Bring in the clones

Barnett Newman’s sculpture Broken Obelisk was made in an edition of three. There is one currently on display at MoMA in New York, one standing outside the Rothko Chapel in Houston, one in the Red Square at Seattle’s Washington University and one outside the New National Gallery in Berlin.

It all started with Art and Space’s Google Earth based website. As we had just been to the New National Gallery we thought we’d attach photos of all the outdoor sculptures for the Google Earth view. Simple enough, until we checked on Google Earth and found that the large Barnett Newman Broken Obelisk on the plaza outside the front entrance wasn’t there. Of course this is one of the intriguing things about Google Earth. There are often long (sometimes years – the building that burnt down across the road from us in Wellington more than two years ago still stands on GE) gaps in the record making a big difference between what you see and what is actually there. This prompted us to check where the three editioned Broken Obelisks were situated, and that led in turn to THE FOURTH OBELISK.

The Berlin Obelisk is in fact an “Exhibition Copy”. This is revealed by a steel plate stuck on the sculpture’s base. The plate tell us that this copy was made in 2005 by Lippincott Merrifield Roberts, the fabrication business that also make Claes Oldenburg and Coosie van Bruggen’s sculptures. A Barnett Newman signature is also etched into the plate but as Newman died in 1970 it’s as hard to work out what the signature means in terms of the status of this copy. In 2004 MoMA’s version of Broken Obelisk was on loan to Berlin's New National Gallery. Maybe when it had to return to New York to feature in MoMA’s new building, Berlin pleaded for their own copy and …. got one.

Inevitably, as you start looking around, you find more examples of these “exhibition copies”, copies that are made because the original is too fragile or too valuable to travel and institutionally authorised in ways we haven’t been able to work out. Let the viewer beware appears to be the museum profession’s caveat. In the Berlin case the exhibition copy isn’t even in an exhibition, but the thought that there should only be three of an edition of three Barnett Newmans on exhibition at any one time has obviously become old think. The animals gathered round and there, written on the board for all of them to see, were the words, "Three broken obelisks good, four broken obelisks better."

Images: Top, Broken Obelisk on view in Berlin. Bottom, rubbing of the metal label attached to the Berlin copy.

Question time

Daddy, what do curators do?
I have no idea. Ask your Mother.
Mummy?
Well, curators arrange things, they put different art works together to make exhibitions, and think of ways that art works can speak to audiences.
But what if they are curating a single artist who is doing their own project, you know, like at Venice?

…. Ask your Father.

This is not a painting

What about those movies about artists where the real artist or their estate won’t let the work be shown? It happens. To combat the problem there have been a number of approaches taken over the years. The hard-nose award goes to Surviving Picasso. Never have the backs of so many canvases been put on film. Merchant Ivory never got close to convincing Francoise Gilot to give permission to show real works and while there was a meeting with Picasso’s son Claude, it came to nothing, And so many, many canvas backs and a whole lot of made-up Picassos (some better than others) and Picasso-like objects have to stand in for the real thing. It’s all a bit weird when the movie is about an artist who was dedicated to showing off his work. The Francis Bacon movie Love is the devil had the same problem but responded with a different solution. Director John Maybury had the skill to create compositions within the film that read like Bacon paintings.

Artist and director Julian Schnabel took another tack. As we have already seen in this series, James Cameron had his own versions of Picasso run up for Titanic and this is exactly what Schnabel did for Basquiat when the Estate refused permission for any original work to appear. As you can see from the stills, Schnabel himself did a very …. er…. Schnabely version of Jean Michel’s graphic paintings and when Gary Oldman (Julian Schnabel) takes Jeffrey Wright (Basquiat) to his home, there’s the Andy Warhol portrait of Schnabel. It gets even more complicated. When Oldman (Schnabel) is seen supervising the hanging of his show at Mary Boone, Oldman borrowed Schnabel’s own pyjamas in a fit of über realism - which is as good a point as any, to stop.
Images: Top, Picasso-like products lurk in the background of Surviving Picasso. Middle, Love is the devil uses composition to evoke Bacon’s work. Bottom, Schnabel does Basquiat.

