by Jon Lackman | 21 November 2008 | Modern, Museums
From Bloomberg News critic Jorg von Uthmann:
Why do people become painters? In two out of three cases, suspected the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, to overcompensate for a congenital sight defect. That’s hard to prove. Yet there is no doubt that Claude Monet had serious eye problems in the last two decades of his life. The Musee Marmottan in Paris, which has the world’s largest collection of his paintings, is raising the question: To what extent did those troubles shape his late work? … With the help of computer simulations, the show aims to demonstrate what the artist actually saw when he painted in his garden. You can also read the correspondence with his doctors and examine the yellow glasses he had to wear after the operation, the first of three … When London’s Royal Academy presented Monet’s late work in 1999, more than 800,000 visitors paid respects to the Grand Old Man of French painting who could do no wrong. The show at the Musee Marmottan has the courage to deflate the hype. Comparing its 1918-19 versions of the Japanese bridge at Giverny, an appalling brew of nightmarish colors, with their wonderful 1899 predecessor, a loan from the Musee d’Orsay, you don’t doubt for a second that what you see is a case for the ophthalmologist, not an artistic decision.
by Jon Lackman | 18 November 2008 | Modern
From the Baltimore Sun:
Before she passed away Saturday after a long illness, Grace Hartigan was adamant, even imperious about the arrangements for how she would be memorialized. And she will get her way, as Hartigan, a seminal figure in the U.S. art world and a longtime Baltimore resident, usually did. “There will be no memorial service. She said that her memorial should be more about her body of work than about her physical body. She’s always felt that way,” says Rex Stevens, chairman of the drawing and general fine arts department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. The 86-year-old painter will be cremated, he said.
From the New York Observer:
The Baltimore Sun reports that Grace Hartigan, the second-generation Abstract Expressionist and one-time New York painter, has died. Hartigan was 86. She was one of the last members of the hardboiled and cigarette-lean generation of American artists that followed Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The Sun bit is touchingly hometown. The story focuses on Hartigan’s role at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where the artist taught from the mid-60s onward. It is also worth remembering, farther back, that Hartigan was once the pre-eminent woman painter in New York of the 1950s–at a time when the art world numbered no more than several hundred artists, dealers, collections, (imperial) critics and very few women … For one last tribute to Hartigan, go out to Green River Cemetery, Long Island, and seek out the grave of the poet Frank O’Hara. Prepare to make a rubbing. For sometime in the 50s, Hartigan became friends with O’Hara, and her name may or may not be inscribed on the poet’s tombstone: ‘Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible.”
by Jon Lackman | 14 November 2008 | Uncategorized
In a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, Laurie Fendrich writes:
… I stopped by the Met last week (as I’ve said, the pleasure of $60 Met membership is that you can do drop-ins) to check out the current Morandi exhibition, up through December 14th.
I’m happy to report that Morandi is still great. Go see his paintings if you’re in New York over the holidays.
But I’m sorry to report that when looking at these Morandis, you have the right to know something that I found out only about five years ago — something that won’t be found on any of the wall plaques at the Met. Morandi was a fascist sympathizer. He’s on record expressing his delight that Il Duce himself purchased a painting, and he noted that his great faith in fascism “from the outset” stayed with him “even in the darkest and stormiest of days.”
I leave it to scholars to document the extent to which Morandi was a fascist (was he “merely” a sympathizer?), but it’s interesting that artists, unlike writers, always get a free ride when it comes to moral condemnation for bad behavior. No art historian I’ve encountered seems to give a damn that Caravaggio killed a man. In fact, they’ve always seemed to relish the delight in surprising their audience with this fact.
