I tend to read a lot of novels, not the pulp variety but usually older works.  Maybe I am trying to fill in my literary education that went on hold for many years when I was watching too much TV.  Granted, I love biographies and books about art and artists, but recently I got a hold of a copy of René Gimpel’s Diary of an Art Dealer and I have been thoroughly engrossed in it for the past few weeks. 

Gimpel was one of the most important and successful art dealers in Paris in the first half of the 20^th century and perhaps not surprisingly, he knew nearly everyone who was rich, famous, or collected art. 

He recounts numerous visits to an aging Claude Monet at Giverny, to an equally frail Auguste Renoir in his home in Southern France, dinner parties where companions recounted stories of Degas’s rudeness, his meeting Marcel Proust on vacation on the seacoast of Normandy, his mistrust of the American expatriate art historian Bernard Berenson, and so-on.

But he doesn’t confine himself merely to art or the rich and famous; Gimpel was an astute and sensitive man who could capture the essence of his time with a few words: about World War I, “On a bench: five soldiers with seven wooden legs.” His journal entries about the “Great War” and its aftermath are sobering. 

Of significant interest to a curator in an American art museum are his frequent visits to America and his meetings with collectors like Henry Clay Frick (“America’s most hated man”), J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford (who he describes quite unflatteringly), as well as dinners and cocktail parties—(and this was during Prohibition)—with museum directors like W.R. Valentiner of Detroit and George and Nina Spalding Stevens of Toledo. 

He frequently notes prices for works of art that he has sold, works others (like the famed British art dealers, the Duveens, into whose family he married) have sold, works he knows to be fakes, and some famous art scandals of the time. If you love art, larger-than-life personalities, “culture gossip,” European and American history during the important years leading up to the outbreak of World War II, you certainly will enjoy this book. 

Gimpel’s entries tend to be brief and pithy so one can read as much or as little as one has time for.  Unfortunately, I believe this book, originally published in translation in 1967, was reprinted in 1992, but copies can be found on the Internet through various book dealers.  Good reading! 

Dominique H. Vasseur

Curator of European Art

 Think about it… you probably know family and friends that would get a lot of enjoyment out of a year long membership to CMA. 

This year we have even partnered with Barcelona Restaurant and Bar!  With each membership that you purchase, we will include a $20 gift certificate toward the purchase of two dinner entrees at Barcelona.

If you want… you can keep the certificate for yourself and give the membership..lol… we won’t tell

Kristy Emch
Member Relations Manager

Melissa will be at the Riffe Gallery again on Sunday, November 13 from 2-4pm as part of the Quilt National ’09 exhibition programming.   She will be teaching some basic quilting techniques to children rather than speaking about her work, but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind a few questions!  Take the opportunity to meet this young, local artist if you can.

Lisa Dent
-Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

On the exact same weekend, artist Stephanie Syjuco set up her project, “Copystand: an autonomous manufacturing zone,” at the Frieze Art Fair.  In what she calls a “counterfeiting event,” Syjuco and a team of artists took over a booth at the prestigious, international art fair.  Over the course of the 4 day event the artists re-created other artworks found within the fair and displayed them as they were completed.  All of the”copies” were for sale, and for a fraction of the price of the original.

As someone who grew up in the age of hip-hop, and later became educated in the ideas of conceptual art practice, pulling inspiration from other sources sometimes feels as natural as sleeping.  And when you hear Syjuco talk about the project, she is clearly aware of the historical, artistic and economic forces around her.  It’s the lie that Fairey told that seems to get to people.  Syjuco, on the other hand, puts it out there for all to know and see.

I’m curious to see where all this will lead.  Are you?

-Lisa Dent, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

Art Speaks. Join the Conversation.
Nannette Maciejunes
CMA Executive Director

All I can say is keep visiting our website and stay up on your reading of the magazine so that you won’t miss even one opportunity here at the museum!

These two events are quickly approaching.  Contact me at 614.629.0344 for more info.

In 2002 I had landed back in my hometown of San Francisco just a year before California College of Arts (CCA) announced that it was dropping “and Crafts” from its name.  The chaos and confusion this created among artists in the area was palpable.  While CCA seemed to be making an effort to provide an atmosphere of integration and mutual respect, there were other signs that the merging of aesthetics was challenging, awkward and sometimes forced.  For instance, when I met Julie Travis, a young MFA student who had been accepted into the program through the ceramics department, she needed to remind me that in order to find her studio I had to visit the Oakland campus.  Her studio, inside the early 1922 campus building, was far removed from the San Francisco campus created in the 1980s, where all but two of the MFA students were given studio space.  The other student who was placed in Oakland worked in glass.  As the two navigated through the rigorous work schedules and ongoing criticism necessary to complete their degrees, both seemed to have the added endeavor of providing plausible reasons for working in glass or clay in the first place.

Dale Chihuly has spent the better part of 40 years within this critical debate, albeit without the discussions hindering his artistic output.  He has even created a haven in Washington state, his own little part of the world to explore and encourage working with glass.

In his essay written in 1997, Donald Kuspit writes, “…Chihuly effects an iconic reprise of the problematic relationship between craft and art-ultimately the relationship between the decorative and the expressive-in the very act of reconciling them.” His extensive list of projects and output can cloud some of his earliest successful examples.  The best aspects of Chihuly Illuminated highlight these successes, and show his formidable desire to push past long held ideas as to what the glass arts were and are for many of us today.

Lisa Dent
Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

I am the Educator for Adult Programs and Multimedia Producer for CMA. Over the past few years we’ve really stepped up our video production schedule, and I’ll be blogging new projects as they happen. For a look at previous CMA-produced documentaries, I invite you to visit the museum’s YouTube page.  I post each new documentary there as soon as it’s finished.  Some of the titles have been listed in this blog previously and linked on the CMA website, but you may find some unfamiliar ones, too. I’d also encourage you to take a look at the YouTube activities of other museums listed on our channel in the ‘Subscriptions’ window. Enjoy!

1) Drop my bag at my desk and grab my coffee mug.
2) Walk to the staff kitchen to get my cup a joe and head back to my desk.
3) Turn on my computer and check my email.

and so on and so forth.  At around 2:00pm I realized that I had not walked through the galleries in a while.  When I first arrived at CMA, I tried to make a point of going upstairs frequently throughout the work week.  Discovering artwork that I hadn’t noticed before, an area that I had overlooked.  I also like seeing what visitors respond to in the museum; Overhearing them discuss what confuses them and what holds their interest.  So I got up off my duff and headed towards the galleries again.

It’s exciting to see people taking advantage of free admission this summer.  The difference in the energy in the galleries between June and July is palpable.  Our membership has given an amazing gift, and I am thrilled to see so many people taking advantage of it.

I started in the Expressionist gallery, made it through the George Tooker exhibit again, past the newly installed Custodian by Gwathmey, and then it happened.  The moment I always cherish when I am at a museum I have been to frequently.  I see something that I knew was there but hadn’t really looked at before.  Deborah Butterfield’s Joseph was looking right at me, and only me, for a split second.  So I walked toward it and looked over it, and under it, and around it again.  Charred bits of welded steel plopped onto each other, layer over layer.  Rusted and dented with muted, flat colors pushing out from the backside.  This woman, this artist, managed to make dirty, ugly, and hard bits of metal into this object, now emanating a sense of movement and softness.  Maybe there were not a lot of thoughts and ideas in this object, but in that moment I believed what she was trying to show me.  That sometimes things that we take for granted everyday can transform into something worth looking at again.

I love my job.

Lisa Dent
Associate Curator of Contemporary Art