Museum-quality art: Handle with care
Ask an art-world insider about the two Los Angeles works that recently shattered in falls from the wall at the Pompidou Center in Paris, and odds are good you'll get one of three answers:
A: This never happens. Meaning that nobody can remember a museum destroying two borrowed pieces in separate accidents during a single exhibition.
B: This happens more than people think. Meaning that museums, eager to protect their images and soothe collectors and other lenders, typically settle such problems in mutually agreed-upon silence.
C: The Pompidou Center? Again?
Since its opening in 1977, the Pompidou Center's Musee National d'Art Moderne has been counted among the world's most admired and most visible museums of contemporary art, beginning with its startling Paris building, its outside walls industrially festooned with ducts and fixtures.
But in some circles, the institution has also acquired a reputation as a place where bad things sometimes happen to borrowed art.
"I've worked with a lot of museums in my life, and this was probably the worst experience I've had," said artist Doug Wheeler, who was invited to join the museum's "Los Angeles 1955-1985" show. After visiting and talking with staff, he pulled out.
"We were warned, 'You have to be very careful with them,' " said Chris Churchill, director of the Franklin Parrasch Gallery in New York, which loaned one of the works ruined. "I have never heard so many people come out and say, 'They're bad news,' about any other institution
"It's no secret in the museum business that handling can be very sketchy at Pompidou," said John Walsh, director emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. But amid the proliferation of traveling shows in recent years, Walsh added, "it's a statistical certainty that these incidents are going to happen somewhere, when we have at any given time thousands of works of art on airplanes and trucks all over the world, being handled by staffs we don't know."
Until last week, there were few public facts available to support such criticism. But the Pompidou has had high-profile troubles with artworks of its own in the last two years.
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Damage done
On Jan. 4, a 77-year-old performance artist entered the museum's galleries and attacked artist Marcel Duchamp's famed porcelain urinal with a hammer. In early 2004, the museum's 1924 Pablo Picasso painting "Nature Morte a la Charlotte" was stolen from a warehouse where it was awaiting restoration. (It was recovered the following year.)
