Quick update and Pollock Fodder

Sorry guys, I've had a long hiatus from the blog on late...working 40-45 hours a week, and weekends filled with weddings and a beer festival and some soccer games have made this the case...plus my town flooded, which means I've moved out of an apartment, into my parent's basement, and then into a NEW apartment, (because the old building was condemned) all with in the last few months. There are thank you notes that have gone unwritten and many other scribblings to attend to before a proper update to this blog can be made. But, for the gist, I'm allright, and getting settled in the new place, and working, and squeezing in the fun where I can in between.

Also, I'm very intrigued by the discussion of the potential sale of our Jackson Pollock Mural to a "museum institution" and in fact, intrigued is only the beginning and I have just now read one of the more insulting varieties of the elitist art critics who shovel their drivel and insult University collections.


Felix Salmon - a critic says:

All the same, some paintings belong not to "the people of Iowa" so much as to the people of the world, and belong in a world-class collection. Which, frankly, the University of Iowa Museum of Art isn't.

One of the reasons that contemporary art goes for such huge sums at auction is that nearly all the major art of the past is now in museums and therefore can't be bought for any sum. But there's a corollary to that well-known fact, which is that some of the greatest paintings of all time have washed up in relative backwaters which don't and can't do them justice.

All of which is to say that if Mural had ended up in MoMA rather than UIMA, it would probably at this point be generally considered to be the greatest American painting of all time. As it is, it's described as being worth an "estimated $100 million" (which wouldn't even get you an opening bid on such a work in today's market) and as "one of the half-dozen greatest Pollocks". Nothing to be ashamed of there, but I do get the impression that being hidden away in Iowa has not done Mural any art-historical favors.

Indiana Jones, when he sees a priceless treasure, always says that it belongs in a museum. But not all museums are equal, and there's surely a case to be made that the greatest of the great masterworks belong in museums which are worthy of them, rather than in small university collections.

So, I'll break this down for my readers. I've been to many a museum in my day, both here and abroad, and from small art museum collections to places like MOMA and the Louvre, so I think this man has a lot of explaining to do by saying Iowa has done 1) nothing to promote the Pollock painting and 2) the belief that it would stand in some greater pantheon of modern art if it were in a place like the MOMA...part of the draw to a small art museum to see a "masterpiece" is just that, it is a standout in a collection, the collection doesn't overshadow a masterpiece. I'm sorry but when I walk through the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam and see how many of the same style and scheme? Do I think any of them are less valuable than the others...no, but do I take a particular interest in them? not really. The point deer friends, is that the Pollock is an imposing piece at the UIMA because it is a large canvas and an important piece to the development of the artist's style. It is hung next to other works by modern artists...perhaps not "masterpieces" in the traditional sense, but still also, works by important artists...Miro, Gris, Feininger and Picasso...but you don't see us complaining that our museum collection was based on some art market issues. No...most of our collection of modern European and American masters came from one family, the Elliots, who traveled and collected. So yes, Peggy Guggenheim herself donated the Pollock to the U of I...and yes in the 1940's a museum didn't exist. But the art school did...and it was well-known and had a reputation for being the "Geenwich Village of the West" at that time.

I also take issue with him calling our collection small or "backwater" are you kidding me? Who is sophisticated society uses such language to describe UNIVERSITY collections? Seriously, has he not seen that most of the images of AFRICAN ART that exist in slide rooms and books and articles come from our very own Stanley collection? Outside of Indiana University (my other alma matter) we have one of the best African collections in the country...but should we discuss selling an Ibeji twin figure no one in the larger art community would bat an eyelash.

It is precisely the famousness of that Pollock piece and BECAUSE it is in a University museum that it gets this kind of attention in the first place. Hello, the MOMA decides to sell a Braque...big deal - would probably barely make it into the papers, they've got others. But a few months ago a similar case was in the news;'

From Wikipedia about Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic
After its purchase for $200 at the time of the Centennial Exhibition, the painting was housed in the College Building of Jefferson Medical College, Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia until it was moved in the mid-1980s to Jefferson Alumni Hall. On November 11, 2006, the Thomas Jefferson University Board voted to sell the painting for $68 million to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, now under construction in Bentonville, Arkansas. The sale would represent a record price for an artwork made in the United States prior to World War II.[3]

The proposed sale was seen as a secretive act[4] that many from Philadelphia believed betrayed the city's cultural legacy.[5] In late November 2006, efforts began to keep the painting in Philadelphia, including a fund with a December 26 deadline to raise money to purchase it and a plan to invoke a clause regarding "historic objects" in the city's historic preservation code. In a matter of weeks the fund raised $30 million, and on December 21, 2006, Wachovia Bank agreed to loan the difference until the rest of the money has been raised, keeping the painting in town at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

So here you have a painting kept in its native city - a masterwork by all accounts - in the cannon of art historical research - that was still in jeopardy until the people of the city rallied around it.

I do not think this Felix should be so quick to judge a painting like Pollock's Mural so simply, and nor the people of Iowa or our artistic merits either. And frankly, I'd love to write a more eloquent diatribe to post on the comments page of his article...but alas, perhaps I, in the "backwater" "small collection" vein in which I seem to live, would not do such an argument justice.