Art&Seek December 2, 2010
Tuesday Morning Roundup Stephen Becker | October 5, 2010 8:08 AM Categorized Under: Dallas Arts District, General, History or Science, Local Events, Music, Visual Arts OPPORTUNITIES MISSED: Uptown Players has managed quite a coup in scoring the American premiere of the Pet Shop Boys musical Closer to Heaven. The show takes us back to a seedy gay club in 1980s London and features songs written by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe with a book by Jonathan Harvey. It’s the later that seems to be the problem. Mark Lowry compares the story to the dreaded Showgirls in his theaterjones.com review. But there is a silver lining here. “The good news is that the acting in Uptown’s Closer to Heaven is way better than Showgirls,” he writes. Lawson Taitte has similar problems with the book, but he’s also a fan of the acting, writing that the main actors are, “often excellent” in his dallasnews.com review. LONG LIVE LIZA: Liza Minnelli swoops in this weekend for a pair of shows with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. The Broadway legend will be singing songs from her newly released CD of standards, Confessions. Ahead of her trip, dfw.com got her on the phone for the briefest of interviews. HIS LOSS IS OUR GAIN: “The Mourners” at the Dallas Museum of Art is probably the biggest museum show coming to North Texas this year. It’s certainly the one we’ve heard the most about. In a nutshell, it features 40 alabaster statues from the tomb of John the Fearless, the second Duke of Burgundy. But the figures aren’t necessarily arranged as they were around the tomb. At the show’s first stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they were lined up twoby-two. But that made it difficult to see all of the details, Gaile Robinson notes in her dallasnews.com review. “The DMA noted the problem and separated the figures. One doublefile group gives a facsimile of their original staging, but others are mounted alone or by twos or in threes so visitors can get close,” she writes. The show was organized by the DMA; if you want to hear more about it, be sure to watch Jerome’s interview with curator Heather MacDonald from last week’s episode of Think TV.
Friday Morning Roundup Stephen Becker | November 6, 2009 7:48 AM THINK GLOBALLY, RECORD LOCALLY: “All I knew was that I wanted to be a musician, and I wanted to skip the step of paying other people to record,” Fort Worth musician and sound engineer Zaq Bell says in reference to using a home recording studio. That’s the approach that more and more Fort Worth musicians are taking to recording, according to Fort Worth Weekly’s cover story. “Now, for musicians to make any money at all, they need to get tradeable, downloadable copies of their efforts somewhere,” writes FWW’s Caroline Collier. Further proof that computers = awesome. CROSSING THE ATLANTIC: The Dallas Museum of Art will host a collection of 40 pieces of French medieval sculpture in an exhibition called “The Mourners.” The pieces normally reside at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, France, but they will be crossing the Atlantic in the fall of 2010. Dallasnews.com has more details about the show, which will hit the Met in New York before coming to town. SETTING UP SHOP: If you’ve been looking for Billy Zane around town and haven’t spotted him yet, you haven’t been trying. The actor (Titanic) has taken up residence here to shoot the ABC midseason replacement The Deep End at The Studios at Las Colinas and has been a fixture at events around Dallas. And he says he wouldn’t mind sticking around for a while. “I’ve spent probably the majority of my adult life on location, usually in the jungle or at sea.” he tells Robert Wilonsky over on Unfair Park. “When I’ve got basketball across the street, following a major concert, it’s pretty cool.”
December 2, 2010
'The Mourners' Coming to the DMA, Raved About in NYC Jerome Weeks | May 3, 2010 1:40 PM The Mourners is a series of some 40 pint-sized statues that typically surround the base of the tomb of John the Fearless, the 15th-century duke of Burgundy. Because the tomb — housed in Dijon’s Musee des Beaux Arts in France — is currently being renovated, The Mourners are able to tour for the first and probably the only time. They’re masterpieces of late medieval art, and they’re coming to the Dallas Museum of Art October 3 — in a tour to seven American museums, a tour overseen by the DMA. The first stop has been the Metropolitan in NYC, and The Mourners have been given two ecstatic reviews, one in the Wall Street Journal (“a small triumph of an exhibition”) and a new one in the New York Review of Books (“to see them is to be dazzled” — subscription required to read the full review). You can get a little bit of that dazzle viewing the individual mourners online. Because the foot-and-a-half tall alabaster statues were removed from their niches in the tomb (where they look like a religious procession wending its way past the pillars in a cathedral), they were digitally photographed in the round. So this is the first time people can see them, full-view, thanks to the Mourners Photography Project. Check it out: Manipulating the figures so they revolve is spooky-cool.
