This originally appeared in a slightly different format on www.huffingtonpost.com
(By Mat Gleason)
I guess I should have been a good tourist and gone to Fisherman’s Wharf, or I could have been a good art nerd and headed out to see the Fisher Collection at SFMOMA. Instead I was stupidly overcome with hope. Hope that I would have a transformative art experience viewing the most reliable touchstone in all of art: Late 19th century French post-impressionism. It would have been a good day to sell me a bridge.
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, The Poor Fisherman, 1881. Oil on canvas. 61 ¼ x 75 ¾ inches. © RMN (Musée d’Orsay) … We should have just gone to Fisherman’s Wharf.
Calling the de Young museum ahead of time, we discovered that walkup tickets to the blockbuster “Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay” were still available. At $25 apiece, it seemed reasonable considering not only the trove of immortal masterpieces on display, but also the hefty discount on plane fare to Paris to see these works when their permanent residence, the Musée d’Orsay, finishes the remodel that made this two part travelling show possible (Part 1, featuring early impressionism, closed on September 6).
We arrived at 2:15 and were able to purchase tickets for the 3:00 PM cattle herding. The Disneyland-like ropes had a maze set up under a giant Gerhard Richter painting in the lobby (if it wasn’t meant as a jab at Germany on behalf of France, it still is funny as one). It was a slow day at Museum Inc., with an unseasonably sunny afternoon keeping droves of tourists outdoors. At the appointed time, we skipped cattle herding maze #1, proceeded downstairs to find check-in point #2 equally empty, and waltzed past the audio tour rental booth, nestled along what ordinarily would have been a half-hour roped-off wait. The cute intern sweetly announced “$8 audio tour, $6 for members, are you members?” ready to pounce on the purse or wallet of anyone inquiring about how to become a museum member.
At check-in point #3 we waited a grand total of 30 seconds with two other couples before being beckoned into the crowd by underworked admission guards. What had been designed to restrain our movement toward the show for up to 90 minutes took less than 90 seconds.
Starry Night Over the Rhone. 1888. Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). Oil on canvas, 28 ½ x 36 ¼ inches. ? RMN (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski
But that is the good part of the review. If I had had to wait 90 minutes for “Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay,” I would not have started this review off as a pleasant tourist. No matter how great these pictures are, they are crammed in a basement overfilled with way too many somnambulant European tourists. The air is literally sucked out of this exhibition space. The Axis and Allied powers stand at attention with drool droplets forming, hypnotized by the audio tour as they peer into each Van Gogh impasto for a sign of life in the long-dead quaintness of their continent. There was not a single artwork that afforded me thirty seconds of contemplation without someone invading my space. I’m not asking for a private tour (I was however, sent an invite to the press preview, but a scheduling conflict forced me here on the first Tuesday of the show, allowing the sardine-can truth to come out), but show me a theater or music act with the artistic or historical impact of Cezanne and I will show you someone who is charging way more than $25 per ticket for a rare stateside appearance.
Self-Portrait with Yellow Christ. 1890-1891. Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Oil on canvas, 15 x 18 1/8 inches. ? RMN (Musée d’Orsay)/René-Gabriel Ojéda
Of course the curatorial solution to the crowds is to simply hang all of the work on a high centerline, ensuring that we will see the tops of the artworks from afar and that might be as close as we get to a good view. It might very well be worth $25 to see Gaugin’s Self Portrait with Yellow Christ but it is not worth anything being one of 25 people crammed onto the optimum viewing real estate of six floor tiles centered in front of the picture. The whole second half of the show was devoted to the lightweight Nabis with the occasional Puvis De Chavannes garbage (say that last word with a French accent as you click that link). For all the rare Seraut studies the show scatters throughout its Pointillist digression, the point seems to be to remind us that Seraut’s Sunday Afternoon masterpiece is in an airy first floor gallery at the Chicago Art Institute.
