Although the museum probably has done more than any other museum in this country to make the work of van Gogh known to Americans, it has not owned a canvas by the artist until the present one was acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss bequest.
The museum’s large exhibition of van Gogh’s work held from Nov. 5, 1935, to Jan. 5, 1936, was one of the few art exhibitions ever held in this city that attracted long lines of standees awaiting admittance.
The newly acquired work was not in that exhibition at the outset. It was then in the collection of Miss G. P. van Stolk of Rotterdam, and although lent to the show, did not arrive here in time. When the exhibition returned to New York after its tour for a final two-week period, the canvas was added.
Alfred Barr Jr., director of the Museum of Modern Art, called it “one of the most important paintings ever acquired by the museum.” It was painted in San Rémy, France, in 1889.
A Tour With Mr. Wright
By ALINE B. SAARINEN | September 22, 1957
NEW YORK’S MOST EXTRAORDINARY AND controversial building is beginning to reveal itself above the contractor’s protective wood fences. Mothers dragging children and baby carriages pause to gaze at the concrete snail slowly growing against a background of conventional, boxlike apartment houses. Young students, with crew cuts, blue shirts and khaki pants, aim the Cyclops-eye of a camera upward toward the astonishing structure. Then they turn eagerly, hoping to get a glimpse of Frank Lloyd Wright, the world’s best-known living architect, who, in this slowly rising Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, is making his first imprint on the New York cityscape.
There, Mr. Wright conducted this reporter on a tour of the museum-in-process, talking all the while of what it all meant, what architecture is or should be, of the arts, of all manner of things. He walks with a springy step that belies his 88 years, his figure tall and spare. His vertically lined, handsome face seemed weathered rather than wrinkled.
“This is the only organic building in New York,” he announced, “the only 20th-century architecture; the only permanent building. This is all one thing, each part is the consequence of the other, the way things are in nature.”
But what of the curving walls? Didn’t some artists object to these? Yes, they did but they didn’t realize that the circumference is so great that one will not be aware of the curve and that there are many vertical sections. Also there is a “grand gallery”—rectilinear and 25 feet high—off the entrance floor for the permanently exhibited older paintings. And what of the fact that the walls slant outward at a slight angle? That angle, Mr. Wright explains, will not be perceptible. Then why have it? Because—patiently explaining—the painter has his canvas at just such an angle when he paints and because, so placed, the pictures will be in a natural perpendicular relation to the spectator’s line of vision.
Guggenheim To Restore Its Most Valuable Asset: Itself
By CAROL VOGEL | June 10, 2004
AFTER 45 YEARS THE SOLOMON R. Guggenheim Museum, the soaring spiral that has become one of Manhattan’s greatest tourist attractions, will undergo a major facelift. And while it has good bones, like many Frank Lloyd Wright buildings the Upper East Side landmark is plagued with cracks, leaks and corroding surfaces.
Calling it ‘’the most important piece of art in the collection,” Peter B. Lewis, a Cleveland-based philanthropist who has been chairman of the museum’s board and a trustee since 1993, has pledged to match trustee gifts three to one for the project.
The building on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street will remain open during the restoration, which is expected to take two years. In addition to removing nine coats of paint, right down to the building’s structure, to fix its cracking surface, the project also includes repairing the sidewalk, with its metallic rings set into concrete.
Hailing a Past and a Future
By ROBERTA SMITH | December 14, 2001
WITH THE UNVEILING OF ITS LONG-AWAITED new building on West 53rd Street, the American Folk Art Museum has assumed a new identity. Known until this year as the Museum of American Folk Art, it has rearranged its name to reflect its growing interest in 20th-century folk art from abroad.
The new eight-story structure, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, gives the museum a presence in the city’s cultural scene that had long eluded it. Now its reconfigured name will evoke not only an exemplary collecting and curatorial record, but also a destination of distinction.