Ripping yarn

As this seems to be Sculpture Monday we should tell you about the latest sculpture scandal here in Berlin. Madame Tussauds has just opened here and one of the features in their new displays is a representation of Adolf Hitler. Not H the scourge of Europe (it is still illegal to display Nazi symbols here), but abject Adolf, moody, inward-looking and broken, a sad loser and obvious contender for immediate suicide watch. The people at Madame’s clearly thought this enfeebled Fuehrer would satisfy their critics who felt it was too early to have the Chancellor, even a wax one, back behind a desk in Berlin. As it worked out Tussauds didn’t have the Hitler feature open for long before the second visitor, a 41 year old guy, leapt over the barriers and ripped Adolf’s head off.
Image: Top, The wax Hitler meditating in his bunker. Bottom, an exclusive OTN reconstruction of the beheaded figure.

Weights and measures

Near where we are staying in Berlin is the romantically named Heavy Load Testing Body. Essentially it is an imposing solid cylinder of 12,360 tons of concrete set on top of a smaller cylindrical concrete base. This heavy hunk of grey matter was created to test whether the site set aside for the gigantic triumphal arch Albert Speer had on the drawing board would be able to withstand this kind of weight. As there was a settlement of only 19 inches it was all go until other matters intervened. We had another physically memorable experience with mass and weight when we saw Richard Serra’s Berlin Block for Charlie Chaplin, a cube of steel impaled, on a slight angle, into the surface of Berlin’s New National Gallery’s concrete deck. Is Richard Serra interested in weight? You might say so. “"Weight is a value for me, not that it is any more compelling than lightness, but I simply know more about weight than lightness and therefore I have more to say about it, more to say about the balancing of weight, the diminishing of weight, the addition and subtraction of weight, the concentration of weight, the rigging of weight, the propping of weight, the placement of weight, the locking of weight, the psychological effects of weight, the disorientation of weight, the disequilibrium of weight, the rotation of weight, the movement of weight, the directionality of weight, the shape of weight." (Richard Serra, 1988)

Images: Top, Heavy Load Testing Body by Albert Speer 1941. 21 meters diameter x 14 meters above ground and 18 meters below ground. Bottom, Richard Serra’s Berlin Block for Charlie Chaplin 1978

50 years ago around about now

About this time 50 years ago Colin McCahon returned from his trip to the United States and painted the Northland Panels. Chances are good that while he was over there he saw the painting Jackson Pollock is working on in this short film by Hans Namuth.

Nature study

By the sound of it, with the weather being what it is, most of our readers could do with something to bring on a smile. So, hoping Daniel won’t mind, here is a pic of his wonderful Paradise Duck snapped when Gambia Castle were in their old digs.
Image: Paradise Duck by Daniel Malone

Faster, faster copy cat, kill, kill, kill

While we were in the Prado we came cross the ultimate Copy Cat. In fact there were about seven of them scattered throughout the collections. The curious thing was that while they were busy making their copies of the art, we were being instructed not to photograph it, even when one of the copy cats were obscuring the view. In the old days you used to hear guards say “don’t touch.” Now it’s “don’t photograph.” The classic shift of our time from object to image. But there were so many people with small cameras, phones and pda that you could feel that the guards knew they are fighting a losing battle. Even in a hyper conventional institution like the Prado you can sense the whole “No photographs” thing losing momentum.

Still, as it stands, at the Prado you can make a realistic copy of the work in oils and on canvas (as long as it is not the same size as the original), but you can’t make an image of it with a camera to print on paper or show on a screen. It must be the same feeling people had when cars were told not to use the main streets so they didn't scare the horses.

Er, Monsieur Loyrette, do you have a moment?

"He is one of the New Zealand artists who could hang in any museum in the world"
Richard Thomson, gallery director of the International Art Centre in Parnell, talks up C F Goldie

52 pick up

There was a short story we read once about a guy who collected playing cards. In fact he was collecting a full deck of cards with the kicker being that he could only add cards that he found randomly on the street. Over the years, one by one, he slowly assembled close to a full deck. An Ace of Spades in a gutter here, a Queen of Clubs blown into a doorway there. Years went past and he had them all, all but one card. The Seven of Diamonds. Then one morning he spotted a flash of red under a park bench, and sure enough it was the last card. He went home, added it to the deck, walked upstairs, and hung himself. Which is to explain why, after years of collecting books about private art collections (one or two a year), we weren’t as pleased as we might have been when we saw a shelve with about 100 of them at the incredible Walther König Books yesterday.

