Cleveland Museum of Art needs to plan exhibits with star power

January 24, 2010, 12:00AM


Cleveland Museum of Art previewed the Monet in Normandy exhibit before it opened in February, 2007.

Exhibition envy is not a pretty emotion, but it's been easy to feel it in Cleveland in recent years. The special-exhibition program at the Cleveland Museum of Art has been sputtering since 2005, if not longer.

The simplest explanation is that the museum has lacked space during construction of a $350 million expansion and renovation designed by Rafael Vinoly, which started in 2005. The museum has also suffered from high turnover among directors.

The institution has had three directors since 1993 and is searching for a successor to Timothy Rub, who left Cleveland in September to head the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Such changes can hurt the momentum needed to plan big shows, which can take years to organize.

But with the end of construction scheduled for 2013, and galleries gradually coming back on line, restoring the vitality of special exhibitions needs to be a top priority.
In fact, it should be a key factor in hiring Rub's successor. The museum needs a new director with the drive to create or host great exhibitions worthy of a plane trip or a long car ride.

The need is immediate. The Vinoly expansion throws down a gauntlet. It includes a pair of special-exhibition galleries designed to provide a total of 12,000 square feet of space, enough to hold most of the biggest touring exhibitions mounted by the nation's leading museums.

When the Cleveland museum finishes its expansion, it will have to mount or borrow exhibitions worthy of the moment. Three short years later, in 2016, the museum will observe its centennial. Big shows need to be part of that package, too.

So far, shows planned for 2013 include an exhibition on "The Last Days of Pompeii" and another on the Magic Realist movement in mid-20th-century American painting.

This year, the museum has scheduled exhibitions on the art of American Indians from the Thaw Collection at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., and on medieval Christian reliquaries and related religious objects.

Long under pressure to exhibit works by Cleveland-area artists, the museum will respond this summer with a show on winners of the Cleveland Arts Prize.

Next year, the museum will examine the work of Fu Baoshi, a major 20th-century Chinese painter, and hold a major show on contemporary sculpture. A display of Op Art paintings from the museum's collection is also planned.

Exhibitions in 2012 will focus on works by Rembrandt in American collections, American art of the 1920s and '30s, and the paintings of African-American artist William H. Johnson.
The schedule signals a quickening pace, which is good. But with the exception of Rembrandt, it lacks obvious star power. It also avoids making a major commitment to 20th-century abstraction.

A great deal depends on how curators flesh out the projects scheduled so far and fill out the calendar with other exhibits.

Insiders at the museum know they need to gear up.
Michael Horvitz, co-chairman of the museum's board of trustees, said the institution is working on a long-range strategic plan, in which "the development of a coherent exhibition program is a very big part."

When asked about lackluster aspects of the exhibition program, C. Griffith Mann, the museum's chief curator, said, "It's a fair criticism.

"Exhibits as a muscle group are less well-developed here than elsewhere," he said. "There are curators here for whom exhibit work is fundamental, and others for whom it has been less of a priority."

The problem has been apparent at least since 2000, the year Katharine Reid became the museum's sixth director.

At times, the museum hustled to fill blank spots on the calendar with canned shows that did little to advance scholarship or break out of the museum's art-historical comfort zones.
The museum had to cancel major exhibitions on the paintings of J.M.W. Turner and Anne-Louis Girodet when trustees decided unexpectedly in 2005 to shut down galleries for construction.

Exhibitions resumed in late 2006, but the number of shows has been paltry in comparison with the two dozen exhibitions a year the museum used to mount.

Some recent shows in Cleveland have been wonderful -- both ambitious in scholarly aspirations and appealing to a broad public. Reid deserves credit for green-lighting them on her watch.

Examples include shows on Claude Monet's Normandy landscapes; "Artistic Luxury," which explored the jewelry and decorative arts of Faberge, Lalique and Tiffany; and "Barcelona," which examined the modernist milieu that nurtured Picasso, Dali and Miro.
But the museum has not been able to maintain a regular concatenation of exhibitions at the same level - or better.

A glance at other big museums around the country indicates what's been missing locally.
The Cleveland museum anchored the fall season with a fine scholarly show re-creating the 1889 exhibition in which Paul Gauguin and compatriots launched the Symbolist movement at the Paris Universal Exposition. The show closed Monday.

Meanwhile, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York staged a retrospective on the work of Wassily Kandinsky, the pioneering 20th-century abstractionist. The Philadelphia Museum of Art weighed in with a massive exhibit on Arshile Gorky, a giant of American Abstract Expressionism.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a big show that challenged traditional perspectives on the Bauhaus, the influential 20th-century German design academy. That show followed a definitive survey on the unruly, late-19th-century Belgian Symbolist James Ensor.

Earlier in the year, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., took a loving look at Giorgio Morandi, the 20th-century Italian whose muted still-life paintings achieved intense poetic effects.

These were all once-in-a-lifetime experiences -- and if you love art and you missed them, you are certainly suffering pangs. They were also the kinds of shows that have rarely been staged in Cleveland.

One reason is obvious: While the museum has done a solid job over the past two decades in surveying the arts of Asia, Africa and the ancient world, it has done less than it should have to educate Northeast Ohioans about the 20th century.

In many ways, the Cleveland museum has been trapped in its own history as an institution molded by the conservative tastes of former trustees and directors.

It's time for the museum to break away from its own history by seeking exhibitions and long-term loans precisely in the areas where it has been weakest. How about a show on Cubism? Italian Futurism? Russian Constructivism or Suprematism?

Moving closer to the present, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, two masters of Pop Art, were the focus of major exhibitions in the past 15 years by the Wexner Center in Columbus. The Pop Art movement has been thinly represented by the Cleveland museum's exhibition program and permanent collection.

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., recently mounted an important historical exhibition on Abstract Expressionism, something the Cleveland museum has never done.
The skepticism about 20th-century art has hurt Cleveland by sending a message that the art of our time is suspect. The result has been to make the city feel provincial and isolated -- hardly a contribution to local culture.

Scholarly ambition is another area that needs attention.
The Gauguin show in Cleveland was great. But in comparison with many of the biggest recent shows elsewhere, it was modest in scope.
The main thrust was to illuminate the importance of a major painting and an important group of prints by Gauguin in the museum's collection.

Ten or 15 years ago, such a show might have been a supporting player in the museum's annual lineup, not a main event.

Cost will be an obvious factor as the museum plans future exhibitions. Big, international loan shows are more expensive than ever.

The museum will need to balance the complicated equations involving how much it can spend on shows in a city that lacks the tourism of New York or Chicago.

But the museum also needs to remember that with an endowment now valued at more than $600 million, it is in a strong position to be Cleveland's window on the broader world of art. In coming years, this will mean exploring entirely new areas, including contemporary art from Africa, India, China and Latin America.

When the expansion is finished in 2013, the museum will have a spectacular new physical framework in which to show off its collection -- and special exhibitions.

The collection, to judge from the galleries that have opened so far, will look terrific. Whether the special-exhibition program lives up to its full potential is still an open question.