Fine Arts News

Detroit Museum Not The First To Consider Selling Out


Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Postman Roulin is part of the collection in the city-owned Detroit Institute of Arts. The financially troubled city of Detroit is eyeing the sale of its prized artworks.

aPic/Getty Images
Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Postman Roulin is part of the collection in the city-owned Detroit Institute of Arts. The financially troubled city of Detroit is eyeing the sale of its prized artworks.
aPic/Getty Images

Detroit doesn't have to wait for Antiques Roadshow to come to town to know the city owns priceless treasures. The city-owned Detroit Institute of Arts holds works by van Gogh, Matisse, Renoir and other artists that could bring in tens of millions of dollars each.
And they just might sell. With the city more than $15 billion in debt, Kevyn Orr, the state-appointed emergency manager trying to straighten out Detroit's finances, has asked the museum to inventory its works with an eye toward potentially selling them off.
It's a scenario that has people in the art world up in arms. When Edsel Ford commissioned Diego Rivera to paint murals for the museum back in 1932, he wasn't thinking they might be sold in 2013 to pay for pensions.
"To sell off artwork to pay for a city's general debt is unconscionable," says Kathleen Bernhardt, an art dealer in Chicago. "It's a short-term sell-off of a magnificent part of their heritage."
Museums sell works all the time, but typically not their best stuff. When they do sell, it's to get rid of pieces that don't suit the collection. They use the money to buy new works that are a better fit. They're not supposed to use the money to buy computers or pay down debt, according to industry standards.
But when museums aren't free-standing institutions, as is the case in Detroit, the larger entities that control them sometimes can't help but see dollar signs. The van Goghs are just hanging there, waiting to be put up for auction.
"A lot of institutions are gun-shy about trumpeting what the size of their assets [is], so that a trustee is not tempted to sell them off," says Kris Anderson, director of the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington.
Some Universities Want To Sell
All museums have to inventory their works for insurance purposes. But Anderson says the bottom line has been more closely held information ever since Brandeis University talked about selling off the entire collection of its Rose Art Museum back in 2009.
"In the case of Brandeis, you had a truly visionary president who did so much good for the university, but got caught up in a very short-term temptation to look at an easy fix," says Michael Rush, who then served as Rose's director. "To our way of thinking, the university was really selling its birthright by even considering selling its collection."

Brandeis University considered selling off the collection of its Rose Art Museum in 2009 but later decided against the move.

Essdras M. Suarez/Boston Globe via Getty Images
Brandeis University considered selling off the collection of its Rose Art Museum in 2009 but later decided against the move.
Essdras M. Suarez/Boston Globe via Getty Images

It was a common consideration during the depths of the recession. Faced with financial problems and endowments battered by the stock market plunge, a number of museums thought long and hard about selling off works.
The temptation was especially strong for universities, which aren't shy about selling off art galleries, campus radio stations or other assets they don't view as part of their prime mission.
In 2005, Fisk University began a seven-year legal battle to shed a number of its works, including a famous painting by Georgia O'Keeffe. In 2008, Randolph College in Virginia sold a Rufino Tamayo painting for $7.2 million and put three other major works in storage at the auction house Christie's, waiting for the market to improve.
But it's not just universities. The Field Museum in Chicago over the past decade has sold off numerous works by noted Western artist George Catlin. An internal report this year suggested that the museum's rare book collection might fetch $50 million on the open market.
Putting Money Over Sentiment
Last year, Fisk University reached an agreement with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, which was founded by Alice Walton, a Wal-Mart heiress. Crystal Bridges paid Fisk $30 million to share the rights to a collection of 101 pieces that had been donated by O'Keeffe back in 1949.
In essence, Crystal Bridges bought a time share. The museum will hold and display the works for two years out of four, while Fisk keeps them the other two years.
"We do think that we have the best of both worlds," says Edwina Harris Hamby, Fisk's vice president for institutional advancement. "We still have a 50 percent share in the collection and all of our students will have access to it."
She says many more people will be able to see the works, since they are also available for viewing at Crystal Bridges.
"Ironically, we did not have a lot of people coming to view the collection, before it became the great issue in court for seven years," Hamby says.
Selling Off Assets
It obviously hurts a museum's reputation when it sells off — or is forced to sell off — its greatest works. It's kind of like a baker who decides to sell off his oven to satisfy his debts. Once the oven is gone, what's left for the baker to do?
"Your collection is from a strategic point of view one of the most valuable resources you have to generate excitement among the public and among donors who will help support the museum," says Russell Lewis, executive vice president of the Chicago History Museum. "Once you go down that path of selling something that has a high value and is part of the legacy collection, you're going to have a hard time attracting donors."
And, once the van Gogh is gone, it can't help you sustain payments for staff salaries or medical care. "Overcoming budget problems by selling art collections seems all too easy, but it's all too shortsighted," says Rush, the former Brandeis museum director who now directs the Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University.
Still, he notes, in the case of Brandeis, preventing proposed sales really came down to the question of whether a state attorney general thinks the museum is violating donor intent or is somehow in breach of its tax-exempt status.
"The truth with Brandeis is the university would have gone on its merry way if the board hadn't brought suit and gotten sympathy from the attorney general," Rush says.
In the end, Brandeis settled a lawsuit and decided against selling its artwork.


