SanArt

Long before the controversy and concern about the National Academy Museum, I contacted Melissa Wolfe, a curator at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio and catalog contributor to the show George Tooker, which closes this weekend. What originally inspired me to contact her is that I was struck by the specific value of exhibition and scholarship generated by these smaller museums. In the interview below, the value for New York of the smaller strategic and collaborative museum emerges.

CS: My response to it is maybe personal, but I remember so well at the Columbus Museum of Art Cornice, a painting of a man about to jump off the building, and it was just so curious, among the Sloans and the Bellows’- it’s such an oddball painting.

MW: It’s interesting because we bought that in the ‘50s, and why did we buy that? I mean in the ‘50s that’s an odd purchase for the museum, really. But we always recognized what an interesting painting it was, and we always had it up. Then in 2005 we bought the Schiller Collection in Chicago, he began collecting in the ‘70s artworks that dealt with social issues, and really amassed one of the best collections of Social Realist works from about 1930-1970. We are a collection of collections, more so than a lot of museums. We bought from a collection of the Photo League as well, and our personality has changed massively. When you are a regional museum and you buy 400 works of art it totally changes your personality. So that’s how the other Tooker, Lunch, came in, it was one of the pieces in that collection that was of really strong interest to us…

CS: I remember that Nanette Maciejunes, also of the Columbus Museum of Art, was responsible for bringing Charles Burchfield to life, all of the sudden he showed up as though a brand new discovery and in a sense he was. That’s another example of someone at a regional museum finding this really quirky painting that people in New York were not interested in. There’s the Blakelock show at the Academy too, from the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska, side by side with Tooker, and they make a point in their catalog of saying that this one painting in their museum became the support of the entire show. And it is a show full of very quirky, ‘uneven” one would say, paintings.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art when they rehung the 19th century they really brought a lot of stuff up from the basement, re-imagining what the curatorial role was and in recent exhibitions wanting to make more visible the history of the institution as well, showing collector’s room after collector’s room. But what you don’t see at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is that while they may decide to have an entire room devoted to Orientalism, or to tourist landscape paintings, you don’t see them landing on one of the curious oddities, such as Cornice, and deciding that they are going to devote an entire show to that. Those kinds of things are just sort of there in the layer of culture.

MW: Well, I think if you are a regional museum, or just a smaller museum, you have a little more leeway to be invested in that one painting that you don’t really get, and in that sense that’s where we can make our mark. Very good curators and strategic museums get that, so with the Tooker, I hung Lunch up immediately. We realize that’s our opening, and the director of the NEA saw it , he was actually here for something else but he saw the George Tooker and fell in love with it, and suggested we nominate him for the National Medal of the Arts, so we did, and he got it the next year, so we initiated that because in Columbus it is large.

The strategic museum is either dwarfed by a larger institution or is in Columbus,Ohio or Lincoln Nebraska. If you’re smart you look at what you’ve got on your walls and you do something with those artists who no one else is doing anything with…We have Hopper, but the Whitney isn’t really loaning out it’s Hoppers to us little museums, so that’s how Nanette got to Burchfield – you can get deep rich exhibitions with works by artists like that, and that’s where you can make your wedge, your mark. Just look at all these Burchfield’s! And you rethink him – the same with George Tooker. The major museums who have him don’t really care if they go. The strategic museum knows that this is good for them, they can get a really rich, deep, multifaceted show.

While George Tooker remains in many ways a New York artist – he was born in Brooklyn in 1920 only moving to Vermont in 1960, studied and taught at the Art Students League, painted Subway, an icon of New York, and his collectors are here – it took the strategic interest of smaller regional museums to make this show happen at the National Academy, and this is a good thing. In turn, the National Academy, with its strong interest in the singular lives of artists and the figurative tradition, is the perfect home for such exhibitions – in this case, one of its own members. Where else in New York could this show have successfully occurred? (The Whitney, which has had Subway in its collection since it was painted?) Finally,to suggest that these paintings have a special meaning for the National Academy, here is a sentence from Melissa Wolfe’s catalog essay: “To paint the figure as deliberately and meditatively as does Tooker, is, in a sense, to touch, caress, and care for it.”*

*M. Melissa Wolfe, “George Tooker: A Biography, ” in George Tooker, Robert Cozzolino, Marshall N. Price, and M. Melissa Wolfe, NY: Merrell Publishers Ltd., 2008, p.33.
Image Credits: All works by George Tooker, American, born 1920: Cornice, c. 1949, Egg-yolk tempera on panel, Columbus Museum of Art, Museum Purchase, Derby Fund, from the Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller Collection of American Social Commentary Art 1930-1970; Lunch, 1964, Egg-yolk tempera on panel, Columbus Museum of Art, Museum Purchase, Derby Fund, from the Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller Collection of American Social Commentary Art 1930-1970: Children and Spastics, 1946, egg tempera on gesso panel, 24 1/2 x 181/2 in. (62.2 x 47 cm), Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, gift of Mary and Earle Ludgin Collection; Embrace of Peace II, 1988, egg tempera on gesso panel, 18 x 30 in. (45.7 x 76.2 cm), Reis Private Collection.