of the American envoy in Paris.

And then there's Valentin de Boulogne's "Samson" (c. 1630; another of the loans from the Cleveland Museum of Art). In that painting, a detail like the bee on the clasp of Samson's garment alludes to the "fabled swarm of bees that gathered on the slaughtered lion's carcass and produced honey." The painting's tag notes that the bee is also the heraldic device of Cardinal Francisco Barberini, who commissioned the painting.

That reminded me of a visit to the Barberini Palace in Rome, where you can find the bee-laden heraldic devices carved in stone on the walls. I love the Barberini because it provided one of those unexpected moments of discovery when I wandered back behind the museum and came upon a gated field. Inside the field were dozens of grazing rabbits, and cats wandering around them. It was sort of surreal. I noticed a kindly-looking white-bearded old man in a hut next to the iron gate, who indicated that it was fine for me to look around. So sweet, I thought. What a cute old man. Then I noticed what lined the walls of the little wooden hut--hard-core porn torn from magazines. The little old man didn't seem quite as cute after that...

Anyway, even if you miss these exhibits--and I'm skipping Tiepolo, because we'd been at the Frick for about four hours and had reached museum burnout--a visit to the Frick is always time well spent. Top Ten items there: Its Vermeers. The Hans Holbein painting of Sir Thomas More. The Sargents. The Rembrandt self-portrait. The incredibly rich, gilded icons. Jean-Antoine Houdon's La Grive Morte (The Dead Thrush), dated 1782. (A press release a while back noted that it was on loan from a gallery in Boston until August 2006, but it's still there, so I guess the loan has been extended?) If you love the whimsy of trompe l'oil, you'll love this marble relief. It is a small slab of white marble with the upside-down body of a thrush carved out of it, and it rests in a deep gold frame. The frame can't contain the volume of the bird; Houdon has one of its wings juts over the frame, leaving a shadow. It's a very arresting image and makes the work so much more intesting than it it were simply mounted in an alcove as a marble sculpture.

At the Frick, it's hard to pick your favorite, because there are so many wonderful things there. They also have a really great website, with MP3 audio guides you can download. There are also very good virtual tours of rooms.

Prague Museums: Part II (Picassos in Prague)

Here's a name that provokes a jarring mental image: The Trade Fair Palace. To a New Yorker, it seems akin to calling our convention center "The Javits Center Mansion."

Just like Dan Quayle was no Jack Kennedy, the Trade Fair Palace is no regal residence.

When you approach the building, you have a moment of confusion--is this an office building? Is it a sales office for work furniture, as the ground floor salesroom suggests, with its row of red, green and blue Knoll chair knockoffs waiting to be filled by budding-capitalist behinds? And what is that big, ungainly metal....thing....in front of the building? It is sculpture, my friends. Art. Kind of...ugly art.

As is, to some extent, the Trade Fair Palace, which was built in the functionalist style and originally designed in 1926-28 to hold 10,000 visitors and 4,000 exhibitors. According to "art/shop/eat Prague" Le Corbusier was one of the first visitors, and "claimed that the building showed him how Functionalism could be applied on a pioneeringly vast scale." And the vast white space, which centers around an atrium from which you can see works of art on all four Gallery floors, is appealing, though I wouldn't rhapsodize about it to the extent that "art/shop/eat Prague" does.

The fact that I didn't particularly warm up to the Trade Fair Palace is partly because I'm used to lavish Western museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick, the MOMA. I'm spoiled by being surrounded by well-funded museums with well-paid curators who have actual budgets to work with and pay great attention to how the works are displayed. The Frick, one of my favorites, even has a full-time horticulturalist on staff, who has been with it for 30 years and arranges gorgeous flower displays, which currently include red peonies worked into Christmas wreaths. (He may be the subject of a future posting.)

The Trade Fair Palace is officially called the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art 0f the National Gallery in Prague. The lighting is basic, the partitions are basic, the floor is speckled linoleum. But it does have something on Western museums--you can pay just for the floors you want to visit. And the 3rd floor has some very good 19th and 20th-Century French Art. Favorites from a number of the floors: the van Gogh; the small Moore sculptures; the stylized paintings of Jan Zrzavy; the two Munchs; Klimt's "The Virgins," and the collection of Picassos, especially the one with the cubist frame by architect and leading theorist of the Czech cubist movement Pavel Janak. Here are a few of his designs you'll probably recognize (and can learn more about and even perhaps buy (well, some of them!) here).



Much of the collection was acquired by the Czechoslovak State in 1923, and a big chunk of good stuff (many of the Picassos and Braques) came from Vincenc Kramar, the director of the National Gallery in the 1920s. He was "encouraged" by the Communists to "donate" his extensive collection to the National Gallery before his death--I think that's how a tag at the Gallery phrased it. "art/shop/eat Prague" puts it like this: "He was forced to donate his collection to the Gallery in 1960, a few months before his death at age 83."

The logistics: A 15-minute or so tram ride from the New Town area of Prague takes you close to the Palace--you just have a 10-minute walk up a mild hill and a jog to the right. It's pretty easy to find. There is a great creperie with a painted red front to the left a block or so from where you exit the tram. (The actual name of the place--yeah, that would be kind of helpful!--will be added to this post soon.)