The fresh start is inaugurated with two displays of recent acquisitions that symbolize a redefinition for the institution as surely as the new building does, while also summing up the evolution of folk art itself. Three of the museum’s four gallery floors are devoted to a dense installation of Ralph Esmerian’s gift of traditional American folk art. It could be said to represent where the museum is from.
The remaining floor houses the work of the great 20th-century outsider artist Henry Darger, including 7 of his bound manuscripts and 27 large two-sided watercolors. It represents where the museum is going.
Ralph Esmerian’s primary focus is traditional folk art: objects usually made from the late 17th to early 20th centuries in the eastern half of the country by European immigrants (or their descendants). They built on European folk models: painted chairs, tables and chests, for example, or the lavishly decorated religious texts and birth and wedding certificates, called frakturs, that are another of the Esmerian gift’s strong suits.
A further achievement of the new American Folk Art Museum is its role in setting a record. Its opening on Tuesday followed by exactly 25 days that of the Neue Galerie New York, a museum for German and Austrian art on Fifth Avenue, giving the city two outstanding new museums in less than a month, and the Asia Society’s expansion makes almost three. Top that.
Talent Call: Hot New Artists Wanted
By CAROL VOGEL | February 3, 2005
“This is why artists are living here,” Alanna Heiss exclaimed as a panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline appeared through the taxi window. Ms. Heiss, director of the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, and Klaus Biesenbach, a curator at P.S. 1 and its big-sister affiliate, the Museum of Modern Art, were heading over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. It had been a long afternoon in Brooklyn visiting artists’ studios. Now Ms. Heiss and Mr. Biesenbach were on their way to Columbia University to call on a 27-year-old art student whose work Mr. Biesenbach had spotted at a fair in Miami.
This is more or less how they have spent the last 10 months—stopping by studios, inviting artists to P.S. 1 and poring over thousands of submissions from painters, sculpto rs and conceptual artists as well as photographers and film and video artists. From 2,400 submissions, 175 will be chosen for a giant survey show of the city’s contemporary art scene.
For the curators, their studio forays are an exercise in discovery—a chance to break away from the routine of organizing exhibitions by proven names. For the artists, they are a nail-biting exercise, not unlike a callback audition for an Off Broadway production.
Seth Price’s studio in Williamsburg was a stop on the curators’ tour through Brooklyn. Among his creations are black CD’s with digital images of a recent beheading in Iraq that he downloaded off the Internet. “I purposely inverted the image—that was the art gesture,” Mr. Price said.
But the curators had other works in mind. On one wall was a series of wall reliefs that each show one breast. Fashioned from vacuum-formed plastic like that used in commercial packaging, each had a different color or pattern: one clear, another gold, still another a blue pattern whose surface resembled flocked Victorian wallpaper. “The breast is a familiar image, dating back to Classical statuary,” Mr. Price explained. “It has been so emptied out by art history, it’s a depleted form.”
“We should give him a wall to do his pieces and videos,” Ms. Heiss said under her breath.
And, later, P.S. 1 officials confirmed that he had made the cut.
For Brooklyn’s Dowager, Hard Sell and Hip-Hop
By CELESTINE BOHLEN | J
anuary 2, 2001
“GOLD INSIDE,” SHOUTS A SIGN OUTSIDE THE Brooklyn Museum of Art. A close reading of the small type reveals that what lies inside are not gold chains or nuggets, but “Gold of the Nomads,” the remains of the Scythian civilization from the first millennium B.C.
It’s not your usual museum advertisement, but the Brooklyn Museum is trying hard not to be a usual museum. It has been just a year since “Sensation,” an exhibition of works by cutting-edge British artists that lived up to its name by kicking up a ruckus that reached City Hall and boomeranged to the museum and its director, Arnold L. Lehman.
When Mr. Lehman, a Brooklyn native, arrived three years ago after 22 years as a museum director in Miami and Baltimore, the great Beaux-Arts museum was the borough’s dowager empress: rich and awe-inspiring but with a reputation for sleeping between shows.