by Jon Lackman | 13 November 2008 | Modern, Museums
It’s caviar for modern art skeptics: Tate Modern hung Rothkos on their side and it made so little difference that barely anyone noticed. The truth of the matter is a bit more complex. From The Times of London:
Curators of the blockbuster Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern in London have displayed two of the artist’s best known works on their side, contrary to Rothko’s original intentions … Rothko outlined his request in a series of discussions with Norman Reid, then director of the Tate, before the paintings first went on display in 1970 … Although Reid followed Rothko’s instructions in 1970, he changed his mind nine years later after taking advice from a colleague and displayed the two paintings with the stripes running vertically. In 1987, the works were returned to their horizontal hang for a special Rothko exhibition. The catalogue at the time stated that the artist’s signature on the back of the canvasses indicated that this was the correct position. However, when the paintings were moved to the Rothko Room at the Tate Modern in 2000, they were once again shown on a vertical axis … Rothko is not the first artist who may have suffered the ignominy of having his work displayed the wrong way up. A painting by Vincent van Gogh called Long Grass with Butterflies briefly hung upside down in the National Gallery in 1965 before the mistake was spotted by a schoolgirl.
by Jon Lackman | 10 November 2008 | Photography
An article in Le Temps recounts the controversy that ensued in 1994 when Time darkened a photograph of O.J. Simpson for its cover. Then it writes:
Fourteen years later, it’s impossible not to notice how scrupulous such magazines have been to present Barack Obama favorably, taking care to neither darken nor lighten overmuch the skin of a hero who himself defines himself as mixed-race or “postracial.” Despite progress in imaging technology, find the right tone remains an arduous task … [And] it’s not just about finding the exact skin tone. The way we look at black skin has also changed, remarks Nathalie Herschdorfer, associate curator at the Musée de l’Elysée: “We’re much more open today to different types of skin and beauty. That’s not to say intolerance has disappeared … [But] the image has played an important role in [creating] greater acceptance of differences.” Photography in particular. It long stereotyped the black man … [but] the natural elegance of Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela and Kofi Annan has been magnified by images … “At the end of the day, their skin is very photographic,” confirms [artist] Valérie Belin. “It has granular surfaces that sparkle and shimmer. It catches light well. It also underscores the importance of skin as an interface between inside and outside, as a surface that carries meaning, the past, personality, and self-image.”
(via ARHV)
by Jon Lackman | 6 November 2008 | Uncategorized
Perhaps now is a good time to start analyzing art related to Barack Obama.
by Jon Lackman | 5 November 2008 | Architecture, Theory
In caa.reviews, Oleg Grabar considers “the unease most of us feel about traditional categories like Islamic and medieval, which are still the categories in which the field of art history is divided. We can probably agree that national labels are inadequate or misleading when dealing with the past, even though they are essential in identifying “national” museums or in fostering pride and knowledge of one’s heritage. These are all matters that need discussion, preferably not an acrimonious one.”
These meditations arise in Grabar’s review of History and Ideology: Architectural Heritage of the “Lands of Rum,” edited by Sibel Bozdoğan and Gülru Necipoğlu:
This is a remarkable volume and of considerable significance to art historians and university administrators … that may well require all historians of art to redefine the traditional time-and-space dimensions of the ways of knowledge in the field and, by extension, the structure of departments … it presents its traditional scholarly pursuits within a different framework from the usual one of an “Islamic” architecture. It argues that the adjective “Islamic” is not appropriate for the arts and cultures of many different places and times, and that it was imposed, or at least propelled, by the “bad” Orientalism, the one that implied Western domination and that must be differentiated from the “good” Orientalism based on a careful knowledge of languages and of history. This volume also rejects as inappropriate to the past the nation-centered identifications and labels that have become so important in the contemporary world, most particularly in Turkey and Iran. It proposes to identify a region—Anatolia and the Balkans—that cannot be identified in national or religious terms, at least not until the early twentieth century, and to argue that this region has its own conception of architecture, at times its own forms, but mostly a way with forms that distinguishes it from surrounding areas and from the broad culture with which it is usually put … An educational program is implicit in the arguments of this volume, a program that will take time to set up and energy to continue. Education and research are activities for which art historians are, or should be, prepared. The more difficult issue is an administrative one. Is there much point in continuing this debate unless one knows that the leadership of universities, museums, and schools of art and architecture understand the nature of the problems and their importance at a time of academic globalization?
