Cultural institutions are now much more likely to be named after people with money than people with talent: On Broadway, the Helen Hayes, the Gershwin and the Eugene O’Neill Theaters have been joined by the American Airlines Theater, the Ford Center for the Performing Arts, and the Cadillac Winter Garden this month, Gerald Schoenfeld renamed one of the theaters he owns as chairman of the Shubert Organization after himself. "Kindred Spirits" by Asher Durand - from NY Public Library to Wal-Art in Arkansasīoth stories are but the latest incidents to suggest that, public institution or not, money is what matters these days in the arts. Walton so expensively celebrates.”Ī week after the sale of “Kindred Spirits,” a front-page article in the Times questioned the decision by the New York City Opera to allow “Atsushi Yamada, a one-time Sony salaryman without conservatory training or a single English-language review to his name” to conduct the company in a tour of Japan for which Yamada helped raise nearly $2 million from Japanese businesses. “A grand inherent irony” of the sale, CBS correspondent Morley Safer added a few days later, is that “all that Wal-Mart money was gleaned from the systematic destruction of the very American landscape Ms. ![]() The painting certainly has New York all over it: In it, the (New York) painter Thomas Cole stands on a ledge with the (New York) poet William Cullen Bryant in the (New York) Catskills. Francis Morrone in the New York Sun called it "New York's most egregious act of self-desecration since the demolition of Pennsylvania Station," Michael Thomas in the NY Observer deemed it a "sorry affair," a "scandal", a "dirty deed," and an example of "institutional philistinism" to the library's explanation that the sale was needed to raise funds for book and manuscript acquisition, he wrote: "I find the arithmetic unpersuasive." New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman condemned the sale in three separate articles (so far), labelling the painting “a civic landmark,” and arguing, with a kind of eloquently restrained anger, that it should at least have been kept in New York. The daughter of the founder of Wal-Mart, Alice Walton, bought "Kindred Spirits" this month reportedly for at least $35 million, the highest price ever paid for a painting by an American artist - though, since it was bought at a "silent auction" at Sotheby's, the parties involved are denying the public even the right to be told what the precise purchase price was, much less have any say in the disposition of what we previously were told was a public treasure.Īrt-lovers have reacted with outrage. Will it become Wal-Art? Are the two marble lions next? Tour: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., September 14, 2007–JanuSan Diego Museum of Art, February 2–April 27, 2008.What would the lions in front of the New York Public Library fetch at auction? This seems a reasonable question, given that the New York Public Library recently sold off one of the most celebrated paintings in the city, “Kindred Spirits” by Asher Durand - hanging for decades in the main library, now being shipped, astonishingly, to Bentonville, Arkansas, hometown of Wal-Mart. Fleischman, the Gilder Foundation, and the Brooklyn Museum American Art Council. Durand and the American Landscape is made possible by the Henry Luce Foundation.Īdditional generous support is provided by Cheryl and Blair Effron, Barbara G. Mellon Curator of American Art and Chair, Department of American Art, Brooklyn Museum. Ferber, Vice President and Museum Director of the New-York Historical Society and former Andrew W. This exhibition is organized for the Brooklyn Museum by Linda S. Most important, this career retrospective displays together some of the most beautiful and famous American landscape paintings of the nineteenth century. ![]() Newly discovered works, new information, and new approaches to the study of art history necessitate another look at Durand’s contribution. ![]() Consequently, Durand was the natural choice for the Brooklyn Institute’s very first commission: The First Harvest in the Wilderness (1855)-the cornerstone of the Brooklyn Museum’s American painting collection. Durand was both an influential artist and the acknowledged dean of the American landscape school from his election as president of the National Academy of Design in 1845 until his death at the age of ninety in 1886. Durand’s career in more than thirty-five years. This exhibition of nearly sixty works is the first monographic exhibition devoted to Asher B.
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