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Carnegie International: Historical Perspective
Sunday, October 31, 1999 By Donald Miller, Post-Gazette Senior Editor
Hindsight is delicious. A look back at the 103-year history of the Carnegie International offers a vast display of ups, downs and personalities. No one could have predicted them.
Certainly not Andrew Carnegie, founder of Carnegie Institute. His aesthetic taste was of the plush club room. His belief in an improving world was shattered by his erstwhile hero, Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose papers were exhibited at the institute long before World War I.
But the crafty philanthropist, in suggesting the Internationals, began a fascinating saga of art and social history. Six Carnegie art directors and six curators have guided this Pittsburgh and world event through many changes, stylistic and otherwise.
The primary objective of the International has always been to provide artistic enlightenment for the Pittsburgh public. Beyond that, it's been a wonderful mechanism by which the museum has acquired works that would become future masterpieces. The world and art were much more stable when Carnegie suggested this idea. But it soon became apparent that one person's masterpiece could be another's poison. Time's passage and new generations also upset what appeared unassailable.
And it could happen again. Choosing future masterpieces is never easy; even less so now.
The International's greatest accomplishment has been to focus attention on today's art through 53 major exhibitions since 1896.
Imagine the staggering amount of energy, imagination and cold hard cash the effort has cost the Institute and donors.
And there has always been a nagging question: Is the International the best thing for the museum and the public? Internationals have siphoned off money that could have enriched the museum's permanent collection.
But some major works could not have come to the museum otherwise, since getting into an artist's studio early usually means a better price for the buyer. The Internationals also have long focused attention on this city, making the Prix Carnegie famous in art circles around the world.
Even indirectly the Internationals have had impact. They grandfathered this country's greatest coup for contemporary art. Sewickley-born John Walker, who grew up on Internationals (and was later director of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), and his New York friend Lincoln Kirstein spawned an audacious idea in the late 1920s. They borrowed Renoirs and Picassos from Kirstein's wealthy New York contacts for their student-run gallery at Harvard University. This led Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (Mrs. John D. Jr.) to say, "Shouldn't we be doing that in New York?"
What they did was create The Museum of Modern Art, prime presenter of the new art in 1929. But MoMA's mission was different from the Carnegie, where the approach was not catalytic but gentlemanly. It asked the public to make its own decisions. Only a 1950s director, Gordon Bailey Washburn (1904-83), would have been as inclined as MoMA, but by then it was too late, and stodgy Carnegie trustees would never have allowed it.
The Internationals were not the first such exhibitions; the quite different Venice Biennale began a year earlier. But today, as Madeleine Grynsztejn, Carnegie curator of contemporary art and selector of the 1999 International, has found, instead of the International losing its purpose, as once thought, it is a respected model for some 20 similar exhibitions around the world. The Internationals are about art, while some others are partly or mostly nationalistic.
From the beginning, the Internationals have reflected their directors' styles. Andrew Carnegie first chose Pittsburgh realist painter and friend John W. Beatty to head the institute's department of fine art. There was considerable fumbling about as the young department assembled workable ways to select not only art but juries.
Throughout most of the show's history, celebrated American and foreign artists were jurors. Among them: Winslow Homer, Cecilia Beaux, John LaFarge, William Merritt Chase, J. Alden Weir, Childe Hassam, John White Alexander, Henri Le Sidaner, Robert Henri, Maurice Denis, George Bellows, Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Ben Shahn, Marcel Duchamp, Louise Nevelson and MoMA director Alfred H. Barr Jr.
Pittsburgh artists appeared in earlier years. In 1952, abstractionist Samuel Rosenberg was probably the last to be invited -- by Washburn, who purchased Rosenberg's "Time Echoes."
The Internationals, at first annual events, consisted of hundreds of paintings; the largest, in 1931, had a whopping 496. For years, works arrived from rail yards in horse-drawn wagons. They came to the institute's rear court via a street that disappeared with the Scaife Gallery addition in 1974.
Suspended during World War I, the shows soon took on a certain routine when presented from 1922-50 by Homer Saint-Gaudens, onetime stage manager for actress Maude Adams and later a journalist. His art claims were that his father was famed sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, his mother a cousin of Winslow Homer and he had known many important artists since his childhood.