December 2, 2010
« Thursday Morning Roundup Q&A: Dallas Artist Brent Ozaeta »
Thursday Roundup, Pt II Jerome Weeks | May 13, 2010 9:30 AM CELEBRATING, NOT MOURNING – In yesterday’s feature on DMA curator Heather MacDonald, we reported on the show coming to the Dallas Museum of Art in October: The Mourners, a series of 40-some, late-medieval statues that have never toured before but are making the rounds of seven American museums, courtesy of the DMA. The pint-sized masterpieces are currently at the Met in New York City and today the Times got around to reviewing them only a week before the show closes (“Last Chance”) — the third rave they’ve received. SELLING OR SUING – Bloomberg broke the news yesterday that former Dallas collector and DMA trustee Marguerite Hoffman is suing Mexican financier David Martinez because he failed to keep secret the details of her sale of Mark Rothko’s Untitled to him in 2006 (h/t Unfair Park). And he also purportedly promised not to re-sell the 1961 painting. But last night Sotheby’s put it up for auction, hoping for $25 million, and it sold for $31 million. It trailed behind only the $32 million that was bid on one of Andy Warhol’s “fright wig” selfportraits. The Warhol, coincidentally, is one of five like it — including the one the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth has and which is currently on display in the exhibition, Andy Warhol: The Last Decade (closing this weekend). Hoffman is suing to ‘rescind” her sale of the Rothko because, allegedly, Martinez didn’t live up to his end of the agreement — she sold the painting privately, not through auction, because it was soon after her husband Robert died and she didn’t want the public attention . Her amended complaint states that she’ll return Martinez’ money and give Untitled to the DMA. Which, says CultureGrrl, seems to have been Hoffman’s plan all along. The Rothko appeared in the celebrated DMA exhibition, Fast Forward, which featured more than 300 works from the ‘Big Three’ local family art collections, the Hoffman, Rachofsky and Rose. All the works were to be given eventually to the DMA, an amazing expansion of the museum’s holdings in modern art (although the terms of the gift reportedly permit family members to sell individual works during their lifetime).
'The Year of Heather': Curating at the Dallas Museum of Art Jerome Weeks | May 12, 2010 7:00 AM At the Dallas Museum of Art, this is ‘the year of Heather.’ KERA’s Jerome Weeks reports that out of a dozen or so exhibitions, associate curator Heather MacDonald is in charge of three this year, including one of the most important. •
The Lens of Impressionism review
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Gaile Robinson’s review of Coastlines
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FrontRow review of Coastlines
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Wall Street Journal review of The Mourners at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
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New York Review of Books on The Mourners (subs. req. for full review)
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New York Times review of The Mourners
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KERA radio story:
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Expanded online story:
The term curator comes from the Latin, curare, meaning to care for. That, literally, is a curator’s basic job, just taking care of the museum’s collection, researching it, preserving it, presenting it. Heather MacDonald has a Ph.D. from Berkeley in French 18th century art. But at the DMA — officially, as the Lillian and James H. Clark Associate Curator — she’s in charge of European art from 1500 to 1945, a sizable piece of art history to care for. Then there are the exceptional times when a curator puts on an exhibition. A major exhibition is one of the most complex endeavors in any art form. Negotiating the loans of milliondollar artworks, arranging secure (and temperature-sensitive) transportation, laying out and assembling the galleries, scheduling public lectures and all the accompanying events. The skill set required extends from diplomat to scholar to set designer. MacDONALD: “There’s even an element of horse-trading sometimes and a lot of legwork, a lot of conversations because there’s just an amazing number of moving parts that go into a temporary exhibition.” Richard Brettell is the former head of the DMA and a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.