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Ozwald Boateng's Style

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  Hide captionOswald Boateng was the first black tailor to have a shop on London's Savile Row. He has designed for the rich and famous.
  
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  Hide captionBoateng measures musician Sean Combs, aka P. Diddy, for a suit. His tailored suits cost as much as $40,000.
  
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Ozwald Boateng was the youngest and first black tailor to have a shop on London's prestigious Savile Row, a street renowned for its fine tailoring, where the world's royalty come for their attire.
Boateng also dresses athletic and Hollywood royalty. Actor Laurence Fishburne once said, "When you wear an Ozwald Boateng suit, you become a statesman of cool." Boateng is also a statesman for something else: the future development of Africa.
He joined Tell Me More host Michel Martin to talk about style and diplomacy.

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Interview Highlights

On discovering his talent
"I fell in love in college with this really amazing girl who could paint and draw with both hands. And she is the reason why I design clothes. She basically pointed me in the direction to discovering my talent."
On dressing men
"I think men dress for women, definitely. But also they dress for themselves — if they understand that what they are wearing makes them feel better about themselves. I mean, the big thing for men is confidence. And so I like to believe that what I create enables men to be more confident about who they are."
On investment in Africa
"It's funny. So someone always asks me a question: 'So how did you get into this passionate place on infrastructure?' And it's, you know, quite simple: I just want to open shops back home."
On President Obama's upcoming trip to Africa
"I think Africa has always been very excited about Obama. You know, he just demonstrated the possibility and he allowed many Africans to dream. So bearing that in mind, and bearing in mind that he goes to Africa carrying that lantern of promise, he needs to use that. ... He needs to engage in Africa in really unlocking its potential. I think he should invest in Africa infrastructure the same way the Chinese are doing. And he needs to be more involved. And I actually think that if he can get Africa to a place where it's a proper partner for the world, I think the world will be in a much better place. So if we get it right in Africa, we get it right for everybody."


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Claes Oldenburg with his Floor Cone (1962) in front of Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, 1963.

Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio/Museum of Modern Art
Claes Oldenburg with his Floor Cone (1962) in front of Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, 1963.
Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio/Museum of Modern Art



Oldenburg's fascination with simple, everyday objects often led him to food as a subject, as with Pastry Case, I, 1961-62.

Claes Oldenburg/Museum of Modern Art
Oldenburg's fascination with simple, everyday objects often led him to food as a subject, as with Pastry Case, I, 1961-62.
Claes Oldenburg/Museum of Modern Art

The sculptor Claes Oldenburg was born in Stockholm but grew up in Chicago, went to Yale and came to New York in 1956, where he became a key player in the pop art movement — the major counter-reaction to the abstract expressionism that dominated the 1950s. So much for art history.
Although Oldenburg is a serious artist, probably no artist in history ever created works that were more fun. In a new show at the Museum of Modern Art — really two shows — practically everyone, including myself, was walking through the galleries with a huge grin.

Though some of the images are unsettling: In the first and scarier part of the exhibit, the objects are from Oldenburg's 1960 shows called The Street — images inspired by his living on New York's Lower East Side. These are figures and objects, many of them suspended from the ceiling, made out of cardboard and burlap, nightmarish but also childlike, brown with black edges as if they were charred. There's a wall tag for a piece called Fire From a Window that took me a while to find, because it's a small board sticking out from the edge of a wall high up above the gallery — like a flame leaping out of a building.

The second and larger part of the exhibit is called The Store, and these include some of Oldenburg's most iconic images from the early '60s. And here's where the smiles begin to widen.

The objects are mostly plaster applied to chicken wire, or canvas stuffed with foam rubber — all sorts of things you can find in stores. Pants and shirts. Furniture. A whole lingerie counter with a mirrored top. And most deliciously, there's food. Glorious food. Succulent slices of pie and cake.

