|
|
|
|
|
Museum Business as Usual
John Haberin New York City
Baltimore, Brooklyn, and Deacessions
Ready? Name your favorite painting in the Brooklyn Museum.
If nothing springs to mind, I have bad news for you: the question just got harder, and I mean significantly harder. The museum has sold off, or deaccessioned, twelve works, from artists as celebrated as Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Henri Matisse. A single painting by Lucas Cranach snagged $5.1 million at auction, well ahead of its $1.8 million estimate—with an estimated $4.2 million headed for Brooklyn. But wait a minute: are they supposed to do that? 
I could understand if you asked. This is not business as usual, and the Baltimore Museum of Art has had to drop plans to sell a mere three works, not one from the airy realms of art history. Apparently people in Baltimore do have museum favorites, and they spoke up loud and clear. Why the difference? One might just as well ask about common aims and a common plight. One might also ask what defines business as usual in art and museums after Covid-19.
Can they do that?
I do have favorites in Brooklyn—and not solely as a critic. Just out of college and discovering art, I took my time in New York museums, where admission was cheap and it was easy to fall in love. I admired a western landscape by Albert Bierstadt so much that a poster of another like it, from the Met, ended up over my bed. There canoes set out on placid waters, but towering peaks press forward, as if to crush anyone who dares to look, or recede into the clouds. Men and women on the near bank step out onto a natural pier of rock, to take in the vision. I could have no doubt why the National Academy of Design drew such scorn a few years back for selling off work from the Hudson River School.
Looking up the works at auction, split between Sotheby's and Christie's, only confirmed my forebodings. The pastel by Edgar Degas, of a nude brushing her hair, has all his eerie mix of engagement and detachment when it comes to vulnerable young woman. It also has his unlikely way with bodies in three dimensions. Working around 1530, Lucas Cranach gives Lucretia, who killed herself rather than give in to nasty male desires, a sexual charge and a knowing smile. In the Northern Renaissance equivalence of Mannerism, he uses acid colors and distended limbs to put your desires on the spot as well, whatever your gender or sexuality. His other, mostly clothed versions of Lucretia look dowdy in comparison.
Favorites aside, you would be right to feel something amiss. The Association of Art Museum Directors has clear guidelines for when to sell: in a word, never. In greater detail, museums should deaccession works only to buy more, not to cover expenses. And they should do so only if they have better work by the artist they are losing. This is not just a matter of quality. It also ensures that a collection best typifies an artist and art history.
Who, though, appointed them? More to the point, who cares if they disapprove? In practice, museums appointed them, by joining together, and the sanctions for violations are real. Other museums are likely to respond by refusing to lend art for exhibitions. And museums thrive on blockbusters, although Vincent van Gogh and Starry Night still draw crowds (although you can still have them all but to yourself as museums reopen after the lockdown). As the NAD discovered, the sanctions hurt.
Public disapproval matters, too, since museums depend on the public for support. And that points to what Brooklyn and Baltimore have in common—the plight of art after Covid-19. As attendance has declined or vanished, so have revenues. The Brooklyn Museum has cut its staff by 7 percent. It had to do something, right? Maybe, but then why did the Baltimore Museum and its director, Christopher Bedford, feel obliged to back down?
That is literally the million-dollar question. Baltimore hoped for $12 million for just those three works. A careful and balanced article in The New York Times for October 30 asked that very question, too. The headline put it starkly: "Two museums tried to sell art. Only one caught grief about it"—but why?
The diversity of cities
This being mainstream journalism, the newspaper's answer focused on the process, starting with Baltimore's motives and expectations. It had sold work not that long ago, including a monster combine painting by Robert Rauschenberg and two late Warhols, to support a greater diversity in its programs and collection (and, yes, there is always another late Warhol). It claimed the very same aims now, but this time people rose up, including fourteen present and former museum directors. Tellingly, that also included African American artists on the museum's board, Amy Sherald and Adam Pendleton. That took pressure off the museum should it appear to neglect diversity by dropping the sale—and weakened its case for sale. Besides, Sherald has herself made news with her official portrait of Michelle Obama, so her voice counts.
Still, that explanation merely puts off the hard question: again, why there and not in New York? Do people in Baltimore care that much more about art? The Times did not ask, but it did offer enough cold facts to hint at one answer. The Baltimore Museum, it turns out, is not in all that bad shape financially. That had to cast further doubt on a major break with business as usual.
No question, too, that New York is taking a hit like nowhere else, and it is not likely to recover any time soon. Its economy has suffered more because it so depends on tourism and arts, which then suffer all the more—a vicious circle if there ever was one. New York also depends more than most on sophisticated white-collar jobs that can carry on at home, apart from the city. Housing costs more here than in Baltimore as well, making people that much less willing to return. Try to convince yourself that it will become cheap as a result, to the benefit of artists.