BRETTELL: “Heather brings an incredible knowledge of art history, a great practical sense of what can and cannot work in an institution and she has a real sense of the intellectual importance of the exhibitions.” So far this year, MacDonald has opened two exhibitions, The Lens of Impressionism, still running at the DMA, and Coastlines: Images of Land and Sea, which just opened. But her most important work won’t be seen here until October. It’s The Mourners — which has already opened to acclaim at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. (Wall Street Journal: It “casts a magic spell that is as sublime and compelling as anything you are likely to encounter in any museum this season.”) The Mourners is a series of 40, doll-sized, alabaster statues from Dijon’s Musee des Beaux Arts in France. They ring the tomb of John the Fearless, the 15th-century Duke of Burgundy. They’re masterworks of late medieval art but are not better known because they’ve never left Dijon — and never will again. The statues can tour now only because the tomb (below) is being cleaned and renovated. The line of seemingly glowing little figures beneath the duke and duchess is the actual home of the statues — they stand in a series of Gothic cathedral-like niches, making them look like a funeral procession in a church. Not only is this tour the first and only time the figures will leave France, but — having been removed from those niches — it’s also the first time they’ve been visible fully in-the-round. You can see them online in 360-degree splendor, thanks to the Mourners Photography Project. The Mourners are also able to tour because of FRAME – the French Regional and American Museum Exchange. Richard Bretell helped create FRAME in 1997. The exchange cuts out New York and Paris to let a dozen museums in the rest of America (and Canada) connect directly with a dozen of their counterparts in France. BRETTELL: “There’s nothing like it. There’s no bilateral coalition of regional museums like it in the world.” The Mourners tour is also rare for its ambitious length: It will travel to seven American cities (most tours these days have only two or three destinations). And the FRAME member in charge of the entire tour is the Dallas Museum of Art. MacDONALD: “The Mourners is sort of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So it was a major logistical challenge to keep the communication circulating at all times between Dijon and the FRAME office and then all the seven venues.” As the co-curator of The Mourners, MacDonald has been working on those logistical challenges for three years.
[murmurs and echo-y footsteps] WEEKS: “It really does make a difference — with the things up on the wall.” MacDONALD: “Right, yeah, I know. There’s that moment when you’re like, ‘Ah, there it is.’” Andre Kertesz, Martinique (gelatin silver print) 1972 Lately, MacDonald has concentrated on installing Coastlines. It’s a new DMA show of seaside paintings and photos. Coastlines is a case of a museum, in these financially trying times, doing more with less by dipping into its permanent collection and figuring how to re-package things. Coastlines re-thinks long-established works in the museum’s permanent collection by putting them up alongside previously unrelated works, including some borrowed ones. Essentially, it creates a new ‘genre’ — or expands a tradition. MacDonald, for example, has not gathered together just seascapes, which are already a genre, of course. Coastlines features seascapes and sunbathers and working ships and landscapes and tourists and lighthouses, the entire cluster of activities and environments that happen where sand, sea, sunlight and swimmers meet. Even as something as powerfully abstract as one of Richard Diebenkorn’s famous Ocean Park paintings finds a place here, evoking bright sky and water, windows and buildings along the California coast — all through just big, bold rectangles drenched in blue. So — voila – these 66 works now have a new context, although a pretty loose, diffuse one. Only a few of these works were created with any of the others in mind, so juxtapositions can feel imposed. And some of the works remain stubbornly disconnected, off by themselves (like Adolf Hiremy-Hirschl’s Seaside Cemetery, a case of Caspar David Friedrich Goes to the Beach and Brings Along His Broody, German Mysticism. It’s nowhere near as weirdly kitschy as Hiremy-Hirschl’s other paintings, but that’s probably because he couldn’t think of a convincing way to drape despairing nudes everywhere). MacDonald has also expanded her context into other media — by attaching selections from poetry, journalism and memoir to individual works and by showcasing the sound installation created by faculty and graduate students in the Arts and Technology (ATEC) program at the University of Texas at Dallas — with the help of students in Toulon, France. For what it’s worth, MacDonald has arranged a DMA first, an entire exhibition with a soundscape. There’s an overall sound design, but several individual works have their own audio works as well, which are indicated on the floor by circles of carpet. A visitor can actually step into and out of different soundscapes. Such audio augmentation may strike some as distracting and gimmicky, a way to prop up an inferior show or artwork with a bit of theme-park novelty. This kind of multi-sensory approach is more common in European museums, where it can get rather clever and
