The Met Takes on Warhol, MoMA Runs Martha Rosler's Flea Market, and Other Must-See Fall Events

Rubens' portrait of his wife

Here are the hot New York museum shows this autumn.

Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years, Metropolitan Museum.  With the season's surefire hit, the Met steps into an uncharacteristic role, that of writing contemporary art history.  The show takes on Warhol's influence on artists who are actually alive -- grouped around such themes as celebrity and repetition -- and features creaky standbys Jeff Koons, Alex Katz, and Richard Prince but also artists we don't see enough of like Vija Celmins.  Opens September 18.

Bernini: Sculpting in Clay, Metropolitan Museum.  The greatest sculptor of the 17th century -- and perhaps the greatest master of public art -- made small clay models for his statuary, and the Met is gathering together 50 of them, including some for his fountains scattered about Rome and the angels along one of Rome's bridges. Opens October 3.

Mantegna to Matisse: Master Drawings from the Courtauld Gallery, Frick Collection.  Sixty drawings over a 500-year period sounds ridiculous, but this show presents the greatest hits from a great English collection by the masters of the craft -- Michelangelo, Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Cezanne among them -- both sketches and finished works.  The Rubens at top is a luscious mix of sensuality and modesty, as he depicts his young wife lifting her veil.  High expectations seem sure to be exceeded.  Opens October 2.

Fore, Studio Museum in Harlem.  Every few years the Studio Museum puts together a show of emerging artists of African descent living and working in the U.S.  This year's show of 29 artists -- including Jennifer Packer (whose work is shown at left) and Toyin Odutola -- looks like a winner.  Opens November 8.

Martha Rosler, Meta-Monumental Garage Sale, Museum of Modern Art.  Haggle with a real artist!  Rosler, MoMA's staff, and the public have donated stuff to be sold in the museum's atrium the last two weeks of November.  Rosler, reputed to be a hard bargainer, has held garage sales several times before -- first in San Diego in 1973 and then in various European cities -- but MoMA's will be the largest.  Expect to be elbowed by serious buyers.  November 17-30.

Fantasy and Invention: Rosso Fiorentino and Sixteenth-Century Florentine Drawing, Morgan Library.   The Morgan is showing approximately 20 drawings by the likes of Bronzino and Pontormo from its own collection, but the real draw is a painting of the Holy Family with the Infant St. John the Baptist (left) on loan from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, one of only three paintings in the U.S. by this major Mannerist artist.  Opens November 10.

Images from the museums' websites.

Text (c) Copyright 2012 Laura Gilbert.

On View in Brief: Summer Loans to the Met, Including a Van Dyck Sold Last Year for $1.1 Million

 

Van Dyck, Portrait of a Carmelite Monk

It's the annual Invasion of the Briefly Loaned Old Masters, the season when private, mostly anonymous individuals send some of their finest paintings to the Metropolitan Museum.  Whether the owners are off on holiday or renovating their homes, they've decided to let the rest of us see these works on the walls of the Met.

Leading the way this year is a magnificent portrait sold as a Van Dyck last year at Sotheby's in London for more than $1.1 million.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the museum had annual exhibitions called something along the lines of "Paintings from Private Collections:  The Summer Show."  You can see references to them in auction house catalogue giving a work's exhibition history -- no doubt about it, a museum exhibit gives the work not just cachet but added value as well, though some lenders undoubtedly shuttle paintings to the Met for safety's sake and out of generosity.

Cavalori, Madonna and Child with St. Anne and the Infant St. John the Baptist

The museum no longer puts on these official summer shows, and it's also stopped making available a list of the summer loans and where the visitor could find them scattered about the museum, a practice that survived at least into the 1990s.

Now it takes a bit of sleuthing to discover them.  Here's a guide to this summer's highlights -- so far:

Anthony Van Dyck, Portrait of a Carmelite Monk, 1617-1620.  The glint of light in the eyes, the visible brushstroke, the creamy flesh tones -- this work has all the marks that make 17th-century painting so splendid.  Add to these the awkward-looking ears and the bold blocks of color, and the painting looks remarkably modern.

Van Dyck has always been recognized as extremely precocious, and the dating of this work puts it when he was perhaps all of 20 years old and still in Rubens' workshop.  This portrait had in fact previously been attributed to Rubens.  Sotheby's, which sold the painting, has a nice video about the reattribution here.

Vasari, Pieta

Giorgio Vasari, Pieta, 1549.  The fame of Vasari's Lives of the Artists, the foundational history of Renaissance art and artists, obscures his importance as . . . an architect -- he designed the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.  Those familiar with his hack work as a painter may wonder how he could ever have ousted Bronzino as the Medici court artist.  His Pieta, a "recent rediscovery," as the label informs us, is unlikely to change anyone's mind -- it's displayed in the same gallery as the Met's Bronzino -- but it's an engaging and intimate work of classicism that, following a Gospel text, shows the sun and moon in the same night sky.