In an exhibition-catalog entry in 1961, Oldenburg made a famous manifesto: "I am for the art that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper. I am for an art that is smoked, like a cigarette, smells, like a pair of shoes. I am for an art that flaps like a flag, or helps blow noses, like a handkerchief. I am for an art that is put on and taken off, like pants, which develops holes, like socks, which is eaten, like a piece of pie ... "

At the MoMA show, there's a huge 9-foot-long wedge of cake called Floor Cake sitting on the floor next to a 7-foot-wide hamburger, called Floor Burger, that you have to walk around. "I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs," Oldenburg wrote. "I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete." Lying near the gigantic hamburger is the 11-foot-long Floor Cone. I particularly loved the small burlap and plaster Baked Potato, with its pat of melting butter, and the Banana Sundae, with its accompanying spoon painted with drips of enamel ice cream.

An actor, Hamlet says, holds a mirror up to nature. Just so, Oldenburg's art reflects the lives we live. "I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life, that twists and extends impossibly and accumulates and spits and drips, and is sweet and stupid as life itself."

It's both high tragedy and low comedy that for most of us our lives are so ordinary, that everything in The Store is for sale, our daily commerce. But that's part of the joy and pain of this wonderful exhibit that makes us smile so hard at the idea that our ordinary lives are so completely surrounded by, and enmeshed in, potential works of art.


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Spencer and Marlene Hays' collection of French art usually adorns the walls of their Nashville home, an exact replica of a French palace. But for a few months, those pieces are back in their country of origin, on loan to the Musee d'Orsay.

John Schweikert/Courtesy Musee d'Orsay
Spencer and Marlene Hays' collection of French art usually adorns the walls of their Nashville home, an exact replica of a French palace. But for a few months, those pieces are back in their country of origin, on loan to the Musee d'Orsay.
John Schweikert/Courtesy Musee d'Orsay

To say that Nashvillean Spencer Hays is crazy for French art is an understatement. "French art just quickens our step, fires our spirit and touches our heart," he says.
Hays' passion began when he was in his 30s. By then he was already a millionaire; Forbes estimated his worth at $400 million in 1997, money earned from book-selling and clothing businesses. Hays had humble beginnings.

In 1891, the artists and lifelong friends Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard created complementary portraits of each other. Here, Bonnard's portrait of Vuillard emphasizes the painter's red beard.

Courtesy Musee d'Orsay
"When Marlene and I grew up in a little old town in Texas, even visiting France was far beyond our expectations," Hays says. "But in 1971, we made our first trip to Paris, and our love affair with this wonderful country began. We've returned every year, and our passion has grown."
As the Hayses' love of France grew, so did their collection of French art. Some of their pieces have now made it back to their country of origin: created in France and brought to Tennessee, the Hays Collection is currently on display in Paris at the Musee d'Orsay. Guy Cogeval, the head of the museum, says he's impressed by Hays' passion. "Very, very rarely in my life," he says, "did I see a person so much in love with French art."
Cogeval says the Hayses' Francophilia shows in the home that they built in Nashville, Tennessee — "a real palace," Cogeval says. That's no exaggeration: Spencer Hays' house is an exact replica of a palace built in France in 1724.
"He wanted to use the limestone from Paris and he wanted every button, every opening, every faucet exactly to be French," Cogeval says. The Hayses raided French antique shops for the furniture and silverware to fill the house, and inside that Nashville palace they installed all the French art they'd been collecting.
Friends And 'Prophets'
Many of the works in their collection were made in the 1890s by artists called the Nabis — French for "prophets." These painters moved beyond impressionism, using flat colors and Japanese-inspired composition. Two of the Nabis — Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard — were lifelong friends.

Vuillard's 1891 portrait of Bonnard is an intimate depiction of an artist at work. Both portraits are part of the Hays Collection, currently on display at the Musee d'Orsay.

Courtesy Musee d'Orsay
Vuillard's 1891 portrait of Bonnard is an intimate depiction of an artist at work. Both portraits are part of the Hays Collection, currently on display at the Musee d'Orsay.
Courtesy Musee d'Orsay

"We have a wonderful painting by Bonnard of Vuillard and then Vuillard of Bonnard," Hays says. "And they were in their 20s when they each did that of the other."
Bonnard's 1891 painting of Vuillard shows his friend in profile. "His beard is so red you can't believe it," Hays says. "The colors are so strong, and you can see the curls in his beard. And you can just tell the passion they had for each other and the movement."
Red-headed Vuillard, in the same year, paints Bonnard making art. Isabelle Cahn, curator of the Musee d'Orsay show, says Bonnard seems intent on the brush he's holding. "He doesn't look at us. He look[s] very carefully to his drawing or his painting," she says. "It is a very intimate portrait."
A Bright Portrait Of Infidelity
These are early works, not great ones. But Guy Cogeval says that a decade later Edouard Vuillard had developed a rather healthy ego. "In the year 1900 he's 32 years old, and he considers himself one of the greatest living artists and the savior of art," Cogeval says.
Fans of Vuillard, like the Hayses, would agree. And in this Musee d'Orsay show, you can see the eye of the artist, and his collectors, develop as the years go by. In 1895, Vuillard made a terrific painting, A table (Le Dejeuner), which curator Isabelle Cahn says depicts a scandal.