sophisticated. In the Barcelona City Museum once, I was following an exhibition that traced the path that Don Quixote took through the city when he supposedly visited it in 1615. Standing in the spot designated as the old city marketplace, I could smell spices and hear the squeak of wooden carts. Given the omnipresence of Muzak today, we may prefer silence. But research shows many people find a quiet place off-putting. It’s too much, in fact, like a museum. Children are hushed, we’re left alone with our thoughts. It’s akin to church — minus the singing. Yet in a museum, most of us don’t stand there Contemplating Art. We speed past, spending only a few seconds with any work. So as much as they may ‘augment’ our experience, MacDonald’s poetry and soundscapes are meant to extend it, make us linger, possibly really seeing (studies show our senses work best in consort — we hear better when we see clearly and vice versa). Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Bather with Cigarette, (oil on canvas), 1924 It worked in my case — at least, curiosity did lead me to try out all the individual soundscapes. And I was initially fascinated by the audio clips. But by the end of Coastlines, I wished the noises would stop — especially in front of the mesmerizing quartet of Hiroshi Sugimoto photos. Perhaps it’s the purity and austerity of the Sugimotos: They dispense with almost everything that concerns the rest of the exhibition. Waves aren’t crashing, no seagulls squawk, no ships foghorn away in the distance. There is only water and sky and a barelythere horizon. What were polarities and defining marks in other works — vanish. The four images have a profound emptiness that is at once bleak and utterly beautiful. Coastlines is clearly devised as a summer diversion, giving North Texas the beachfront property it’s never had. Just as clearly, it draws on different skills from MacDonald than The Mourners. With Coastlines, she more or less assembled the context, manufactured the environment we can splash around in. With The Mourners, on the other hand, she has to recreate much of what is already in place in France — not the specific tomb-setting but the history and religious resonances that most French visitors know walking in. The first exhibition required a multi-media show-woman; the second, a knowledgeable translator. With any exhibition, a curator’s goal is to create for the visitor an entire little world in a box. MacDonald says there are only a few moments before it opens when a curator can get a sense of the whole show she’s imagined for months or years: when the gallery walls go up, when the paintings are first mounted, when the technicians install the lights. It was only a few days before the Coastlines exhibition opened and MacDonald was indulging in what she called one of the great pleasures for a curator: tweaking the details that can bring the entire show to life.
Edward Hopper, Lighthouse Hill, (oil on canvas) 1927 [murmurs and echo-y footsteps] MacDONALD: “It’s always that little bit of uncertainty until things come together. And then when it does, it is a really wonderful, complete experience.”
MacDonald was especially pleased with the freshly painted walls, with her choices of blue-ish greys and blue-ish browns, meant to chime with (and bring together) the different paintings and photos. That’s right. After wrangling with wealthy collectors, overseeing schedules, laying out the galleries and writing the catalog, the curator also has to choose the color this little world gets painted.
Art&Seek on Think TV: ‘The Mourners’ at the DMA Jerome Weeks | September 30, 2010 8:54 PM
See 360-degree images of The Mourners. As part of his prodigious research for his statue of Honore de Balzac, sculptor Auguste Rodin checked out what are called the Mourners, the 40-some stone figures that surround the tomb of John the Fearless, the medieval duke of Burgundy in Dijon, France. Rodin’s 1898 bronze of Balzac is a towering figure (left), wrapped in the monkish dressing gown that the novelist wore while he was writing. It turned the author into a monument — to the artist as genius, the artist as titanic ego and force of nature. Why — to create such a colossus, one that helped launch modernist sculpture with its rawness and boldness — why did Rodin study these poignant, pint-sized, 15th-century funerary figures? They’re not even two feet tall. Because, as Richard Brettell said in a recent interview, the Mourners are a landmark in carved drapery. They’re not simply displays of the increasing ability of artists to capture beautifully the folds and texture of fabric. This is stone clothing as an expressive medium. Each of the 40 alabaster statues in The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy is individually realized: There’s a pair of choirboys, other statues carry elaborately detailed missals or Bibles, a pudgy bishop wields his crozier. During the press preview at the Dallas Museum of Art, I spotted an older, bearded figure sporting a pinky ring. Each statue is a diminutive, personal expression of sorrow or grief. Several use their robes to wipe tears, others simply bury their heads in their cowls, downcast. Individually like this, the Mourners can seem almost cute. Look at the details. They’re dolls — with accessories. One can’t help thinking of Gounod’s Funeral March of (the) Marionettes. But — as we discuss with co-curator Heather MacDonald in her Think TV interview above — they are also a collective expression of distress, a crowd-sized symbol of what the duke’s assassination in 1419 meant to Burgundy in northern France. We return to the single statues with a different sense of import, an appreciation of shared loss. (Think of Rodin’s masterwork The Burghers of Calais.) This is an entire community gathered in a single gallery (admittedly, there are no women). It is this double expression — both personal and communal — that the DMA’s exhibition beautifully conveys. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Mourners were all lined up in a procession. But here, we have a group of some two dozen in the center, while the remaining figures are dispersed in trios and solos, permitting closer, more individual inspection (right). The rich, dark- blue background color and the pinpoint lighting lend the gallery an atmosphere both royal and
