LACMA ACQUIRES A KIENHOLZ; HEAD OF NORWAY’S NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ART STEPS DOWN
This year, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s efforts increased to buy Ed Kienholz’s The Illegal Operation, an evocation of backstreet abortion, fund-raisers had reason to worry. So it came as quite a surprise when the mission was recently accomplished without ruffling feathers. Suzanne Muchnic reports in the Los Angeles Times that, though the museum won’t disclose how much it paid, sources close to the fund-raising effort say the price was about one million dollars. A coalition of sixteen donors provided funds to buy it from its longtime Los Angeles owner, the Betty and Monte Factor Collection. The new acquisition will go on view in February at LACMA, after returning from an exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The 1962 tableau is a down-and-dirty disaster scene, laid out on a tatty old knotted rug. A floor lamp, with its shade askew, blazes over a metal shopping cart rejiggered into an operating table. A sack of oozing concrete sits on the table, like a lifeless body, above a bedpan littered with rusty medical instruments. Off to the side are a slop bucket, a cooking pot, and a little red stool. “This was one of the most important postwar sculptures in LA, and it really belonged at the museum,” said Stephanie Barron, LACMA’s senior curator of modern art, who led the campaign with Henry T. Hopkins, a veteran museum director and UCLA professor emeritus with close ties to the artist. “It still has the same ability to make us uncomfortable as it did when it was created. It’s hard to think of works of art that continue to deliver that wallop.”
In other news, the head of Norway’s National Museum for Art, Architecture, and Design, Allis Helleland, has announced that she is stepping down, less than a year after she arrived, reports the Norway Post. This follows a long conflict between the museum leadership and the staff. The controversy between the Danish Helleland and the staff began shortly after she arrived in the fall of 2007, when she decided to purchase certain works of art against the advice of the museum’s own experts. She has also been criticized for not allowing her own staff members to speak to the press. Helleland, an art historian, has held various posts at Danish museums for the past twenty years, including at the National Art Museum in Copenhagen since 1994.