by Jon Lackman | 4 November 2008 | Photography
Rémi Coignet, who blogs about photography and books for Le Monde, recently reviewed Playboy: Posters, La collection complète, which is a kind of catalogue raisonné comprising all the hundreds of centerfolds the magazine has published since 1953:
Flipping through the work, you get an impression of great repetition, an impression confirmed by a quick tally of the images’ principal characteristic elements. In decreasing order by frequency:
on a couch: 63 times
on a bed: 55
in nature: 46
in a bathroom: 28
sports: 26
opening a door, curtain or window: 20
fireplace: 15
pool: 14
car or motorcycle: 13
on a staircase: 13
black woman: 9
animal skins: 5 [...]The domestic sphere is the principal playing field of the Playmate. More than half of the images take place in very traditional bourgeois interiors with satin sheets, wood paneling, or heavy curtains. Therein resides one of the paradoxes of Playboy — promoting a traditional vision of the woman in the home, while producing (mildly) transgressive images. Nature scenes rank second, statistically speaking. They generally feature a nature that is peaceful (fine sand, snow-covered landscape) or domesticated (romantic gardens). Sport also forms an important group (more than 40 sports or pool scenes). Let’s note that this type of image takes off in the 1980s … Playing sports suggests an active woman … this vision is the opposite of the Playboy aesthetic … you never see her “in the middle of” (doing dishes, trimming roses, reading, or working). Contrary to the Deleuzian desiring machine, her body is a machine to be desired … In 54 years, just 13 cars or motorcycles, 3 telephones, as many computers, 2 items of modern furniture, and an office scene. The playmate is not modern.
(via ARHV)
by Jon Lackman | 31 October 2008 | Uncategorized
From CAA News:
CAA warmly thanks the 831 participants in a recent email survey, which was sent to 8,300 members whose database records indicate that their primary profession is: art/architectural historian, artist, administrator, curator, art-museum educator, or librarian. The survey contained one open-ended question: “What are the most pressing issues you face in your profession?”
455 art/architectural historians responded to the question. CAA divides their answers into 10 categories, but they could arguably be boiled down to just two:
- “I deserve more money and/or fame” (91% of respondents)
- “We should do better work” (9%)
The latter 9% reported concern for the “Viability, credibility, and relevance of art history to other disciplines” or “Issues regarding resources and attention devoted to historical art vs. contemporary art; Western vs. non-Western art; national vs. global; traditional curriculum, research, and pedagogy vs. interdisciplinary curriculum, research, and pedagogy.” Which might sometimes just be another way of saying “I want more money and/or fame.”
Of course, the 91% raise valid issues, issues that can and do affect the intellectual quality and composition of the field. Nonetheless, it’s striking how much more highly people rank their economic concerns over their intellectual ones.
(FYI: The numbers actually added up to 109% and 11%, presumably because some people gave multiple answers, so I adjusted them to add up to 100%.)
Here’s CAA’s categorization of the complaints:
- 33% – Decrease in positions; increase in PhDs; reduction of tenured positions and increase in part-time and adjunct positions
- 17% – Difficulty finding publishers; insufficient number of art journals; decrease in presses publishing art history; tenure requirement for monographs vs. few presses publishing monographs
- 16% – Limited research funds and high cost of travel
- 13% – Work load vs. keeping up with the field and quality of life
- 11% – High cost of image reproduction; copyright restrictions
- 7% – Low salaries and need for pay equity
- 7% – Issues regarding resources and attention devoted to historical art vs. contemporary art; Western vs. non-Western art; national vs. global; traditional curriculum, research, and pedagogy vs. interdisciplinary curriculum, research, and pedagogy
- 7% – New technology demands: cost, training, accessibility
- 5% – Need for American public understanding of art and combating anti-intellectualism
- 4% – Viability, credibility, and relevance of art history to other disciplines
by Jon Lackman | 29 October 2008 | Asia
“Her questionable death in federal custody means we may never know,” writes Rick Anderson in a long article in the Seattle Weekly. “The American-born, Bangkok-based museum director” died in prison of an untreated ulcer:
[A] one-paragraph document issued by a Los Angeles grand jury accuses her of aiding and abetting a scheme to defraud the IRS. It claims she allowed her electronic signature to be used on appraisal forms with inflated, tax-deductible valuations. The continuing probe, centered in Los Angeles, involves a group of antiquities dealers and wealthy donors who trade in ancient ceramics, stone, glass, and brass. Brown had cooperated with federal agents as they developed their case over five years, helping them identify suspects and providing information. Court records show she opposed removing valued objects from their homeland, and said that if her signature had shown up on fraudulent documents, it was without her knowledge … Once the government’s confidant, Brown became—and remains—the only person charged in the fraud probe.