Things past

The last time we were in Berlin we posted a photo of Jeff Koons’ sculpture Balloon Flower, the blue version of which is in the DaimlerChrysler collection and installed on Potsdamer Platz. A couple of days ago, in their 30 June sale, the magenta version sold at Christie’s for a record $US25.7 million. If you’re into art logistics, and who isn’t these days, here is an amusing account of how the giant sculpture was shipped in a 4.37 by 3.18 by 3.61 meter crate on a chartered Soviet military aircraft, the Antonov 124.

Flaming June

In June we listened in on people at the Basel Art Fair • spotted art trends • baulked at Brad’s taste in lamps • came up with one of our best ever post titles • went to the movies • came to understand that some dealers had bigger ones than others • announced the first of two winners in the CNZ Venice bake off • put in a plug for Francis • gave credit where credit was due • found the Duke and became emotional in Madrid .
Image: Flaming June by Frederick Leighton in the collection of the Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico

The 12.8 million dollar question

Extraordinary prices on the international art market recently are putting huge pressure on art institutions. The question is whether to sell works from the collections which are judged not essential but have become exceptionally valuable. These sales, the argument goes, provide funds that can be used to make purchases more relevant to the institution’s mission. In New Zealand deaccessioning, as it is called in the profession, is uncommon and its processes have often not been made public. The Govett-Brewster in an exception having deaccessioned a number of works over the years via an advisory committee including an impressive painting by American John McLaughlin.

So consider the dilemma presented by Russian artist Natalia Goncharova to the national collections held by Te Papa. Te Papa has seven works by Goncharova. Three of them came into the collection in 1973 via Alexandra Larionov who Goncharova's companion and fellow artist Mikhail Larionov married after Goncharova's death. Ten years later another four paintings were gifted by the National Art Gallery’s London agent Mary Chamot.

Apart from Porteuse de raisins (Woman carrying fruit on her head) from 1911, which has been shown off and on over the years, most of the Goncharova paintings have spent most of their time in store. That in itself is not so newsworthy but the huge escalation in value of these works over the last couple of years certainly is. A group of vastly rich Russian men (they all seem to be men, most of them “bankers”) have shaken up the global art market showing a particular interest in contemporary Russian art and work produced early in the twentieth century. Recent auction prices show the depth of their oligarchic pockets.

Goncharova’s Picking apples, a painting made a couple of years before Te Papa’s Porteuse de raisins, achieved $NZ12.8 million last June at auction. More recently a semi-abstract work titled Bluebells, another 1909 work, was sold for $NZ8.1 million. Last week at Christie's these prices were held when her 1912 painting, Les Fleurs sold for $NZ14.5 million. Serious money. Of course it’s hard to know how much Te Papa’s works might bring (for some reason non of these paintings are illustrated in Te Papa’s database) but it's going to be more than chump change.

So here’s a question. Now that Te Papa no longer collects or shows much concern for international art, how important are the Goncharovas to the collection? Is having them on the racks in store enough of a reason to hold on to them, given their new escalated values?

Museums around the world (from MoMA down) sell works to buy more relevant examples, new work, or to build up interest-bearing funds for future purchases. Now the extreme auction prices for Goncharova brings this challenge to the doors of Te Papa. At the very least it's worth a discussion.
Image: Natalia Goncharova looking disarmingly like Rita Angas

Big, bigger, biggest

The UK is continuing in its determination to be home to the world’s tallest sculptures. The latest addition dwarfs Gormley’s The Angel of the North by three times and makes the Statue of Liberty look like a doll holding a lamp and a book. Designed by architect Ken Shuttleworth (aka by his friends as, “Ken the Pen”) as a destination attraction, Aspire is a 60 metre tower commissioned by Nottingham University. The benefactor has [insert your own reason here] remained anonymous. We’ve already posted on the UK’s response to Sweedish attempts to snatch the world’s tallest animal sculpture in the form of a colossal moose. We will give you giant horse reports from the UK as they come to hand.

Sculpture cam

Here's something you don't get to do every day - film a sculpture from a bike. The work is Richard Serra's Berlin Junction which although it appears kind of uncared for is typically impressive. It stands outside the Berlin Philharmonic's building - you can see it in the center of the image below via Google Earth, an entertaining way to look at art we were pointed to by Andrew Clifford's site Art from Space.