Betty Freeman (1921–2009)
01.06.09
The Los Angeles Times’s Mark Swed reports that arts patron Betty Freeman died on Saturday, January 3, of pancreatic cancer. She was eighty-seven years old. As Swed writes, Freeman was an arts patron like no other, supporting an extraordinary contingent of important composers—commissioning new work, underwriting recordings and performances, helping out with living expenses, even on occasion bailing a recalcitrant artist out of jail. From 1981 through the mid-’90s, Freeman hosted musicales at her home for around a hundred guests at a time. Composers—Luciano Berio, John Cage, Steve Reich, Pierre Boulez, John Adams, Terry Riley, Morton Feldman, Esa-Pekka Salonen and many more—spoke and presented new work. Often she paired a famous composer with an emerging artist few among the listeners had heard of.
Freeman began her life of patronage supporting outsider American composers. Modern music caught her fancy when she was asked in 1961 to contribute to the defense fund of LaMonte Young, a conceptual, minimalist composer who had been arrested on drug charges. Beginning in 1964, Freeman served on the board of “Encounters,” the Pasadena Art Museum’s concert program. She helped support Harry Partch in the ’60s and ’70s, and in 1965, Freeman visited John Cage in New York and was so shocked by his poverty that she began giving him an annual grant, which she continued until his death in 1992. In Cage’s later years, he signed the checks over to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and after Cage died, Freeman sent the money directly to Cunningham. An avid photographer, Freeman also captured many noteworthy photos of her friends—Partch, Cage, Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Peter Sellars, among them.
As Anthony Tommasini notes in the New York Times, Freeman was a throwback to an earlier era of patronage based on personal preferences. The composer John Adams, who dedicated his opera Nixon in China to Freeman, has long called her a “modern-day Medici.” Her selection of composers was “purely arbitrary and based solely on my response to their music,” Freeman said in a 1998 interview in the New York Times.
She commissioned the French twelve-tone master Pierre Boulez and the American maverick Cage, the British modernist Harrison Birtwistle and the American minimalist Reich. Reich’s Different Trains, written for the Kronos Quartet; Kaija Saariaho’s opera L’Amour de Loin, which had its premiere at the Salzburg Festival; Tod Machover’s Hyper-Violin Concerto, for the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group; and Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto, composed for Keith Jarrett, are among the hundreds of notable works Freeman commissioned from about eighty composers.
Saarinen Embassy’s Slated Demise Provokes Controversy as US State Department Unveils Short List
01.06.09
According to Christopher Hawthorne on the Los Angeles Times’ blog, the US State Department has announced a nine-firm short list for a new American diplomatic headquarters in London, where Eero Saarinen's 1960 original is at the center of a growing preservation battle. Saarinen designed the building on Grosvenor Square after winning a 1955 competition. Hawthorne links to a plea by prominent architecture critic Hugh Pearman to save Saarinen’s embassy. “No question in my mind: This building must not be wrecked,” Pearman writes. According to the Architects’ Journal, the short-listed architects and firms are Richard Meier, Pritzker Prize-winner Thom Mayne's Morphosis Architects; Gwathmey Siegel & Associates; Kallmann; McKinnell & Wood; KieranTimberlake; Kohn Pedersen Fox Architects; PEI Cobb Freed & Partners; Perkins + Will; and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. The firms will present to a panel of judges comprising British and American architects, diplomats, and academics, including Richard Rogers. Up to five firms will then be invited to submit formal designs for the final. Only American firms with the necessary security clearance are allowed to compete for embassy commissions, although the next phase may see the short-listed practices recruit British partners to complete their design teams.
New Board Member for Rubin Museum; Kemper Art Museum Appoints Curator
01.06.09
Vikas Kapoor has joined the Rubin Museum of Art’s board of trustees, reports Reuters. Kapoor is president and CEO of iQor, an international company that provides business outsourcing. “I’m excited to sit on such a distinguished board,” said Kapoor, saying that he looked forward to “helping the museum build on the opportunities they have created for the public to explore and appreciate the art of the Himalayas.” Founded in 1999 as a nonprofit charitable organization, the museum, specializing in Himalayan art, opened to the public in October 2004. “We are delighted to have a talented leader like Vikas to lend us his business acumen to help us remain a landmark for Himalayan artwork,” said Bob Baylis, chair of the executive committee of the museum.
In other news, the Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in Saint Louis has appointed Karen Butler curator of collections, according to the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch’s website. Butler, a postdoctoral fellow in Matisse studies at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, started her new job last Friday. She earned her doctorate in art history from Columbia University in 2006, writing her dissertation on French painter Jean Fautrier. She has also worked at the Guggenheim Museum as a research assistant on Robert Rauschenberg and in the education department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “With Karen on board, the organization of our curatorial department reflects the vision of the institution as a whole: a balance between the development, preservation, and presentation of its outstanding permanent collection, and special exhibitions with a focus on modern and contemporary art,” said Sabine Eckmann, the Kemper’s director and chief curator.