A table (Le Dejeuner), a 1892 oil painting by Edouard Vuillard, appears to show a quiet domestic scene. But Isabelle Cahn, the curator of a new show at the Musee d'Orsay, says this painting actually depicts a scandal-ridden household.

Courtesy Musee d'Orsay
A table (Le Dejeuner), a 1892 oil painting by Edouard Vuillard, appears to show a quiet domestic scene. But Isabelle Cahn, the curator of a new show at the Musee d'Orsay, says this painting actually depicts a scandal-ridden household.
Courtesy Musee d'Orsay

"This scene is about infidelity," she says. At first glance, the painting seems to be depicting a nice family meal: An old lady, a bearded man and a young woman in a red, lace-trimmed blouse sit around a dining table. It seems benign enough. But the bearded fellow is in motion. "A lot of men I know, when they get angry at the table, they push back," Hays observes. "And that's what he's doing."
The woman in the red and lace blouse is Vuillard's sister Marie; she's married to the bearded table-pusher, Ker-Xavier Roussel, another Nabi, who's Vuillard's closest friend. Roussel is consistently unfaithful — he's cheating on his best friend's sister.
Cogeval says that the brothers-in-law remained best friends, even as Roussel kept up his scandalous behavior. "He did that for a very long time," Cogeval says. "During the '30s he was still bringing models, women models, into his atelier, and wished the family to go upstairs and leave him alone inside the atelier." Cogeval found the evidence of this family drama in letters and diaries — see how much fun art experts can have?

Financial Donations, Artistic Value
The owners of that Vuillard with the racy backstory, Marlene and Spencer Hays of Nashville, Tenn., have helped to launch the American Friends Musee d'Orsay. The group will attempt to bring American money to the great French museum at a time when national budgets are tight. Certainly a help to the Musee. Did it also help get the Hays Collection onto the walls of the Orsay?
"This is an amazing collection," curator Isabelle Cahn says. "When Spencer came before the opening of the exhibition, he told me that he was afraid that his collection was not at the same level as the paintings and the sculpture in the Musee d'Orsay. But now we know that it is the same level. It is why it is so beautiful, and we are so happy to have it."
Not all visitors may agree. But in Spencer Hays' view, the pictures he's collected over the years, especially the works of the Nabis, are indeed marvelous.
"Every night before I go to bed," he says. "I spend at least 45 minutes to an hour plus walking around looking at every painting. Because that's what's so wonderful about the Nabis — you can always discover something else."
More than 100 works of art from the Marlene and Spencer Hays Collection are on view at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris until mid-August. So for at least a little while, Spencer Hays might find his nighttime prowls a bit curtailed.


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Ellsworth Kelly, Yellow Relief over Red, 2004. Oil on canvas, two joined panels, 80 x 83 x 2 3/4 inches. Private collection.

Jerry L. Thompson/Courtesy of Ellsworth Kelly



Ellsworth Kelly, White Black Red, 2004. Oil on canvas, three joined panels, 81 3/8 x 40 1/2 inches. Private collection.

Jerry L. Thompson/Courtesy of Ellsworth Kelly



Ellsworth Kelly, Black Diagonal, 2007. Oil on canvas, two joined panels, 103 1/4 x 56 5/8 x 2 3/4 inches. Private collection.




Ellsworth Kelly, White Diagonal II, 2008. Oil on canvas, two joined panels, 66 1/2 x 91 x 2 5/8 inches. Private collection.


American artist Ellsworth Kelly turned 90 in May, and there's been much celebration. On Wednesday, President Obama presented Kelly with the National Medal of Arts. Meanwhile, museums around the country are showing his work: Kelly sculptures, prints and paintings are on view in New York, Philadelphia and Detroit. In Washington, D.C., the Phillips Collection is featuring his flat geometric canvases, layered to create wall sculptures.
These Kelly works seem baffling at first, maybe scoff-worthy — simple, solid canvases of color. But if you crouch and bend to inspect the shadows that the combinations of canvases cast on the gallery walls, you can start having fun with them.
At the Phillips Collection, museum director Dorothy Kosinski does exactly that. "With the shadows he introduces maybe another color, a gray, and certainly another dimension," Kosinski says. "It almost reads like a box."
The Phillips is showing seven Kelly works, each featuring multiple canvases painted in solid, bright colors. One piece has four separate panels in a row: a green rectangle, a blue rectangle, a black square, a red-orange square. Kosinski, who says Kelly is one of the major 20th century American painters, sees perfection in these panels.