Then Mr. Lehman led the museum into the “Sensation” maelstrom. It began before the show even opened, with an aggressive promotional campaign that warned of artworks so upsetting they could cause vomiting. Outraged by an image of the Virgin Mary festooned in elephant dung, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani threatened to cut the museum’s subsidy.
The Brooklyn museum’s board took the city to court and won. But the victory turned out to be Pyrrhic for Mr. Lehman. He was shown to have allowed Charles Saatchi, the owner of the artworks in the show, not only to be the exhibition’s anonymous sponsor but in some matters virtually its curator too. This arrangement seemed to cross a vaguely drawn line between sponsorship and self-promotion.
Mr. Lehman makes no apologies for his populist approach, saying that if the choice arose, he would have no trouble favoring a broader audience over deeper scholarly research, while bearing in mind that the mission of the museum is always about art.
“My only direction to our curators was that they had to clearly define which audiences were being served,” he said. “The only audience that I would not support was us, the internal audience.”
Sassy Sculpture Casts Whimsical Cityscape in Bronze
By IAN FISHER | May 11, 1996
“DID YOU CATCH THE ONE ON THE END—the rat?” Marie Ricca, a 40-year-old receptionist, asked as she whipped past the sculpture at lunchtime.
The rat in question was balanced perhaps 12 feet off the sidewalk, dressed cutely as a police officer with a billy club in a busy subway scene of 40 bronze figures. Like the other pint-size statues, the rat looked like a harmless cartoon character, except he was chasing another figure, a hapless white-collar worker, off the edge of a steel construction beam.
Small children bugged their eyes and giggled at “Life Underground,” a fanciful work of public art expanded this week at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street. But this artwork, which will eventually be installed in the subway station at 14th Street and Eighth Avenue, is more devious than it at first looks: An alligator in a suit pokes from a sewer to devour a man with a moneybag for a head. A second moneybag-head looks on without helping. A frowning telephone sucks up another man. And two knee-high figures work calmly to saw the whole thing down.
“I think it’s a lot of fun and also whimsical,” said Salli Lovelarkin, an art gallery director from Cincinnati who was one of many who gawked at and pondered the work yesterday. “But he gets a little dark, too. He’s got some people being squashed over there.”
“He” is the artist, Tom Otterness, who, inspired by 19th-century political cartoons that skewered corruption in New York, said he wanted to show, among other things, the struggle between rich and poor—and do it with a sense of humor. He said the sculpture reflects something any subway rider can appreciate: “The impossibility of understanding life in New York is the subject.”
Bovine Crimes Strike an Unlikely Cow Town
By ELISSA GOOTMAN | August 24, 2000
IT HAS BEEN ALMOST THREE MONTHS SINCE 500 life-size fiberglass cows arrived on city streets. Some people welcome the herd, with their imaginative designs by local artists. Others consider the whole cow parade just a hokey import from Chicago.
Now there has been some old-fashioned rustling.
“Cow Hands,” one of the fiberglass creatures, was unfastened from its concrete base at West Houston Street and La Guardia Place. The police arrived as “Cow Hands” was about to be loaded into a blue Jeep Cherokee.
The officers found Patrick Kraft, 24, of East Windsor, N.J., and Michael Macisco, 23, of Stratford, Conn., clearing their Jeep, apparently to make room for the cow. Detective Andrew McDermott said the two men soon confessed to plotting a prank, claiming that they were probably going to station “Cow Hands” in front of a friend’s Manhattan home.
Before long, “Cow Hands” was standing silently in the Sixth Precinct station house, on West 10th Street, where she was to be kept for 48 hours as evidence. Snapping a Polaroid picture for the station house scrapbook, Officer Jon Goldin shook his head, saying that when he first saw the cow at the station house, he figured that it was a prop in a publicity stunt.
“Well, that’s life in a big city,” he said.
A Billowy Gift to the City
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN | February 13, 2005
Experiencing “The Gates” at eye level: photographing them, walking beneath them.
IT IS A LONG, BILLOWY SAFFRON RIBBON meandering through Central Park—not a neat bow, but something that’s very much a gift package to New York City: “The Gates,” by Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude.