Prague Museum Reviews: Part I

I can highly recommend spending Thanksgiving in Prague. Thanks perhaps (agh) to global warming, it wasn’t nearly as cold as I’d thought it would be, and rain wasn’t a problem. A cashmere sweater, wool coat, warm scarf and gloves did the trick. There are more people there than you’d expect in an “off time” and especially on the weekend, but I can’t even imagine the crush of people that would be there in the summer months all cramming onto the Charles Bridge. The only real negative, and it wasn’t a big deal as long as you plan, are the reduced hours at certain museums that go into effect in November. Oh--and this can be a plus or a minus, depending on how economical you're feeling: The souveniers are, to be blunt but accurate, overpriced crap. Truly. While the notion of one of those Russian nesting dolls housing various Simpsons-Bart, Lisa, etc., or a set of George Bush or Berlusconi nesting dolls is amusing, it's not something you're (or I'm, at least) going to fork over too many Czech crowns for.

My frustrated consumerism aside, it’s a beautiful city to wander around—you’re always finding cool little (or big) architectural elements to admire, like this door, this synagogue, which I haven't yet been able to identify (it's not in the Jewish quarter--it's closer to the State Opera), and the Hogwartsesque twin spires of the Tyn Church.









One new high-profile architectural element I did not particularly admire: Frank Gehry’s so-called “Fred and Ginger” building that is often described as "dancing along the banks of the Vltava river." Nothing was knocked down in order to make room for it; the lot stood empty for 35-40 years after the original building was hit by one of the few light air raids in the war. It’s very mod, and, in my opinion, doesn’t fit and doesn’t add anything by not fitting. You know how sometimes buildings that don’t fit can make a really great statement and you just admire them for what they are, and they make you think? The Gehry building didn’t do that for me. Here’s a picture of it and you can make your own judgment--I actually didn't view it from this vantage point--it's the building bulging out in the middle--and this actually looks better than I thought, from a distance, at least.











The museums? A mixed bag, from what I saw and I couldn’t possibly see them all in six days, because, much as I’d like to see everything, this is after all vacation, so involves taking time to really enjoy the things you’re seeing. Some of the collections, like the one at Convent of St. Agnes, which houses the National Gallery’s Museum of Medieval Art, are very well displayed, with informative writeups for every picture. I’ll start with a description of that, and in following posts, move on to impressions/info on the National Gallery pictures at the Trade Fair Palace (Veletrzni Palac), the National Museum (that’ll be brief; for me, the big thrill, so to speak, was taking pictures of Woolly Mammoths to send to my nephew. This is what happens when your last name is Woolley, although, thankfully, none of us are mammoths), the Mucha Museum, and the synagogues in the Jewish Quarter, particularly the Spanish Synagogue, which is in a (yes, you could guess this) Moorish style and is just gorgeous, and has a good, heart-wrenching museum on its second floor/gallery.

Convent of St. Agnes: Housed in what "The Rough Guide to Prague" tells me is the city's oldest surviving Gothic building, founded in 1233, are some truly great Madonna/Madonna and child sculptures. An in-depth art guide I took along, “Art for Travellers/Prague,” by Deanne MacDonald, notes that “In the 12th and 13th centuries a popular cult of the Virgin developed partially in response to the church’s traditional hostility toward women, an attitude exemplified by the vilification of the figure of Eve.” Here’s a picture of a statue that caught my eye—if I could find what I wrote about it in my notes and tell you more about it, that would be great, but…I can’t find them yet. When looking at the blue in some of the panel paintings of Madonnas, I’d think back to that great Victoria Finlay book mentioned in an earlier post on this site and the use of the very precious royal blue lapis lazuli stone that was ground up and used as paint and or a dye.

After the Madonna statues, in the main part of the gallery, the pictures were displayed on gunmetal gray metal sheets bolted onto the wooden floor—this is in an old stone and brick convent that’s in the Gothic style, so high vaulted ceilings—and somehow this very contemporary treatment really works. It allows the Convent to show many more paintings in the space than they could with thicker regular walls, too, I imagine, and keeps the feeling of the room light. There are all sorts of gorgeous rich paintings of saints and such and you can play your own little private parlor game of picking out symbolic details (goldfinch=”ancient motif that was a pagan symbol of the soul later adopted by Christianity. A legend grew that the goldfinch acquired its red spot when it flew down to remove a thorn from Christ’s crown on the way to Calvary, and so it was seen as symbolizing Christ’s role as savior and martyr and became a popular attribute in Italian art” (thank you, Deanne MacDonald), a window frame ”symbolizing [in the painting of the Madonna of Most] that through devotion to the Virgin, the faithful would see into the Kingdom of Heaven,” etc., etc.)

My only wish there was that the writeups had occasionally gone into the materials and techniques used in the paintings; there was some heavy sort of patterning in gold paint that occasionally went all over the background of the painting and over onto the frame and I would have liked to learn more about that.