According to the 1996 book "International Encounters: The Carnegie International and Contemporary Art, 1896-1996" -- edited for the Carnegie by Vicky A. Clark, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts curator -- Saint-Gaudens enjoyed more than anyone the task of selecting art abroad. Although wedded by his history to the traditional, he made an effort to exhibit what he called "advanced art" (as in avant-garde) and arranged paintings under signs of their nationality.
Saint-Gaudens spread the International's fame, garnering newspaper stories when he discussed inviting Italian artists with Benito Mussolini. And when Carnegie board member Andrew W. Mellon was U.S. Treasury secretary, presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover attended preview dinners.
In an effort for modernism, Saint-Gaudens invited Henri Matisse to be a juror in 1930 -- and Pablo Picasso, Matisse's friendly competitor, won a prize (his only one here) for a portrait of his wife.
The museum has often been criticized for ignoring the early modernists. But few museums in this country or Europe were interested in cubism or later styles until the 1930s. Sir Kenneth Clark, late director of Britain's National Gallery of Art, didn't see his first Matisse print until 1926 in a London bookstore.
During Matisse's visit, the museum asked late Pittsburgh artist/teacher Mary Shaw Mahronic to drive the artist around town in her open car. She took him to Mount Washington for the view on an overcast day. Although he spoke only French and she didn't, she was nonetheless thrilled and often recounted the experience. During the trip, Matisse visited the Barnes Foundation, near Philadelphia, to prepare for his now-well-known mural there.
That view was challenged by Washburn, Saint-Gaudens' successor. He was former director of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum and before that Buffalo's Albright (now Albright-Knox) Art Gallery. Harvard-educated Washburn, a new champion of post-World War II abstraction, headed a 13-part national television series on modern and contemporary art in 1956.
His Internationals became strongly nonobjective as he dropped nationality labels and added contemporary sculpture. The shows were flooded with abstraction in the style of the time. One year, Andrew Wyeth's "Brown Swiss," a now famous landscape of Karl Kuerner's barn, was the show's only realist painting. But reined in on his European art search, Washburn was ordered by Carnegie Institute president James M. Bovard not to include "that communist" -- Picasso.
With abstract expressionism's heyday in the 1950s, Washburn finally pushed the Carnegie's trustees too far. With little Asian art background, he soon found himself director of the small but choice Asia House Gallery, New York, backed by the Laurence Rockefellers, ending his role in contemporary art.
Elegant and charming, Washburn installed striking exhibitions here. His fans were charmed, and some began collecting abstract art. The museum also received major gifts from Pittsburgh collector G. David Thompson. Among the many: Willem de Kooning's "Woman VI" and Henry Moore's bronze "Reclining Figure."
Washburn also increased museum holdings with Alberto Giacometti's "Man Walking," Franz Kline's "Siegfried" and Jacques Villon's "Portrait of the Artist," all coming from Internationals. Next here was Gustave von Groschwitz, former print curator and chief curator at the Cincinnati Museum of Art, where he had mounted six international biennials of lithography. A quiet man with degrees from Columbia University and Institute of Fine Arts, New York, he organized the 1964 and '67 Internationals with seven European correspondents he called informal co-jurors.
His shows were a mixed blend of abstract expressionism and its antitheses, op and pop art. "Von" also dealt with many artists in the 1960s who scorned or rejected prizes as a protest of art-world practices. Sculptor David Smith turned aside a third prize, which also was an ego thing; he might have taken first prize. But Von and the Carnegie twice offered equal awards to 12 artists.
Among his still-important International acquisitions were Jean Arp's "Sculpture Classique," Antonio Saura's "Imaginary Portrait of Goya," Pierre Soulages' "24 November '63" and Victor Vasarely's "Alom."
Deeply involved in Scaife Gallery construction, Arkus rejected scouring the art world and won board permission to select the first of two "Pittsburgh International Series" in 1977. He invited Belgian Cobra Group expressionist Pierre Alechinsky to exhibit 134 mostly large works, filling galleries with bright semiabstract dragons and volcanoes. It was, simply put, too much Alechinsky.
Although the series, in 1979, united Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida and Dutch-American abstractionist De Kooning, it ultimately lacked the excitement of regular Internationals.
John R. Lane, assistant director of curatorial affairs at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, impressed trustees with his Harvard arts doctorate and a master's degree in business. He succeeded Arkus, who retired in June 1980. The museum soon revived the renamed Carnegie International and established an endowment fund from assets of the A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust. Paul Mellon ended the trust after 50 years of giving, and other foundations took on the trust's role.