"The entire wall becomes part of a very demanding, rigorous and yet terrifically exuberant composition," she says. "Isn't it exuberant?" Indeed, the gallery feels cheerful — and, at the same time, serene.
Kelly himself was not feeling so cheerful the day museum director Kosinski spoke of exuberance. He'd been at a Phillips dinner the night before, felt ill the next morning, and went back home to Spencertown, N.Y. He missed the 90th-birthday party the museum put together, with champagne, birthday cake and the obligatory birthday song.



Artist Ellsworth Kelly, shown here in April at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, turned 90 this May.
Matt Rourke/AP

A week later, by phone, Kelly was reluctant to discuss his art: "I don't really talk about my work unless I'm with it," he says. But he agrees to discuss someone else's artwork — a famous Renoir, reproduced in a big Phillips Collection art book.
"I'm trying to find it," Kelly says. "It's after the Matisse, I think, isn't it? ... I have to put my glasses on."
Renoir's joyful, jubilant The Luncheon of the Boating Party, from 1881, is the Phillips Collection's best-loved work. In it, sun-dappled men and women finish off a delicious meal, and wine, on a riverside porch.
"The happiness that [Renoir] was able to get into the picture is very visible," Kelly says. "I don't know if Americans have painted a picture quite like this."
As a very young artist, Kelly tried painting like Renoir and others — real-life scenes, people, landscapes. In the 1950s he shifted to his crisp abstract shapes: no narratives, nothing going on but color.
"I learned my color in Europe," Kelly says. "I've always been a colorist, I think. I started when I was very young, being a bird-watcher, fascinated by the bird colors."
Kelly came back from studying in Paris with a series of flat, geometric panels in the color spectrum — the colors you see when light hits a prism.
"Each color had to have its own canvas. ... I feel that I like color in its strongest sense," Kelly says. "I don't like mixed colors that much, like plum color or deep, deep colors that are hard to define. I liked red, yellow, blue, black and white — [that] was what I started with."
And he's still at it. Kelly has been making his layered, flat-colored, geometric panels for 60 years now. When he began, other young artists were busy with abstract expressionism; Jackson Pollock, with his ropes of thick paint, was the man of the moment. Kelly — well, he was not.
"It was a very hard job doing it all myself, getting to where I am," he says. "And I'm still continuing that exploration of color and form."
Kelly didn't get attention until the 1960s, when pop artists like Andy Warhol[ and Roy Lichtenstein came along with their strong, clear colors. His persistence over the years has had a sweet goal: "I've always wanted ... I wanted to give people joy," he says.
His art gives him joy, too — when asked to name the best thing about being 90, he mentions his work. "I feel like I'm 20 in my head," he says. "My painting makes me feel good, but my body is not the same as it was when I was 20, 40 or 60. I just feel like I can live on. I hope I can reach 100. I think today if you just keep doing, keep working, that — maybe that's possible."
By the time the Phillips show closes in September, it's a good bet that in his upstate New York studio, Ellsworth Kelly will have produced more new — and often joy-giving — works.


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War/Photography is a genre-defining exhibition currently on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. And also the last place I wanted to find myself on a sunny midweek morning.
As a photojournalist and picture editor, I've consumed my fair share of conflict photography, essays and films. How could this exhibition possibly be any different from all the other shows I've seen in this vein?



Training on the beach outside Barcelona, Spain, 1936
Gerda Taro/International Center of Photography



A U.S. Marine Corps drill instructor delivers a severe reprimand to a recruit, Parris Island, S.C., 1970.
Thomas Hoepker/Magnum



Boarding of the transport ship Ajana, Melbourne, Australia, 1916
Josiah Barnes

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  Smoker #1, 1967. Oil on shaped canvas, in two parts, 9.87 x 7.1 in.
  The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
  
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  Great American Nude #35, 1962. Enamel, polymer, found materials on board, 48"H x 60"W, 121.92 cm x 152.4 cm. Gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis.
  Travis Fullerton /Virginia Museum of Fine Arts/Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
  
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  Sunset Nude, Floral Blanket, 2003. Oil on canvas, 91 x 120 in.
  Jeffrey Sturges/Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
  
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  Bedroom Painting #39, 1978. Oil on canvas, 96"H x 117½"W, 243.7 cm x 298.3 cm. Gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis.
  Ron Jennings/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts/Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
  
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  Study for Great American Nude #57, 1964. Pencil on paper, 8.875 x 11.875 in.
  Mugrabi Collection/Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
  

Sixties pop artist Tom Wesselmann liked women, and saluted them on his canvases — or, sometimes, just parts of them: perfect glossy red mouths with lips parted to reveal pink tongues; nipples, even on the oranges he paints. These are just a few of the images that might make you blush in a Wesselmann retrospective now on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

"I don't think you could ask for a more literal interpretation of the objectification of parts of the female body," says curator Sarah Eckhardt.