Mirabello Cavalori, Madonna and Child with St. Anne and the Infant St. John the Baptist, ca. 1570.  Cavalori is not a familiar name, but judging from this work it's perhaps a name to be reckoned with.  What makes this painting remarkable, aside from its being a noteworthy example of Florentine Mannerism, with its cool unnatural colors and twisting and elongated figures, is that a glance at St. John shows that he is hardly the "infant" of the title but more akin to the tweener St. Johns that Caravaggio would paint a couple of decades later.

Ribera, Sts. Peter and Paul

Fewer than a dozen works are attributed to Cavalori, and if the attributions are correct, the Met now has three of these rare works in one gallery, including a second loan from the same anonymous owner (who has, all told, parked four paintings at the Met, including the Vasari.)

Jusepe de Ribera, Sts. Peter and Paul, ca. 1613.  A European collector has loaned this work, thought to be an early one by the Spanish master and painted in Rome, where Ribera was absorbing all things Caravaggio.  It's displayed in one of the Met's Spanish galleries but could be more profitably shown next to Caravaggio's religious paintings about ten galleries away.

Delacroix, Christ at the Column

Eugene Delacroix, Christ at the Column, 1849.  This small painting has been loaned by longtime Met patron Wheelock Whitney III. Let's hope it lands at the Met permanently.  The museum has what might be euphemistically described as a tedious overabundance of Corots and Courbets.  If this work were donated, it would strengthen the Met's weak holdings in great French Romantic painters like Delacroix.

This year's lenders hardly rival in the number of works loaned the magnificent spoils of a New York collector who permitted seventeen paintings she owned to grace the museum's walls a few summers ago (there was reputedly an eighteenth work, but I never could find it), but in quality they aren't far behind.

Text and photos (c) Copyright 2012 Laura Gilbert.

A Small Spectacular: Bartolo di Fredi and Other Sienese Artists at the Museum of Biblical Art. Exclusive Photos Here, Article at Observer.com

Franceso di Vannuccio, Crucifix ca. 1370

It's the must-see yet unsung show of the summer -- a tightly focused exhibit of 14th-century Sienese altarpieces -- and it's at one of Manhattan's under-visited jewel-box spaces, the Museum of Biblical Art on Broadway near Lincoln Center.

Naddo Ceccarelli, Madonna and Child with Saints, mid-14th c.

The exhibit, with only seven works, is stunning in its simplicity and beautifully conceived, and it shows off one of this museum's strengths -- displaying art that is either new to the viewer or placed in a context that makes it seem new.

For this show, the museum is emphasizing an uninterrupted viewing experience.  "We didn't want a lot of text on the wall where people are reading instead of looking," said acting executive director Patricia Pongracz, so MOBIA, as the museum is known, provides a free take-it-home handout that identifies the figures in each work and includes the religious text it is based on.

Bartolo di Fredi, Adoration of the Magi, ca 1385, detail

Bartolo's altarpiece demonstrates something that is often overlooked in narrative religious imagery -- telling a story to people who don't know how to read.  The artist, for the first time, depicted with the Adoration four narratives of the kings' journey across the upper part of the painting.

Installation view

MOBIA, which opened in 2005, has a steady trickle of only 15,000 to 17,000 visitors a year. 

Become one of them.  The exhibition is free. 

Read more about the difficult-to-obtain loan from Siena -- which involves antiquities smuggling -- and about the exhibition and museum in my article in today's New York Observer, here.

Bartolo, Adoration of the Magi, detail of Siena's cathedral behind medieval walls

Bartolo, Adoration of Magi, detail of kings and Joseph

Bartolo, Adoration of the Magi, from the Pinacoteca Nazional, Siena

Ceccarelli, Madonna and Child with Saints, detail

"Bartolo di Fredi, The Adoration of the Magi: A Masterpiece Reconstructed," Museum of Biblical Art, Broadway at 61st Street, through September 9

Text and photos (c) Copyright 2012 Laura Gilbert

"Bellini, Titian, Lotto: North Italian Paintings from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo" at the Met

Moroni, "Portrait of a Girl"

Some Renaissance masters have taken up residence at the Met while the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo undergoes renovations.  There are only 15 paintings on loan, but what marvelous paintings they are.

Giovanni Bellini, "Pieta"

There's a dead Christ with the Virgin Mary and St. John by the great Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini -- emotional and simply yet subtly colored -- and a mythological scene that some think is an early Titian.  But the excitement in this small show is in discovering great works by artists who are obscure compared to those titans.