She’d had quite a life:
[Raised] on an Illinois chicken farm … A high-school cheerleader and senior class president, she went on to study journalism at Columbia University in New York and graduate with a degree in philosophy. At 21 she rode cross-country on a motorcycle to California, from where in 1968 she headed to Australia, then to Vietnam to see her brother … Bilingual and a budding writer, Roxanna wrangled freelance reporting jobs during the Vietnam War, working at times for the Associated Press … Subsequently, she produced the first of seven books she would author or co-write, and edited an arts magazine in Hong Kong. But while living there, she became addicted to opium, and was eventually arrested, detained, and ordered to leave the country … She ended up marrying a former Buddhist monk, with whom she had a son. In 1982, when Brown was 36, she was riding her silver and red motorbike on the congested Bangkok streets when she was hit by a truck, eventually losing her leg … Roxanna’s marriage ended, but she trudged on, a one-legged single mom who, upon returning to Bangkok, ran a small bar and worked part-time as a ceramics teacher … After 2000, she returned to the U.S., where, aided by friends, she enrolled in grad school at UCLA. She left with a doctorate in 2004, at age 58, having become an expert on the recovery of ceramics from historic shipwrecks. Brown regularly produced scholarly articles on Asian plate and vase production around the 15th century, and was best known for her book The Ceramics of South-East Asia: Their Dating and Identification.
by Jon Lackman | 29 October 2008 | Journals
The journal Word & Image, edited by John Dixon Hunt, made the unusual decision to turn over its entire July-September 2008 issue to two authors, Deborah Schultz and Edward Timms, who present their joint research on “Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani,” “the findings of a three-year research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust,” which also underwrote “the cost of illustrations” for this special issue. In their introduction, the authors write:
The first volume of Word & Image featured an essay by Ernst Gombrich on ‘Image and word in twentieth-century art’ … In his introduction, Gombrich recalls the ‘ideal of purity’ that has dominated traditional approaches to the history of art, a purity that entails ‘the freedom of the image from the intrusion or indeed the contamination of words’ … Such ideas came to dominate the theory and practice of the visual arts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries … Only with regard to premodern art, untouched by the aesthetic and intellectual advances of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, did historians seriously engage with the concept of pictorial narrative. In early Christian art, it was conceded, narrative played an important role, construed primarily in didactic rather than aesthetic terms … We set out an alternative approach, presenting pictorial narrative not as a premodern resource for the simple-minded, but as an art of crisis that can be correlated with periods of ideological upheaval. Purity of form and harmony of perspective lend themselves to the portrayal of a hierarchical society and an ordered universe. But hybridity, the aesthetically impure mixing of media, reflects the breakdown of established authority and the implosion for new meanings.
by Jon Lackman | 27 October 2008 | Theory
In the October 2008 issue of Frieze, James Elkins has published “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Across the top half of each page runs one narrative, “Five reasons to be pessimistic about the art world”; across the bottom half runs a counter-narrative (printed upside down), “Five reasons to be optimistic about the art world.” The first page reads:
Visual studies has stalled. The field, which emerged in the early 1990s, had great potential: it promised to be the place where you could study images of all sorts, outside of fine art. The allegedly moribund field of art history was to be critiqued, and a new interdisciplinary space was to be opened between art history, anthropology, film studies, media studies, literary criticism, philosophy, anthropology and performance. Visual studies was to be trans-disciplinary, non-disciplinary, sub-disciplinary. It was to be the place where television, film, video, advertising and photography could be analyzed together, where Erwin Panofsky, George Kubler, Meyer Schapiro and Ernst Gombrich would give way to Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. Visual studies was to provide serious political critique, an analysis of the operator, a renewed interest in the gaze, a rethinking of post-colonial theory, a genuinely international scope, a reach beyond the art world and beyond the narrow precincts of the humanities. But that promise has been dissipated, and the field remains a collage of special-interest studies that fail to cohere into a larger project or extend beyond the familiar confines of fine art and mass media.