In the winter light, the bright fabric seemed to warm the fields, flickering like a flame against the barren trees.
“The Gates” is a work of pure joy, a vast populist spectacle of good will and simple eloquence, the first great public art event of the 21st century. It remains on view for just 16 days. Time is fleeting.
An army of paid helpers gradually released the panels of colored fabric from atop the 16-foot-tall gates, all 7,500 of them. The shifting light couldn’t have been better to show off the effects of the cloth. Sometimes the fabric looked deep orange; at other times it was shiny, like gold leaf, or silvery or almost tan. In the breeze, the skirted gates also appeared to shimmy like dancers in a conga line, the cloth buckling and swaying.
Fans mobbed their car. Like all projects by this duo, “The Gates” is as much a public happening as it is a vast environmental sculpture and a feat of engineering. It has required more than 1 million square feet of vinyl and 5,300 tons of steel, arrayed along 23 miles of footpaths throughout the park at a cost (borne exclusively by the artists) of $20 million.
From outside the park, the gates looked like endless rows of inert orange dominoes overwhelming Frederick Law Olmsted’s and Calvert Vaux’s masterpiece. But as the artists have insisted, the gates aren’t made to be seen from above or from outside. The gates need to be experienced on the ground, at eye level, where, as you move through the park, they crisscross and double up, rising over hills, blocking your view of everything except sky, then passing underfoot, through an underpass, or suddenly appearing through a copse of trees, their fabric fluttering in the corner of your eye. They have transformed the paths into boulevards decked out as if with flags for a holiday. Everyone is suddenly a dignitary on parade.
The Dinosaurs Are Moving
By W. H. BALLOU | December 28, 1924
THAT LONG-EXTINCT SHARK THAT CAME UP from the chalk beds of South Carolina is about to emerge from storage and unfold his 100 feet of length and tell the world how an army of Jonahs would make just one filling meal. He will be followed by a procession of gigantic extinct creatures that have long been hidden in boxes at the American Museum of Natural History, facing Central Park at West 77th Street.
The new southeast wing and Hall of Ocean Life will be followed by the School Service Building, for which the city has appropriated $733,800. It will be devoted to the relations of the museum to the schools of the city. The first floor will constitute the main exhibition hall. The building will also provide classrooms for visiting classes of children, laboratories and offices of the ed
ucational staff and nature study collections. Many offices of curators and assistants will be on the fifth floor and its mezzanine.
Two skeletons, a perfect matched pair of the largest carnivorous dinosaur extant, Tyrannosaurus rex, will stand in the reptile exhibit, with heads towering 20 feet above the floor. From tip of snout to end of tail they are 47 feet long.
Nearby will be Allosaurus, another mighty carnivore, the reptile balanced on heavy hind limbs and long, heavy tail. The hind legs are nine feet in length. His chief prey, as shown by the fossil remains found with his, was the equally huge herbivorous dinosaur Brontosaurus. “We may imagine,” states the label, “Allosaurus lying in wait, watching its prey until near approach stimulates him into semi-instinctive activity. Then a sudden swift rush, a fierce snap of the huge jaws and a savage attack with teeth and claws until the victim is torn in pieces and swallowed.”
Not less in size and power was the American gigantic dinosaur Deinodon, carnivorous and terrible in action. His limbs show climbing powers, and he would be credited with ability to scale skyscrapers in quest of prey—if alive today and running loose on Broadway.
To Visit a Museum, Perchance to Dream
By DAVID K. RANDALL | March 27, 2007
SEEING YOUR FIRST TIGER CAN BE SURprising, worrying, fascinating and ultimately tiring. Especially if you are a toddler on your first visit to the animal dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History.
Young museum visitors typically start with its tigers and gorillas, and then head to the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, a cavernous two-tiered room capped by a 94-foot-long model of a blue whale hanging from the ceiling.
Unlike much of the museum, the Milstein Hall is dark and serene, meant to simulate being underwater. It also appears to be a prime spot for a family nap.
The New York Times Book of New York Page 23