Georges Seurat, Study for A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte - 1884, 1884-1886. Oil on panel. 6 1/4 x 9 7/8 inches. © RMN (Musée d’Orsay)
Buy the book, the calendar, the posters (framed or unframed) and the mugs. But consider buying a tuberculosis test if you are ever in an enclosed space with this many dawdling droning bored fools ever again. The only thing French this show made me consider was philosopher Michel Foucault and his theories of power derived in systems of control, primarily prisons. In sympathy to the masterpieces who are sentenced to spend eternity on institutional walls, the institution now sends the art audience through mazes and checkpoints and stairwells down into the bowels of their buildings to share the claustrophobic time. But don’t let the de Young dungeon scare you from visiting tourist-friendly San Francisco. Less than four hours after finishing up this mosh pit at the de Young, we were seated with 38,000 Giants fans at AT&T park for a baseball game and breathing room with what seemed like fewer people and much more excitement.
This originally appeared in a slightly different format on www.huffingtonpost.com
(By Mat Gleason)
There really is no way around calling the Getty a conservative art museum. When a sign in the second floor gallery directs you to “Paintings after 1875″, you cross a hallway expecting a wing and get one 20 x 20 gallery with seven paintings total, all completed before the turn of the century. The last century.
They have great shows of conservative art, but nobody wants to be a fuddy-duddy, so they balance it out with Getty grants to arts organizations of all shapes, sizes and proclivities. There is no Getty dictum in regard to its funding, it seems based on the quality of an organization’s administration and with zero analysis of their aesthetic. So you can’t call them conservative. Case closed?
Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down), 1872, oil on canvas. Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona, Museum Purchase. Photograph by Craig Smith. Courtesy of the Getty Museum.
Well… having just caught the exhibit The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gér?me, a revision of this fundamental assumption about the Getty seems to be at hand. As arts funding sources dry up, will the sugar tit of the Getty turn sour for arts organizations with an avant garde bent?
What could one show have that inspires a vision of apocalypse on the arts funding landscape? It was not the formal qualities of the Gér?me show. He was a hyper-realist with the drafting skills to rival Ingres or David or Caspar David Friederich or anyone. It was not the conceptual approach of Gér?me, who was Cecil B. DeMille sixty years before Technicolor and forty years before talkies. It was not the gift shop, the audio tour, the tourists in Disneyland tee shirts nor the never ending convoy of strollers all taking in a show of everything the Impressionists made sure to scorn. It was none of this.
The Snake Charmer (detail), about 1870, oil o canvas. Courtesy of and copyright Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachussetts, USA, (photo Michael Agee) Courtesy of the Getty Museum.
Most importantly, my sentiment that the Getty may ultimately have a conservative agenda was not the politics of Gér?me, decidedly backward by our standards, reveling in what was called “Orientalism”, a reinvigorating of painting by not just painting a nude, but by painting a nude who has been kidnapped and forced to serve in the Harem of an Arab prince in some palace near Morocco. But we are getting warm.
Had the Getty just put up these impossibly precise, dramatic and emotional exercises in academic realism, they would have been doing their duty. But as Gér?me gets rich and famous in the 1880s, he travels to the “near east” and concocts scenes of a world that just did not exist. It was a world painted in believable realism where the barbarism and eroticism of the infidel Muslim are intertwined branches that just makes them so darn exotic. To be fair and balanced, the Getty then makes sure that every placard is dripping with a reassurance that this way of looking at certain peoples through Western eyes is completely backward.
Public Prayer in a Mosque, 1871, oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887. Image copyright the Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY. Courtesy of the Getty Museum.
These mea culpas were suddenly everywhere, with every kidnapped white slave, with each leering Moslem. There were sincere disclaimers with every pigeon-infested mosque, in 32-point type next to the steps with severed heads and opium pipes. All of the lamentations of western cultural ignorance got poster-sized near the naked little boy performing with a snake to the pedophilic glances of what could have been a conquering jihad squad.
As I read each of these missives, a voice in my head spoke them. It sounded like Sarah Palin insisting that the Tea Party Rally was not a political event. It was Glenn Beck weeping his conservative demands to being accepted as an intellectual leader. When information about one small Gér?me portrait explained that it was deaccessioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1956, I could almost hear this anecdote being told by Rupert Murdoch while he added “Some of my best friends are liberals!” … If the most powerful conservatives in America are always pretending that they aren’t conservatives, we should expect our most conservative major collection of art to display this anosognosia of identity as well.
If the Getty believed that the politics of Gér?me were reprehensible, it would not have mounted this show, but the Getty wanted it both ways, it littered its own show with rationalizations to prove that it is fair and balanced… hmm just like Fox News.