crypt-like. The alabaster practically glows, letting us sense the weight of the mourners’ cloaks. Because of the cowls these figures wear and the rosary beads they finger, many viewers will assume that the entire procession — which normally wends its way through an ornamental, Gothic arcade ringing the duke’s tomb — is made up solely of monks and clergy. The tomb of the duke and his duchess, Margaret of Bavaria, was originally in the chapel of the charterhouse (or Chartreuse de la Sainte-Trinite), the name for the monastery of Carthusian monks at Champmol. But only two of the figures are actually monks (they’re easily identified — they have pointed cowls, both have books and they stand together on their own pedestal). With the exceptions of the bishop, the monks and the choirboys, the statues represent ordinary townspeople. The elaborate cloaks they’re wearing were part of the extensive funeral rituals for John the Fearless, the second duke of Burgundy and a member of a branch of the royal Valois family. It was the family who bought the expensive material to be made into cloaks and then given to hundreds of citizens to wear. The cloaks would have been black and, as can be seen from rolled-back collars, they were fur-lined. The entire town must have seemed draped in opulent sorrow. Only the Carthusian monks would have been in white because that is the traditional color of their habits. Interestingly enough, that means only they would have actually looked something like these warm, creamy little ghosts at the DMA. Richard Brettell — the former DMA director and currently professor of aesthetics at the University of Texas at Dallas — was instrumental in bringing The Mourners to Dallas. For one thing, he helped create FRAME, the French Regional American Museum Exchange. Established in 1997, the exchange cuts out New York and Paris to let a dozen museums in the rest of America (and Canada) connect directly with a dozen of their counterparts in France.
The Mourners is FRAME’s most ambitious project to date, and the FRAME member in charge of the seven-city tour is the Dallas Museum of Art — meaning co-curator MacDonald. (It’s because of the magnitude of this effort — and the comparative obscurity of these statues with the American public — that this FRAME tour began at the Met in New York. It was a way of ‘introducing’ the statues to American media attention, and it worked with ‘magical’ reviews in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the New York Review of Books.) Of course, it didn’t hurt our French-Texan link-up that for 53 years, Dijon has been Dallas’ “sister city” in France. Dijon has even sent over a small brigade of their best chefs — who will appear at the State Fair and at the DMA on Saturday, as part of the Art in October celebration. Judging from the savory pannini avec escargot and the bottle of white burgundy I tried at the press preview, I’d recommend sampling early. The set of devotional statues were created primarily by Jean de la Huerta and Antoine le Moiturier between 1443-1456 in a workshop, strongly influenced by Claus Sluter and his
nephew Claus de Werve of Holland. Sluter had been the chief sculptor for Philip the Bold, the father of John the Fearless. It was Philip who established the Carthusian charterhouse as a major arts center — and as a giant mausoleum for himself and his dynasty. Don’t fret. The names of these artists and their achievements are relatively unknown to Americans, partly because — as MacDonald indicates in the interview — the Italian Renaissance, happening at roughly the same time, got all the press with a bold story (and a more centralized source of media influence and distribution in Rome). Yet Sluter’s works, for example, are often cited as examples of the ‘Northern Renaissance.’ They certainly have the grandeur and brilliant naturalism of the Florentine masters without the gloss of classicallyinspired humanism the Italians revived. Instead, both Sluter’s works and the Mourners retain much of the spirituality and flavor of the medieval — but raised to an unprecedented level of sculptural realism. Hence, the other, blander designation for this entire period: International Gothic. With the disbanding and selling of the charterhouse during the French Revolution (it was “nationalized”), the art works were auctioned off. By 1791, the monastery had become a ‘holiday retreat’ run by Napoleon’s Minister of the Interior. It was only in the 19th century that many of the works — including Sluter’s masterpiece, the Well of Moses – were reassembled, excavated or rediscovered. A few Mourners have strayed — several remain in Cleveland — but the majority were eventually installed in the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, which, fittingly enough, had been the ducal palace. Because the Musee is being extensively renovated — and they’re starting with the oldest section — the duke and duchess’ tomb is being cleaned and renovated. And that’s why the Mourners are able to tour for their first and probably only time. There is something about their blend of the small, the forlorn and the fully realized that makes these men in shrouds so memorable and affecting. They charm and they haunt. The Mourners opens Sunday at the DMA and runs through Jan. 2, with a special sneak preview and food tasting Saturday, Oct. 3.