Whitney Chooses Biennial Curators
By CAROL VOGEL | Published: December 12, 2008

Although the art world can grow quiet as the holidays approach, there have been a number of developments this week, like details about the next Whitney Biennial and acquisitions including a Matisse at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“The Three O’Clock Sitting,” a Matisse oil from 1924, is one of two important recent acquisitions by the Metropolitan Museum.
Times Topics: Whitney Museum of American Art | Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art

“The Lute Player” by Valentin de Boulogne, recently acquired by the Met.

First, the Biennial. Although it seems as if there just was one (there was, ending in June), officials at the Whitney Museum of American Art are already plotting the sequel, scheduled to open in March 2010. This week they are announcing the choice of curators, who in years past have consisted of all-Whitney teams, groups of outsiders, or variations in between.

This time the museum has paired Francesco Bonami, 53, a seasoned Italian-born curator with an international reputation, and Gary Carrion-Murayari, 28, a homegrown senior curatorial assistant. Mr. Bonami will serve as curator for the Biennial, with Mr. Carrion-Murayari acting as associate curator.

“It seemed like a good fit on a lot of levels,” said Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s chief curator. “Francesco is well known to the Whitney” — he helped organize the Rudolf Stingel retrospective in 2007 — “and he has been thinking about and looking at biennials. Gary is about investing in a younger generation of curators. Not youth for youth’s sake but tapping into the way they see.”

These Biennials are “a monster to wrestle,” as Ms. De Salvo put it, but the Whitney also wanted a young eye involved; thus an experienced curator was matched with a greener one.
In 2007 Mr. Carrion-Murayari organized “Television Delivers People,” which focused on video works from the 1970s and ’80s and newer examples that examined the relationship between television and the viewer. A five-year Whitney veteran, he also worked on the 2004 and 2006 Whitney Biennials and helped Mr. Bonami and the Whitney curator Chrissie Iles on the installation of Mr. Stingel’s show.

This year the Biennial spilled over into the Park Avenue Armory for part of its run. At other times it has spread into Central Park. The 2010 edition, it seems, will be a more concentrated affair, occupying only the museum’s landmark Marcel Breuer home.

Unless the curators find a special project that requires another sort of space. “I want to stretch the building’s dimensions,” Mr. Bonami said. “Sometimes Biennials go all over the place. This one will be more specific.”
Although the curators won’t start visiting artists’ studios around the country until January, and at this early stage they haven’t decided whether the Biennial will have a particular theme, they are already starting to focus on certain ideas.

“I grew up around the world of globalism,” said Mr. Bonami, who in 2003 became the first American citizen to direct a Venice Biennale and who recently organized “Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution: 1968-2008,” which is on view through March 22 at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. “It was a time, around 1992-93, when there were no boundaries. But now my challenge is to reflect on the idea of Americanness. Setting these parameters, these limitations could be an advantage.”

Mr. Carrion-Murayari said the notion of globalism, which was important in past Biennials, feels dated. “We’ve gotten beyond that,” he said. “It’s not so much an argument anymore.”
Both curators said that their decision to concentrate on the Breuer building rather than consider other locations was not about keeping budgets low because of the current economic climate, adding that there might actually be a benefit to being focused and in one place.The two men also said they were considering weaving works from the Whitney’s holdings into the Biennial, which would be a departure.“We have talked about using the permanent collection,” Mr. Carrion-Murayari said. “We definitely want to consider it.”

TWO MET ACQUISITIONS
Two paintings, executed three centuries apart and each considered surprising in its own way, were recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The earliest, by the 17th-century French painter Valentin de Boulogne, depicts a full-length, seated man playing the lute and singing. It recently went on view in the Met’s 17th-century French paintings gallery.