National Gallery of Art Acquires Over 5,000 Prints
01.05.09
The National Gallery of Art has announced that it has acquired a collection of American prints belonging to Reba and Dave Williams and the Print Research Foundation in Stamford, Connecticut, which was established by the couple in 2003. The acquisition includes about 5,200 works from roughly 1875 through 1975. The collection’s artists range from Winslow Homer to Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Ed Ruscha. A total of 2,070 artists are represented, more than three-quarters of them new to the institution's holdings. In addition, the National Gallery of Art will also receive the research library and related assets of the Print Research Foundation. In an independent transaction, the National Gallery of Art purchased 250 works from the Williams's personal collection. “This is a transformational acquisition,” said Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art. “Reba and Dave Williams's collection has extraordinary quality and breadth and gives the National Gallery of Art an entirely new standing in the field of American prints.”
Director of British Museum Named Briton of the Year
01.02.09
Dave Itzkoff reports in the New York Times that Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, has been named Briton of the Year by The Times of London. MacGregor, who joined the museum in 2002 when it was nearly $7 million in debt and had closed one-third of its galleries, has since helped restore it to an attraction that now receives more than six million visitors a year. He was also believed to be among the candidates to replace Philippe de Montebello at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In naming MacGregor for the distinction, Rachel Campbell-Johnston noted in The Times that, “He is a committed idealist who, in a world in which culture is increasingly presented as the acceptable face of politics, has pioneered a broader, more open, more peaceable way forward.”
Twenty-Five Additions to National Film Registry
01.01.09
James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, has added twenty-five American motion pictures to the National Film Registry. Additions include John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), and John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972). Spanning from 1910 to 1989, this year’s selections bring the number of films in the registry to 500. Billington conducted extensive discussions with members of the National Film Preservation Board and the library’s motion-picture staff, solicited public nominations at the Film Board’s website, and also issued a call for lesser-known but culturally vital films. This year’s list includes Disneyland Dream, a significant home movie and record of Hollywood and Los Angeles in 1956 by Robbins and Meg Barstow, and Mitchell Block’s student film No Lies (1973).
Congress established the National Film Registry in 1989 and reauthorized the program in September 2008 when it passed the Library of Congress Sound Recording and Film Preservation Programs Reauthorization Act of 2008. For each title named to the registry, the Library of Congress’s Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center ensures that the film is preserved. "Both as a public-awareness tool and as an educational learning aid for students, the registry helps this nation understand the diversity of America’s film heritage and, just as importantly, the need for its preservation. The nation has lost about half of the films produced before 1950 and as much as 90 percent of those made before 1920. In addition, more and more nitrate-based and acetate-based films are deteriorating with the passage of time,” noted Billington.
Sir Michael Levey (1927–2008)
12.30.08
Sir Michael Levey, director of the National Gallery between 1973 and 1987, has passed away, reports the Guardian’s Terence Mullaly. It was while he was at the National Gallery that Levey brought in the intelligent, if controversial, policy of cleaning and restoring the pictures in the collection. Levey was also responsible for the National Gallery’s catalogues of the eighteenth-century Italian Schools and of the German School. As early as 1956 he wrote Six Great Painters, followed by volumes on Bronzino, Botticelli, and Jacob van Ruisdael. His Rococo to Revolution was published in 1966, and he wrote extensively on eighteenth-century French art and architecture.
Levey was a professor of fine art at Cambridge from 1963 until 1964 and at Oxford from 1994 until 1995 and a supernumerary fellow at King's College, Cambridge, 1963–64. He was also made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature—something very rare for an art historian—and two of the world's greatest learned societies recognized his achievements: In 1983, he became a fellow of the British Academy and, a source of particular pleasure to him, he joined the small and highly select band of foreign members of the Ateneo Veneto. He was knighted in 1981. He resigned as director of the National Gallery in 1987 after his wife, writer Brigid Brophy, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and they moved to Louth in Lincolnshire, England. There Levey continued to write; his last published volume, in 2005, was Sir Thomas Lawrence.
Alanna Heiss to Retire from P.S. 1
12.30.08
The Museum of Modern Art has announced the retirement of Alanna Heiss from her position as the director of the curatorial department at P.S. 1 after thirty-seven years of running the institution. The New York Press’s Jerry Portwood calls Heiss the “powerful force that put the former schoolhouse on the cultural map as an experimental, edgy art destination” before it became affiliated with MoMA in 2000. Portwood notes that John Baldessari has said, “She is P.S. 1, and P.S. 1 is her. It doesn’t seem like she could be replaced.” Following her retirement, Heiss will launch Art International Radio, “an organization that will be devoted to artistic, musical, performance, and experimental programs, in early 2009. Taking its lead from Heiss’s brainchild Art Radio WPS1.org, Art International Radio will bolster a tradition of bringing thought-provoking conversations with noteworthy artists, curators, and academics to a listening audience.” A search committee will be formed in 2009 to locate the person who will replace the retiring director. “Alanna Heiss is a creative and visionary leader whose efforts brought the originality of contemporary artists to a worldwide public and built a landmark center for the visual and performance arts,” said Glenn Lowry, director of MoMA. “Literally hundreds of artists from around the world have felt the impact of her tireless efforts over the last thirty-seven years, and that impact will continue to resonate with artists for years to come.”