Before these large works focusing only on closely observed individual body parts, Wesselmann painted a series of full nudes, sprawling indiscreetly against patriotic backgrounds with red, white and blue stripes, and some stars.

The Great American Nude series was Wesselmann's best-known work. Painted in the 1960s, the large canvases featured the colors of Old Glory, sprawly nudes, and on the walls behind them, pasted clippings from magazines: a portrait of George Washington, a photograph of JFK, a reproduction of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, the Mona Lisa. What's going on here?

Curator Sylvia Yount says Wesselmann was paying tribute to an artistic tradition: "[He was] putting himself into that larger pantheon of artists who are dealing with the mainstay of art history: the female nude."



Nearly 100 years after Edouard Manet painted his scandalous 1863 Olympia, Tom Wesselmann created The Great American Nude #26.
And he was jockeying himself, as an American artist, into that pantheon. Some of Wesselmann's paintings are funny: Great American Nude #26 (he doesn't do fancy titles), which he painted in 1962, is a very pink figure, lying on what looks like a blue bedspread. On a table behind her, Wesselmann has pasted pictures of various objects cut out of magazines: a man's brimmed hat, a Siamese cat, liquor bottles, a half-eaten chocolate cake, a six-pack of Coke ...

It's a contrast to Manet's scandalous 1863 painting Olympia, in which a nude prostitute reclines on white sheets, ignoring the black maid behind her holding an enormous bouquet of flowers. Wesselmann's 1962 nude gets cake — different times, different tastes.

Now, in 2013, Wesselmann's tastes seem insulting to feminist eyes — seeing women only as sex objects. But curator Sarah Eckhardt says in the pre-feminist '60s (those Playboy and pinup days) women were objectified that way. And if these paintings shock us today, that's part of a long artistic tradition.

"If there's something to resist in Wesselmann, it's something that could be resisted in almost any of the nudes in art history," Eckhardt says.

In fine art, the female body is a nude. In not-so-fine art, she's naked. In Richmond, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art's Wesselmann show has a bit of both.


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Boston's Shaw Memorial sits at the corner of Beacon and Park Streets.

Andrea Shea/WBUR
Boston's Shaw Memorial sits at the corner of Beacon and Park Streets.
Andrea Shea/WBUR

The Shaw Memorial, by American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, stands 11 feet by 14 feet, like a giant bronze diorama, on the corner of Boston Common. In it, 40 or so black soldiers march to war alongside their white colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, on horseback.

The statue memorializes the first African-American volunteer infantry unit of the Civil War, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, which was crushed 150 years ago Thursday in a battle at Fort Wagner in South Carolina.

"It shows in their stance, in their eyes, their pride, and it shows them marching out of Boston for what they know is going to be a sea change in the history of their generation," says Beverly Morgan-Welch, executive director of the Museum of African-American History in Boston.

The Men Had To Be Part Of It

In the 1989 film Glory, Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew, abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Shaw's father introduce the watershed idea of a regiment of black soldiers. The Shaw Memorial is also cinematic — it has the kind of movement you'd expect to see in the frame of a movie, says Henry Duffy, curator of the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, N.H., where the 19th century artist lived and worked.

Another mammoth Shaw Memorial rises up from the estate's well-groomed grounds. In the front, the procession is led by a drummer, but half the drum is outside the frame of the picture. In the back, the last soldier's legs are cut off. It gives you a sense that there's more happening both in front and behind.

The meticulous Saint-Gaudens trained in Paris. He was already world famous when a committee in Boston commissioned him to make a monument in 1883.

"He was originally focusing just on Col. Shaw," Duffy says, "and it was Shaw's parents who told him, 'No, if you're going to do a monument to our son, you have to include his men, because he was dedicated to his men and the men have to be part of it.' "

A Haunting Sacrifice

Recruiting black soldiers was strategic and symbolic during the Civil War. The carnage was far worse than expected, and the Union needed more men. President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect in January 1863, enabled newly freed slaves to join. Shaw, the son of a wealthy Boston abolitionist, chose to fight with the 54th at Fort Wagner rather than command from the sidelines. Six hundred men stormed the fort; 272 died. Shaw, just 25 years old, was the first to fall, making him a hero to his surviving men and the rest of the Union.