Lane made his former teacher and mentor Gene Baro, a former director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Carnegie's adjunct curator of contemporary art. Traveling for two years, Baro in 1982 made the selections for the Carnegie's most critically condemned International. He emphasized lesser names: 189 works by 63 artists from 27 countries.
The day after the preview, national critics, gathered in the lecture hall as an invited panel, condemned Baro's effort. (His catalog essay, incidentally, was a diatribe against critics.) Carnegie women volunteers swayed in their seats like wind-blown wheat when Newsweek's Peter Plagens charged, "This is a bad show, a very bad show." Moderator Hilton Kramer calmly concurred with the other panelists. A general complaint: If the International was showing work similar to that of better-known artists, why not show them?
Baro, who had carte blanche from Lane, had picked a disaster. Lane, in the audience that day, held his hands to his head in anguish. Sadly, Baro died a few weeks later.
Lane, who had done his Ph.D. on Stuart Davis, boned up on newer art and organized the 1985 International with John Caldwell, new contemporary curator. They concentrated on short-lived neoexpressionism. This angry style, with nuclear holocaust as one of its themes, died in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its world threat.
Caldwell went it alone in 1988, selecting 114 works and combining veteran modernist masters with newer ones. A multiple stone sculpture by the late Joseph Beuys appeared in a gallery with large self-photo-derived portraits by Andy Warhol, who had died in 1987. German sculptor Rebecca Horne won the 1988 Carnegie Prize. Soon Caldwell was hunting a site for The Andy Warhol Museum.
Jack Lane left the Carnegie to build the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and wooed Caldwell there. The Carnegie, after a long hunt, chose its acting director Phillip M. Johnston, a decorative arts curator, as head. He now heads the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, as Washburn once did.
The museum then hired Briton Mark Francis, one of seven curators of "Magicians of the Earth," a survey of Third World contemporary art at Paris' Centre Georges Pompidou. Francis, as contemporary art curator, also prepared and briefly directed the Warhol Museum before becoming its curator. He came to Pittsburgh because of the Warhol, he later said.
For the 1991 International, Francis brought in Lynne Cooke, an Australian art writer in London, now curator of Dia Center of the Arts in New York.
They chose 219 works and asked artists to use the museum and Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh as resources. It was a different International. One artist stunk up the library by plopping pulped books on shelves. Others did several site-specific installations in the city. They included the grassy island in front of Fifth Avenue Place, Downtown, where a row of arborvitae trees and a small steel table meant to mirror Fifth Avenue Place on its watery top still survive but are rarely thought of as environmental art.
Also that year, inspiring words appeared on the windows of Duquesne University's Mellon Hall of Science. And Christian Boltanski in "The Archives of the Carnegie International, 1896-1991" offered metal shelving in the Mattress Factory, North Side, where hundreds of cardboard boxes carried names of artists associated with the Carnegie.
Finally, a burned-out house near the Mattress Factory became a show hit after Ohio sculptor Ann Hamilton set up melting wax candles and 36 free-flying canaries there. Ignoring protests of bird abuse, the canaries multiplied. But Japanese artist On Kawara won the Carnegie Prize for a series of small black paintings carrying the dates on which each was done in white paint. They ringed the Hall of Sculpture mezzanine. Some thought it boring.
For instance, Colombian sculptor Doris Salceda's old worn furniture filled with cast concrete and bits of cloth was not meant to be aesthetic -- it was a memorial to countrymen kidnapped, killed and secretly buried by drug lords. Her tribute was different from other art -- as was that of Thai/New York artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who served rice to visitors under the Scaife staircase.
For many decades, the Internationals were the Carnegie Museum of Art. And even Homer Saint-Gaudens, who enjoyed long annual forays abroad, thought they took too much money away from the Carnegie's collection. Although Internationals are more expensive than ever, they no longer consume the museum calendar. Director Armstrong wants the Internationals to be permanently endowed. That way they can continue while the museum concentrates on other exhibitions.
As we await contemporary curator Madeleine Grynsztejn's 53rd International -- which she has promised will be viewer-approachable -- we can only hope for the best. So far it's been a stimulating tradition.
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How conservative was the museum? Thomas Eakins, now regarded as the greatest American artist, was a juror five times between 1899-1905, but paintings like "The Gross Clinic," depicting an operation/lecture and Eakins' masterpiece, were thought too strong for the public. But in 1907 his "Portrait of Prof. Leslie Miller," 1901, won a medal of the second class and joined the collection.