The New Eloise W. Martin Director

With last month's announcement that Douglas Druick would replace James Cuno , as the Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute, it seems like the right time to contemplate the future.


It's hard to say just what kind of choices the new director has made in his curatorial career because the museum is run behind closed doors and there is no professional journalism that tries to peek behind them.

Except that, as Alan Artner noted in his above report, Druick was primarily responsible for the acquisition of the fake Gauguin shown above. Art forgeries can be very cleverly done, so we can't really blame a curator for being fooled. But we can blame him for making a major investment in something with zero aesthetic value, all the more painful because the museum has so little European figure sculpture unless it's done by non-sculptors like Degas, Daumier, or Matisse.

Was he also responsible for selling off four paintings by Picasso, Matisse, and Braque to help raise the 60 million dollars to purchase the Malevich?

Only the insiders know what role he played, but as director of the European painting and sculpture department, he had to be involved.


Perhaps the new director, as well as the board that hired him, subscribe to the recent trend in art theory that has demoted good taste to personal opinion. Even Clement Greenberg, in his later years, railed against such relativism.

If good taste is not relevant to museum exhibitions, what's left ?

Star power -- and, regretfully, that seems to be where our new director has been going, with his big exhibitions of of Van Gogh and Seurat from the 19th C. and Jasper Johns from the late 20th.

And what, beside star power would justify buying and exhibiting that horrible fake Gauguin ?

It's hard to be optimistic about the upcoming decade, but anyway, here's my wish list:

*Devote a gallery to Chinese painting. (and not at the expense of Chinese ceramics)
And in that gallery, please install a display case that's long enough to show an entire scroll.

For example, this painting (which I think is one of the greatest things in the entire museum) has only been put on display about once every 20 years - and even then, since the old display case was 8 feet long, it would take more than a lifetime to ever see all of it.


*Make rotating displays of off-view European painting, sculpture, and tapestry.

Just like there are special galleries for the rotating display of Japanese and European/American prints.

There is no good reason to keep things off-view unless they are periodically put on display. And if they're never put on display -- sell them! Let somebody else in the world enjoy them.


*Do SOMETHING about art from the Islamic world.

As proven by the rather sparse exhibit of the museum's collection of Persian art in 2010, that collection is threadbare.

One of the strongest arguments for an encyclopedic art museum is the improvement of international relations by making our public a bit less narrow minded, and no area of the world currently needs more understanding than the Islamic.

Currently, Islamic arts occupy a small, dark hallway near the connecting doors to the Modern Wing. They need more space -- and continuous new exhibits.



*The A.I.C. online.

Why can't the entire data base be accessible -- with information about exhibition history and pieces that have been de-accessioned? Why can't we have larger pictures - which is especially important for things like tapestries that only go on display every century or so ?

And what about museum statistics, like the Indianapolis Museum is offering on their Dashboard ?

I once asked Director Cuno about this, and though he was quite aware of what the director of the I.M.A. had done, he had no intention of following his lead into transparency.

Hopefully Druick will have a different attitude.

And why does the interactive blog have to be juvenile? Why can't it offer serious discussions like this one instead of idiotic posts like this one ?