Word: museum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...American museums had to subsist on Government money like the Louvre or the National Gallery in London, all would shrink, and many of the best would never have got started. Names like Whitney, Guggenheim, Phillips, Freer and Frick attest to the role played by the private collector in creating the public institution. Today more than ever the one-person museum, named for the man or woman who assembled it and put it in its own building, is a ruling fantasy of the ambitious collector. Why settle for your name on a plaque in the Met when for a few extra...
...this year, at least three American private collections have gone public, with their own buildings and curatorial staff. One, the Menil Collection in Houston, is a triumph. The others, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington (based on a collection put together by Wilhelmina and Wallace Holladay) and the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago, are rather less than that...
...National Museum of Women in the Arts is a virtuous bore. Until ten years ago, with a few resolute exceptions like Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Cassatt and Louise Nevelson, women artists were shabbily treated by American museums and either omitted from their collections or treated as token presences. The idea that art by women was necessarily second rate lingered discreetly in some quarters through the '70s. Today it is gone, at least in America. Apart from political enlightenment, one of the things that killed it was the growth of the art market. Now that any list of collectors' favorites...
...live ill-known in a catastrophically overcrowded art world. Thus it is easy for Ms. Anybody, M.F.A., to blame the obscurity of her work on sexist machinations against her as a member of a class and plangently call for redress in quotas and affirmative action. Hence the National Museum of Women in the Arts, a grimly sentimental waste of money, an idea whose time is gone...
...American couple ever assemble a worse collection than the Holladays? Perhaps, but none that got their own museum. It is short even of major works by women whose historical significance has been admitted for decades. Its inaugural show, American Women Artists 1830-1930, consisted mainly of loans; but even so, except for some paintings by Cecilia Beaux, Romaine Brooks and, of course, O'Keeffe, it was a dull florilegium of derivative kitsch. Who would waste ten minutes on these sub-Sargent portraits, these mincing imitations of Childe Hassam, these genre scenes crawling with dimpled rosy brats, if they...