[upside down] Visual studies is triumphing. Visual studies is spreading around the world, with new programmes opening in Central and South America, South-East Asia, China, Eastern Europe and South Africa. There is evidence, from student enrolment, that visual studies is overtaking art history, and it is possible that visual studies may absorb and transform art history in the coming decades. Visual studies emphasis on agency and visuality, as opposed to visual objects, is a transformative re-reading of art history. It is genuinely trans-disciplinary, and if it doesn’t cohere, that is simply a sign of strength. Visual studies is open to film and media studies, visual anthropology, sociology, economics and other fields, and it has the capacity to become a unifying force in university life, bringing together people from various disciplines with a general interest in visuality. The diversity of journals that are concerned with visual studies – from the Journal of Visual Studies to Critical Inquiry – shows the strength of the subject. It would be difficult to point a field in the humanities that is growing more quickly or generating more interest.
In his conclusion, Elkins writes:
I put the optimistic [arguments] after the pessimistic ones so that the piece ends on a positive note, and also to create a little puzzle. I think that if you read the piece straight through, it appears that the optimistic arguments answer the pessimistic ones, but actually they don’t. The pessimistic arguments answer the optimistic arguments, and in fact the optimistic arguments are arranged so they misunderstand the pessimistic ones.
by Jon Lackman | 23 October 2008 | Uncategorized
As we’ve noted, art historian bloggers are few and far between. And it would appear that one of the few good ones we had is no longer — anybody know if David Packwood has decided to give up on Art History Today for good? I’m still getting a “Blog has been removed” message.
by Jon Lackman | 23 October 2008 | Uncategorized
From the L.A. Times:
Albert Boime, an art historian, educator and author who evaluated art in its social and political context for new insights into French Neo-Classicism, Impressionism and other prominent art movements of the last 250 years, has died. He was 75. Boime, a faculty member at UCLA for more than 30 years … first captured wide attention with his 1971 book, “The Academy and French Painting in the 19th Century.” In it he explored French Impressionism in relation to the neo-classical painting style that the Impressionists broke from. Many art historians had dismissed classical realist painting as irrelevant to the new movement … Boime was born March 17, 1933, in St. Louis and earned his doctorate at Columbia University.
by Jon Lackman | 22 October 2008 | Architecture, Theory
In the summer 2008 issue of Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, Pierre Chabard reviews Felicity D. Scott’s Architecture or Techno-Utopia. Politics after Modernism:
Architecture or Techno-Utopia, presented as an “alternative genealogy of the postmodern turn in American architecture,” could appear at first glance to be a pure product of the powerful university machine of the U.S. east coast … Of Australian origin, [Scott] graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and in 2001 defended her thesis in the doctoral program of Princeton University’s architecture department. Founded by [Anthony] Vidler in the early 1980s and directed today by [Beatriz] Colomina, this doctoral program – where Alan Colquhoun, Mark Wigley, Georges Teyssot, and Alexandra Ponte, among others, teach or have taught – constitutes one of the most intense American centers of historical research into twentieth-century architecture – history that is enthusiastically cross-cutting, culturalist, and nourished by Kritische Theorie and French Theory.
However, with her already rich work, this young and brilliant historian, who has been teaching at Columbia since 2007, resolutely contradicts any prejudices one could harbor in light of such a pedigree. Her originality permits her to escape the intellectual comfort (and even conformism) that is sometimes the fruit of this scientific doxa, to instead draw from its better half …
Scott has made the choice to break with the readings that reduce this period [c. 1970] to a dialectic between modernisms and postmodernisms … Scott intends to reveals other types of cleavage, other lines of fracture, in particular between architecture and Techno-Utopia … she opposes the nostalgic proponents for the discipline’s autonomy with those optimistically favoring its dissolving into new mechanistic regimes …
[The book] systematically integrates a parameter often absent from architectural histories – the inscription of architects in their social, cultural and political contexts. Closer to cultural studies (and sometimes abusing the prefix “post” – “postrevolutionary,” “postsemantic,” “postnational,” “postutopian,” “postcritical,” “postpolitical,” “postdisciplinary,” etc.) than the marxist readings of the previous generation, this interest in context can also be found at the heart of Grey Room, the journal … that Scott co-founded in 2000 and codirects … such an approach undeniably enriches, nuances and renews the historical comprehension of the architectural facts of this period.