Duffy says he thinks the colonel's sacrifice inspired Saint-Gaudens to the point of obsession. He was supposed to complete his commission in six months — instead he took 14 years.
"It haunted him," Duffy says. "I think he just couldn't get it out of his mind."

Even after installing the first sculpture in Boston, the artist continued to tinker with other versions for three more years. Finally, he stopped with the one at his home in New Hampshire.

"I think, like Shaw himself, Saint-Gaudens had his eyes opened," Duffy says. "He had never had much to do with black people, just like Shaw, so that when he had to do this he was faced with having to, for the first time in his life, I think, look at people and not stereotypes."

Saint-Gaudens sat for hours with black models in his studio. The realistic faces he captured have stirred people from the moment the Boston memorial was dedicated in 1897, including writer Henry James, poet Robert Lowell and composer Charles Ives.

"[The] Shaw Memorial is the first time black Americans were ever portrayed in a work of sculpture as heroic," says historian and Bostonian David McCullough, "otherwise they were background. But here they are the heroes who would, many of them, pay the ultimate price."

That's one reason the Boston's Black Heritage Trail walking tour starts at Saint-Gauden's memorial.


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Donald Judd's daughter, Rainer, says her father's bedroom is her favorite space in the house. (101 Spring Street, New York, 5th Floor, 2013.)

The former studio and home of artist Donald Judd is in what used to be called the Cast Iron District of Manhattan. He bought the five-story building in 1968, long before the Gucci store and Ivanka Trump Boutique moved into the neighborhood. When Judd died in 1994, the house stayed in the family, with much of his stuff exactly where he left it. Now, after a three-year renovation, the general public can tour the building and see firsthand how Judd thought art and architecture could work together.



Donald Judd purchased his home on Spring Street in 1968 for $68 million. (101 Spring Street, New York, Exterior, 1972.)

Judd was one of the most important artists of the last half of the 20th century. His son, Flavin, 45, oversaw the restoration. He lived in the building until he was 8 years old, then again as a teenager and for most of his 20s. Before Judd died, he and Flavin talked about what to do with the building, which, Flavin discovered, had originally been painted cream. He asked his father if they should restore it. Judd's response was, "It's been gray a long time, we'll just let it stay gray."

Like 'Touching A Moon Rock'

The house's interior isn't all that colorful either; and it's sparse, just like Judd's work. The artist created boxes of straight lines and angled planes which others called "minimalist," a label Judd disdained. On the ground floor there are just a few pieces of art, including a wall of Judd's purple anodized aluminum rectangles and a pile of bricks by artist Carl Andre. It's meant as a kind of spiritual space for the work to be shown just as Judd intended.

"Don's art is very much about the sculpture as it existed in reality," Flavin says. "It's not referring to other things; it's not referring to other theories. It's very much about something that simply exists. The effect should be like, you know, touching a moon rock, or something just as big."

Judd believed that art had a relationship with the space around it and he placed things very specifically in the building.

"That's why it's so important to preserve this," says Rob Beyer, who also oversaw the restoration project, "because it's not necessarily preserving the work but it's preserving the work in an environment where it can be most appreciated."

There's art on all five floors. The second floor is where the family spent most of its time. It has furniture built by Judd and a puppet theater. Not far from the kitchen, there's a potbellied stove that was the only source of heat for a very long time. The third floor has the artist's studio, with Judd's drafting table overlooking the street. On the fourth floor, tucked into the corner, there are a couple of chairs, a small table Judd made, some smooth stones, a few cowboy hats and books, including the collected works of Gertrude Stein and Richmond Lattimore's translation of Homer's Odyssey.

Overall the effect is like Judd's sculptures — sparse, deliberate, rectilinear and non-organic. As he said in a 1965 interview for the Archives of American Art, "I don't want it descriptive or naturalistic in any way. So for the time being, I'm left with a fairly geometric sort of arrangement because that doesn't have any of these things."



The potbellied stove on the second floor was once the only source of heat. (101 Spring Street, New York, 2nd Floor, 2013.)

Even the bedrooms reflect Judd's preference for clean lines. They're up on the fifth floor and Judd's daughter, Rainer, says it's her favorite space. Her father's bed is on a low platform that he built. Right next to the mattress, there's a work by Lucas Samaras — a box with knives sticking out of it.

"Somebody asked me my favorite artwork when I was a kid," Flavin says. "This is it."
Nearby is a work by Claes Oldenburg and a nearly wall-length sculpture of red and white neon lights by Dan Flavin, the artist Flavin Judd got his name from.

But there's one item missing. "Don bought his first TV in 1973 to watch the impeachment of Nixon. So the TV was across from the bed," Flavin says. "And of course, thereafter, it was used watch cartoons, but you know that wasn't its initial purpose."

