Category: visual

“Within days – possibly by Thanksgiving – a Montgomery County Orphans’ Court judge will rule on whether the Barnes Foundation can move its multibillion-dollar art collection from Lower Merion to a site along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The ruling will culminate more than two years of legal wrangling since the Barnes board of directors, saying the foundation was nearly broke, petitioned for the right to move its gallery to a more-accessible location downtown.”

Outgoing Getty Museum director Deborah Gribbon’s statement that “museums best serve the public by collecting, exhibiting and interpreting works of art of the highest quality” has “pricked up ears in the art world. It was widely viewed as an indictment that the Getty is not serious enough about acquiring masterpieces, despite its fabulous wealth left by its namesake patron after his death in 1976. Gribbon’s resignation cuts to an ongoing struggle for museums: How should precious money be spent in an expensive enterprise: on art or on programs promoting the arts?”

Art Basel Miami Beach has re-upped its commitment and will stay in Miami indefinitely. ”We are certainly pleased that the show has garnered the international reputation that it has and that it was generally acclaimed as the most important contemporary art fair in North America after its first incarnation.”

“The new Modern is an elegant envelope for an unsurpassed collection of 20th Century art shimmering against expanses of pristine white.” But “anyone expecting a museum in the theatrical, exuberant vein of the Guggenheim extravaganza that Frank Gehry bestowed on Bilbao will be disappointed. MoMA is not thrilling, dazzling or emotive. It seduces with a murmur. There are no panels crammed with historical background, no interactive gizmos, no flashy displays, not even a peach-hued wall — nothing to distract from the stark potency of the work.”

Hilton Kramer registers his disappointment with the new Museum of Modern Art: “The first and gravest of our disappointments is with the ill-conceived architecture. Yoshio Taniguchi’s redesign has at every turn in its cold and elephantine structure the look and feel of a Japanese parody of the kind of American modernism that has itself long outlived its expiration date. Thus the galleries are essentially an architectural assemblage of—what else?—bleak, oversized white boxes in which the scale of the interior space and the unrelieved whiteness of the walls conspire to discomfort the viewer while diminishing the aesthetic integrity of works of art marooned in an environment remarkably hostile to the pleasures of the eye.”

The Museum of Modern Art reflects a change in the museum’s character. “MoMA is no longer the edgy institution of its youth, a place of argument, sharp elbows, and missionary zeal. It remains a vital museum, but one whose energies now seem older and more contemplative. In its early days, the museum’s celebrated garden was a place of retreat—not just from the hurly-burly of the city but from the metaphysical racket within the museum. Now, in this new building, Taniguchi has imbued the entire museum with the spirit of the garden, creating a light-filled temple.”

MoMA’s move from Manhattan to Queens and back to Manhattan may have been a public relations triumph, but it was a logistical nightmare the likes of which would cause the most experienced moving company to break out in a collective flop sweat. The woman who has single-handedly overseen the moves is named Jennifer Russell, and her job over the past two years has demanded the combined skills of curator, stagehand, travel agent, and international diplomat.

A new exhibit of the work of Raphael, as well as the work of those who influenced him, is a new way of looking at an artist whose impact on the art world is immeasurable. “‘Influence’ scarcely covers the relation to Raphael’s work not only of Michelangelo and the other titan of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, but also of Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi; Perugino, who may have been his teacher; Pinturicchio; and Fra Bartolommeo. The show, which incorporates works by most of those elders, demonstrates that the prodigy from the Marches extracted the formal essence of each man’s art to feed a synthetic style that would become a beau ideal of Western painting for the next four centuries.”

London’s Victoria & Albert Museum unveils a spectacular new architecture gallery this week, and the curators have an astonishing collection on which to draw. “The display can be changed almost infinitely, encouraging repeat visits and allowing keen visitors to construct a picture of how buildings have been commissioned, designed, built, perceived and appreciated – or not – over hundreds of years… Although handsomely designed in a perfectly rational manner by the Glaswegian architect Gareth Hoskins, the collection of architectural riches is the museological equivalent of a box of expensive, gift-wrapped chocolates: temptation layered upon temptation.”

“Rarely has a building attracted quite so many similes. Some locals think it looks like a slug, or a bloated armadillo. Glimpsed from sea it seems very like a whale emerging from the deep… For some it is already a white elephant – the latest example of a witless public-sector mentality. The comparisons multiply because nobody knows what exactly Wales’s all too multi-purpose Millennium Centre really is. The latest, and the last, of the big millennial lottery-funded projects opens next week – the legatee of more than a decade of wrangling about what should be built in the middle of the reconstructed Cardiff Bay.”