by Jon Lackman | 21 October 2008 | Asia
In her introduction to the recently published conference volume Asian Art History in the Twenty-First Century, Asia Society director Vishaka Desai writes:
More than a century ago, great luminaries of Asian art Ernest Fenollosa, Okakura Kakuzō, and Ananda Coomaraswamy … began to argue for the rightful place of Asian art in the field of art history … None of them focused on the emerging art practices in Asia that looked to the West for inspiration. In fact, they decidedly derided such efforts as impure and not reflecting the “true” essence of arts of Asia …
[Today] Not only is Asian contemporary art taking center stage in terms of museum acquisitions and as a preferred field of inquiry for many incoming graduate students; the spiritual or unique contrasting qualities of Asian art, so prized by our early predecessors, are now of lesser interest …
At the end of a full day of presentations and talk … A number of us were struck by the fact that much of the intellectual energy now focused on the study of contemporary art … for the first time I felt the need to make a case for the study of traditional, premodern arts of Asia.
by Jon Lackman | 16 October 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
From Smithsonian:
… despite his artistic stature, Bernini is only now receiving his first major American exhibition—at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (through October 26) and then at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (November 28, 2008-March 8, 2009). One explanation for the oversight is obvious, says Catherine Hess, associate curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the Getty and a co-curator of the exhibition. “How do you move Piazza San Pietro?” Like that grand piazza, which Bernini designed in front of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, the enormous marble sculptures for which the artist is best known are for all practical purposes untransportable. What does that leave? As it happens, a significant body of work: especially the portrait busts, a genre in which the young Bernini demonstrated that he was head and shoulders above the competition. “All the things that make Bernini great can be found in his portrait busts,” says Hess.
By mid-career, as he became busier with large-scale ventures, Bernini did fewer busts—”only popes and kings, people you couldn’t say no to,” says exhibition co-curator Andrea Bacchi, professor at the University of Trento in Italy. But Bacchi believes one reason that the sculptor stopped doing busts after he got successful is that he valued them too highly to allow his assistants to take over the carving. By focusing this exhibition on portrait busts—including rare Italian loans that come as implicit thanks for the Getty’s agreement last year to return some 40 antiquities said to have been excavated and exported illegally—the curators present a Bernini retrospective that is both intimate and revealing.
(via 3 Quarks Daily.)
by Jon Lackman | 14 October 2008 | Uncategorized
… that in 2000 USC art historian Richard Meyer “was sent by the U.S. Department of State to Kazakhstan to conduct a series of lectures and seminars about Warhol and contemporary art in the United States.”
by Jon Lackman | 14 October 2008 | Uncategorized
More here.
by Jon Lackman | 10 October 2008 | Museums
Vanity Fair has excerpted a new book Mona Lisa in Camelot, by Margaret Leslie Davis. When France agreed in 1962 to lend the Mona Lisa to America, art officials on both shores opposed the idea:
The treatment and care of old-master paintings was [National Gallery of Art director John] Walker’s specialty, and he believed extremely fragile works of art should never move needlessly from continent to continent. The Mona Lisa was no exception … Walker attempted to make it clear that he would not support the plan. He favored museum stipulations that forbade the lending of certain artworks. Even a layperson had to acknowledge that a 450-year-old picture painted on wood could not travel thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean at the depth of winter without risk of damage …
Meanwhile, in Paris … Madame Madeleine Hours, head of the Louvre’s prestigious museum laboratory … had practically lived with the masterpiece, constantly checking the small picture like a mother hen. Madame Hours felt the idea of shipping the painting to America was extremely foolish. “I had had many opportunities to see how fragile and how sensitive to differences in temperature the painting was,” she said … Madame Hours prepared a report anticipating the worst possible harm that could come to the masterpiece were it allowed to travel. She felt certain that her alarming conclusions would discourage the authorities, but her report accomplished the exact opposite. Malraux dismissed the concerns as exaggerated and announced his decision that the exhibition would proceed as planned.
The loan proceeded.