A Labor Of Love

Judd bought the building for $68,000, and the restoration cost about $23 million. There was pressure to sell, but the siblings resisted.

"We're saving like every paint chip and every little splinter on the floor," Rainer says. "I think that's very sentimental. The whole reason this exists, in a way, is because we care about every little inch and, at the end of the day, because we were raised by somebody who was so generous to us and taught us so much that we want honor what he gave us and what he made in the world. So I think this whole project wouldn't exist unless we were, to be really cheesy, just full of love."

Given the way the neighborhood has changed, a bit of sentiment is kind of nice.


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In 1963, Faith Ringgold began a series of 20 paintings called "The American People." She she wanted to create images that would make people really look. "The more they look, the more they see," she says. Above, #18: The Flag Is Bleeding, 1967, oil on canvas.

Courtesy Faith Ringgold and ACA Galleries, New York



As a black, female artist in the 1960s, Ringgold says there were "a lot of people trying to get in my way and keep me from doing what I was doing." Above, a 1965 self portrait.

Jim Frank/On loan from Elizabeth A. Sackler
As a black, female artist in the 1960s, Ringgold says there were "a lot of people trying to get in my way and keep me from doing what I was doing." Above, a 1965 self portrait.
Jim Frank/On loan from Elizabeth A. Sackler

Artist Faith Ringgold is best known for what she calls her story quilts — large canvases made in the 1980s, on which she painted scenes of African-American life: sunbathing on a tar roof, a mother and her children, a quilting bee. She frames the canvases in strips of quilted fabric, carrying out an old African, and African-American quilt-making tradition.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington is showing an earlier aspect of Ringgold's art: big, strong, vivid paintings from the 1960s that reflect the violence and social upheaval of that time.

Faith Ringgold is now 83 — and still stunning with her long braids and colorful beads. "[It] was important to be determined," she says of her time developing as an artist in the 1960s. The stop signs that appeared in the pop art movement spoke to her: "There were a lot of stop signs in my life. ... People telling you what to do, when to do it, and so on," she says.

In the '60s, those days of civil rights struffles and conflicts over equality of ther aces, Ringgold was making traditional art — painting landscapes primarily.

She showed her work to Ruth White, the owner of the popular Ruth White Gallery, who said Ringgold couldn't be black and simply paint landscapes during such a tumultuous time. "Some people might have been upset or hurt by it," she says. "But I was happy that she had the courage to tell me that. "



"It was what was going on in America and I wanted [viewers] to look at these paintings and see themselves," Ringgold says. Above, American People Series #20: Die, 1967, oil on canvas.

Courtesy Faith Ringgold and ACA Galleries, New York

So Ringgold changed her work; gave up landscapes and began putting on her canvases the racial and political tumult of the '60s — and the rage she often felt. In 1963, she began a series of 20 paintings called "The American People," which depicted confrontations between white and black people. Her 1967 painting Die shows a violent street riot. White and black faces peer through bloodied stars and stripes in The Flag Is Bleeding. "It was what was going on in America and I wanted them to look at these paintings and see themselves. ... I wanted to create art that made people stop and look.You've got to get 'em and hold 'em: The more they look, the more they see."



"People like stories," says Faith Ringgold. "I think I ... struck on a combination of imagery and politics that worked."

Courtesy Faith Ringgold

Ringgold wanted us to look at the realities of race in this country — the pain and brutality of it — but she found no ready audience. She says it's taken 50 years to get these tough paintings exhibited. Part of it, she thinks, is because she was showing "too damn much" back then. "You can get by very easily without saying quite so much," she says.

This led Ringgold to create the story quilts for which she became known. At first, she thought they wouldn't be embraced as art because quilts are traditionally thought of as a craft, but the opposite happened: "Paintings, people really don't understand. ... They don't really get paintings. Quilts they do understand because everybody has a quilt in their house." She thinks it had to do with the comfort and familiarity of the medium. "People like stories," she adds. "I think I had struck on a combination of imagery and politics that worked."

These days, Ringgold makes successful children's book and is working on a new project in which she turns Sudoku into art for smart phones. As for the emotion that inspired her earlier work, Ringgold says it wasn't really anger — it always came from a place of enlightenment.

"I don't think you can create art out of anger, it has to come out of some form of understanding," she says. "You have to feel good about who you are and that you could do something to change things. I would feel angry if I didn't do anything: If I wasn't aware, if I was trying to deny, if I had no opportunity. ... Anger will stifle you and stop you and make you so that you won't be able to move. ... I wouldn't allow anyone to do that to me. Because then they win, I lose. I want to win."


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