“For the last 25 years, any time a dealer asked me what I was looking for, Valentin was the first name I mentioned,” said Keith Christiansen, curator of Italian and French paintings at the Met. “He’s an artist we’ve wanted for a long time.”
Although born in France, Valentin spent his entire career in Rome and died at just 41. So paintings by him are relatively rare.Like Ribera and Velázquez, he was inspired by Caravaggio. “But Valentin took his style one step further,” Mr. Christiansen said. “Both artists painted directly from a posed model. However, Valentin captured more movement in his canvases.” While most of his subjects were ordinary people playing cards or drinking or having their fortunes told, “The Lute Player” (from about 1626) is the only painting of a single figure playing a musical instrument.
In 1624 Valentin joined the society of northern artists living in Rome, where the members adopted nicknames. Valentin’s was Amador, Spanish for lover boy. “The painting may be emblematic of his nickname,” Mr. Christiansen said. “Indeed in the 17th and 18th century the painting is sometimes described as in Spanish costume. But we don’t know who the sitter is.”
The theme of the painting relates to two other famous canvases in the Met’s collection, Watteau’s commedia dell’arte figure “Mezzetin” and Manet’s “Spanish Guitar Player. “It’s not impossible that the two artists knew this picture and were inspired by it,” Mr. Christiansen said.
The Met purchased “The Lute Player” for an undisclosed price with the help of various funds and several individual donors.
The second acquisition, “The Three O’Clock Sitting,” a painting by Matisse executed in Nice, France, in 1924, is a gift from the family of Roderick H. Cushman, a commercial real estate investor from Jackson Hole, Wyo. His mother, Cordelia Cushman, bought the painting in 1948 from the New York collector Stephen C. Clark.

It went on view this week in the museum’s second-floor Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for modern art. And if the image looks familiar that may be because it was included in the exhibition “Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings: The Clark Brothers Collect,” at the Met last year.

“After we requested it for the Clark show, the Cushmans called out of the blue and asked if we wanted a donation,” said Gary Tinterow, chairman of the Met’s department of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art.

Set in Matisse’s third-floor apartment two blocks from the beach, it depicts a female artist seated at her easel painting an androgynous model. The artist is Henriette Darricarrère, his favorite model at the time.

“The painting could almost be read as a commentary with twists on the artist’s own studio pictures of the first decade of the 20th century,” Mr. Tinterow said. “In a reversal he shows his model as the artist, whereas in the past she was always the subject.”

Although the Met already has several Matisses from this period, including the paintings “Girl by a Window” (1921) and “The Goldfish Bowl” (1921-22) as well as four odalisque paintings, this is its first multifigured studio interior.

CLEVELAND’S SMALL GEM
Curators at the Cleveland Museum of Art have been shopping in London recently. Last week at Sotheby’s they spent $91,262 for “Mars, Minerva, Venus and Cupid,” an early-16th-century rock crystal intaglio by Valerio Belli, the Italian gem engraver, goldsmith and medalist. “We have great ancient cameos and an impressive collection of medals and plaquettes, but until now we had no example of Renaissance gem carving,” said Jon L. Seydl, Cleveland’s curator or European painting and sculpture.

The pendant, which measures 2.3 by 1.6 inches, depicts a man thought to be Mars with a bare breast and a helmet next to his foot. Opposite him are two goddesses, Minerva, who is in full armor, and Venus with her son Cupid, representing antithetical choices for Mars: wisdom and responsibility on one side and lust and pleasure on the other.

The museum also bought an alabaster sculpture of a virgin and child by the late-15th-century sculptor Gil de Siloé. “These works are exceptionally rare,” said Stephen Fleigel, Cleveland’s curator of medieval art. So when he saw the sculpture in June at Sam Fogg, a London dealer, he urged the museum to buy it. (The price is undisclosed.) There are only four others in the United States, one in the Cloisters and three that are attributed to the workshop of Gil de Siloé in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

“It has been suggested that the face of this particular virgin resembles Isabella, Queen of Spain, who was the patron of Gil de Siloé,” Mr. Fleigel said. “It’s not impossible, but we have no documentation to prove it.”