Foremost among them is Giovanni Battista Moroni, who worked not in the wealthy cities of Milan and Venice but in the relative backwater of Bergamo.  Even so, Moroni was esteemed by his contemporaries -- Titian is said to have recommended that a couple of Venetians on their way to Bergamo have their likeness painted by him -- and based on the two portraits by Moroni here it is easy to see why.  They are so engaging that for awhile it may be hard to look at anything else in the room.

Moroni combined an aggressive realism -- in his portrait of a young girl, for example, the costume, pearls, and red beads of her bracelet are all meticulously rendered -- with a sympathetic intimacy.  Both the girl and Moroni's portrait of a man have a direct gaze one can't help but return.

Foppa, "The Three Crosses"

Another knockout is "The Three Crosses" by Vincenzo Foppa, which in a virtuoso display shows off the artist's mastery of the male nude, perspective, landscape, and architectural detail (the painting isn't nearly so monochromatic as appears in this image provided by the Met).  Oddly, the Crucifixion occurs immediately beyond a triumphal arch -- complete with portrait roundels -- that springs from Corinthian columns, has floor tiles, and opens onto Jerusalem in the distance.

Lorenzo Lotto is represented by four works: an ingenious portrait in front of a dark moonscape -- how many nighttime portraits were there in the Renaissance? -- and three brightly colored religious narratives that formed part of an altarpiece for a church in Bergamo.

Moretto di Brescia, "Christ and a Devotee"

And there's a lovely, delicate Moretto di Brescia painting of Christ and a devotee whose book tumbles to the ground as he drops to his knees.

The history of Italian Renaissance painting tends to concentrate on works in the cities of power and riches -- Rome, Florence, and Venice.  The art of Northern Italy has its own delights, as these loans beautifully show.

"Bellini, Titian, and Lotto: North Italian Paintings from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo," Metropolitan Museum of Art, 5th Ave. and 82nd St.  Through September 3.

Images:  Moroni and Bellini (c) 2012 Laura Gilbert.  Foppa and Moretto courtesy the Metropolitan Museum.

Text (c) 2012 Laura Gilbert

Hermann Goering as Art Collector: German Museum Puts His 4,263-Work Stash Online

A Tiepolo stolen for Goering from the family of Federico Gentili di Guiseppe, now in the Getty Museum

The German Historical Museum in Berlin yesterday put online the art collection of the notorious Hermann Goering, perhaps the most rapacious individual art thief of the Nazi era.    It shows that Goering, who organized the Gestapo and was Hitler's designated successor until the end of World War II, had a whopping 4,263 works.

The collection database -- which is only in German -- is organized into several categories, including artist, title, and previous owner of the work.  Sometimes an entry is illustrated with a black-and-white thumbnail.

Among previous owners are several that have been the subject of recent high-profile restitution cases -- Cassirer, Goudstikker, Gentili -- in addition to such prominent names as Rothschild and Wildenstein.

A cursory glance at the list of artists yields some surprises -- the Nazis considered modernism degenerate but Goering apparently had nine Picassos, three Braques, a Leger, nineteen Matisses, and eight Cezannes in his collection.  He also seemed to have a taste for the erotic, with more than 30 works by Boucher, the 18th-century master of titillation.

Goering was one of the Nazi leaders sentenced to hang as war criminals at Nuremberg.  Albert Speer, who as Hitler's armaments minister was sentenced to twenty years for using slave labor, recounted to Gitta Sereny this anecdote about Goering's collecting from the time of their incarceration before trial:

"One day at lunch, Brandt (Dr. Karl Brandt, executed for conducting medical experiments on prisoners) was talking about the mountains and about how sad he was to have lost their house there.

"'Oh, come on,' said Goering.  'What possible reason can you have to complain when you had so little.  But I who had so much, think what it means to me.  I was sitting back to back with Doenitz (Admiral Karl Doenitz, who received a ten-year sentence), and I heard him murmur to his neighbor, 'Yes, and all stolen.'  He was of course right."

Goering's collection at one of his residences, ca 1943

Photographs:  Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, "Alexander the Great in the Studio of Apelles," from Getty Museum website; view of Goering's collection from the German Historical Museum website

Anecdote from Gitta Sereny, "Albert Speer:  His Battle with Truth," 1995

Text (c) 2012 Laura Gilbert

Metropolitan Museum Quietly Shuttles 12 Old Masters to Christie's for Auction

Master of Brunswick Dyptich, "Virgin and Child with Sts. Mary Magdelene
and Dorothy"

In a quiet move, the Met has consigned a dozen Old Master paintings -- including some by major artists -- to Christie's for auction on June 6.