I wonder, though. Can that be all, when museum practices and public reactions are so at stake? I want to suggest two further explanations, starting with the differences between museums. Maybe they serve different needs in different cities, or at least they think they do. Maybe enough people in Baltimore really do like their museum enough to have favorites. A second explanation then looks back well before Covid-19, to what museums everywhere have in common after all, as big money—and what that means for just what gets sold off.
First, arts are indeed more vital to New York, favorites or not. The Brooklyn Museum competes with unequaled collections at the Met, the Museum of Modern Art, and more. To recover its voice, it has chosen to think locally, like the Queens Museum, in a multicultural borough. It has made popular appeal and education its mission with greater care than ever for diversity. That can mean pandering, with an exhibition of David Bowie, but also shows of Black Power, black radical women, art and civil rights, women Pop artists, Latin American women, Frida Kahlo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mickalene Thomas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Kehinde Wiley with and without his riff on Jacques-Louis David, and (yes) the Obama state portraits. It all but sidelines the collection—which I dare you to find, apart from the global feminism of Judy Chicago.
Baltimore has much more to prove. To promote diversity, it must make a case for its place in the arts. Of the proposed works for sale, one is Abstract Expressionism by Clyfford Still. Contemporary artists can feel proud to belong in its company. Conversely, Baltimore can take pride in including them on its board. Its commitment to diversity is not in doubt—or in need of $12 million.
Sought-after periods
That said, something is still fishy in Brooklyn, where the director, Anne Pasternak, says that the institution was "extremely conservative" in its selection for sale. How, though, could the bottom of the museum's barrel bring in that kind of money? For an altogether different take, these "are highly sought-after periods and should fetch substantial prices." Sophie Webel, director of the Fondation Dubuffet in Paris, was praising two colorful works by Jean Dubuffet. She could just as well be speaking of an equally lively abstraction by Joan Miró or the entire lot. Last year, artists protested the Whitney and its board, for making money off tear gas. So yet again, where are the protests in Brooklyn now?
Without question, need is a priority, as reduced attendance in the pandemic strains museum budgets, and so is diversity. How could they not be? Other priorities, though, predate the lockdown, and they point to one last answer. As Ben Davis has argued, museums have been banking more on contemporary art and less on art history. It is where the money lies—money for donors and board members, who collect contemporary art and enjoy a museum's stamp of approval. It explains years of ready money and museum growth, but it applies here as well.
Seen in this light, the different fates in two cities make perfect sense. Baltimore was hoping to deaccession relatively recent work—by Brice Marden and Andy Warhol, and contemporary art makes headlines. Clyfford Still is an old master by comparison. The press was telling, and its board resisted. Brooklyn, in contrast, can command such high prices because it is digging deep into history, and nobody seems to care. Yet that could be a dangerous strategy.
It sure cost the Metropolitan Museum. It expanded rapidly into the Met Breuer to give further space to contemporary art, went way over budget, and drew back—and on February 5, 2021, it announced that it was weighing selling works, too, to pay staff salaries in a crisis. But the danger is also to museum-goers, who miss out on so much more. They may miss entirely what happens in the gaps between the historic names they recognize. In losing Cranach, they are losing the sexual charge (and some awfully good painting), but also the tricky course of art after the High Renaissance. In losing Degas, they are missing the still trickier course on the way to modern art.
Also for sale was a young Italian woman by Camille Corot. Her gaze is formidable, but her figure is as awkward as a nude for Degas. The cross in her right hand seems improbably small and her figure improbably flat and fluid. On a previous trip to Italy, a young Corot could deliver the crisp light of Rome. Here he anticipates the defiant women, painterly brush, and incongruous spaces of Degas and Edouard Manet. To top it off, a painter I hardly knew marks a strange turn as well, at the very start of the Renaissance.
Donato de Bardi worked a bit off the beaten path, in Genoa, which may explain his also working in and against history. His Saint Jerome from before 1450 belongs to that long retreat from Giotto, in its gilded backdrop and in spirit. Yet the Renaissance in Florence was already underway, and Donato had already set a crucifixion against a painterly landscape. Its naturalism overwhelms the emotions in his foreground, and he must have returned to gilding to regain the tension due to his own serious limits. Jerome's intense features and the vivid red of his cloak convey the twist in turns in art history better than many a more famous artist. Will museums keep up with the twists and turns in their history as well?
Sales and final decisions took place the last week in October 2020.