The consignment has not been announced by the museum.  At the auction house, though, the paintings are displayed in their own gallery with the large label "Property from the Metropolitan Museum of Art."

Jordaens, "St. Ives Receiving Supplicants"

The Met cache has some of the best artworks up for bidding in this sale, among them a small oil sketch by Jacob Jordaens, one of the most important Flemish painters and certainly the most important in Antwerp after Rubens died.  The Met has two paintings by Jordaens on more or less permanent display, but regrettably the sketch has not been shown with them, at least not in recent memory, and the opportunity to see all of them together now seems foreclosed.

Robert, "The Ruins"

The Met is also willing to part with a pair of remarkable paintings by Hubert Robert that many museums would be proud to display.  The Met owns several works by this late18th-century artist who specialized in painting the ruins of Rome, so the Met could rationalize that a couple are expendable.  But it's a surprise to see that it is these two that are offered -- they are in an unusual round format and thus unlike anything else that the museum owns by this artist.

The auction is estimated to bring between roughly $1.8 and $2.7 million to benefit the Met's acquisition fund for European paintings.

Here are the other Met offerings of note:

Circle of Rembrandt

Pieter Breughel the Younger, "The Whitsun Bride" and "The Bird Trap."  Christie's is selling the latter as autograph, while noting that Met curator Walter Liedtke considers it workshop.

Master of the Brunswick Dyptich, "Virgin and Child with Sts. Mary Magdalene and Dorothy."

Circle of Rembrandt, "Young Girl in an Interior," a beautiful small painting that came into the museum attributed to Rembrandt himself.

Pieter Breughel the Younger, "The Whitsun Bride"

Text and images (c) 2012 Laura Gilbert.

Court Seeks U.S. Views in Chabad Case that Triggered Russia's Embargo on Art Loans

The federal district court hearing Chabad v. Russian Federation -- the lawsuit that caused Russia to embargo loans of artworks to U.S. museums -- has solicited the U.S. government's views on the latest twist in the case.

The concern stated by the court is that judicial action could jeopardize relations between the two countries -- which are already tense.

The court is therefore seeking the White House's position on whether Russia ought to be held in contempt and ordered to pay monetary sanctions for its refusal to honor the court's default judgment.  That judgment ordered Russia to turn over two separate collections of Jewish-themed and religious books and manuscripts to the Brooklyn, New York-based Jewish sect known as Chabad.

Impact on U.S. Foreign Policy Interests

The court issued its request in response to a motion for sanctions brought by Chabad.  "Because of the serious impact such an order (for sanctions) could have on the foreign policy interests of the United States, this Court finds it  would be helpful to obtain the views of the United  States prior to action on the motion," the court wrote in its May 23 order to the Justice Department.

The request comes at a time of severe political tensions between the U.S. and Russia, with very public disagreements resulting from the recently arrived U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, Michael McFaul, making incendiary remarks in Russia -- and then, in several instances, having to apologize publicly for making them.  McFaul's comments have included calling Russia a "wild country," for example.

Other major diplomatic issues involve Russia's support of the Syrian government.

McFaul, via Twitter, said he is "still learning of craft" of being a diplomat.
 
Meanwhile, in the now seven-year-old Chabad litigation, the sect is seeking a hoard of books and manuscripts that was nationalized by the Soviet Union in the first years after the 1917 Russian Revolution, when the government abolished private property.

Standstill in U.S.-Russia Art Loans
 
Chabad is also seeking a second hoard, which originally belonged to a rabbi who had to leave it behind when he came to the U.S. seeking refuge from the Nazis.   This second hoard was twice taken -- first stolen by the Nazis in Warsaw and then seized by the Soviets at the end of World War II.

Chabad claims it is the rightful owner of both hoards, which it sometimes refers to as a single, "Schneerson," collection.

Russia abandoned the case, saying U.S. courts did not have jurisdiction over it because it is a sovereign nation, and in July 2010 the court issued a default judgment in favor of Chabad.

The art embargo started shortly thereafter and is still in effect.  In response, New York's Metropolitan Museum cancelled scheduled loans to Russia, and now neither U.S. nor Russian institutions are requesting loans from the other.

It has been suggested, by lawyers and others, that the "Russia factor" is behind proposed federal legislation to immunize foreign-government lenders of art from lawsuits based on their loans.

When the U.S. submits its brief on sanctions, it will be the second time the government has entered the case.  Almost a year ago it submitted a statement when Chabad moved to begin attaching Russian property to enforce its judgment.  Then the U.S. urged the court to proceed carefully while reiterating its longstanding support for Chabad.

Text (c) 2012 Laura Gilbert