Carlos Basualdo

Alison McDonaldMuseums are critical in the preservation of artists’ legacies. What’s the most important question you think artists or estates should consider when deciding which institutions to entrust with that responsibility?

Carlos BasualdoThat’s an interesting and complex question. Often, requests being made of an institution are different coming from an artist than from an estate or foundation. And it’s certainly a different matter altogether when you’re talking to a collector. While it’s fair to say that collectors, artists, and estates typically have similar goals when it comes to the preservation of legacy, they have very different ways of thinking about what’s needed to ensure those goals.

I’ve found that the artists I’ve worked with tend to be concerned with the representative quality of the institution’s collection, how prominent the institution is in the field, and its role in the promotion of contemporary art. It’s critical to them to have an affinity with the collection and the wider programming, and it’s important to them to consider the weight their contribution will have in the context of that institution. A lot of this is very personal: it has to do with their own histories with the institution, or with their connections to people in the institution.

Foundations and estates, meanwhile, are trying to interpret the desires of the artist. In my experience, their decisions are very attuned to questions about what the institution can do moving forward. Of course, each relationship has its own concerns and nuances.

AMYes, and while nothing is going to be true for all artists, there does of course need to be a desire on the institution’s part to make a commitment. The artist has to feel that the institution wants to be a steward of their legacy.

CBYes, absolutely.

AMMost artists give to more than just one institution.

CBYes, that’s right.

AMA hometown museum could also be important because the artist’s work might stand out in a different way in that context?

CBIndeed, that’s an interesting example.

AMYou work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art [PMA]. Philadelphia is a big city and your museum has a magnificent collection, but New York has wonderful museums that must be attractive to artists who are considering gifts. How does that competition work for you?

CBVisitors and artists are often surprised by the PMA collection, not only by its quality but by its depth in certain areas. I actually feel it’s great for us to be so close to New York, because it means increased accessibility. You’re right that New York has many powerful institutions, and that the city has its own gravitational pull, but when people venture out of it they find extraordinary collections at the PMA and nearby at the Barnes Foundation. And our collection has areas of depth—certainly Marcel Duchamp is one of them—that are very attractive to artists. In fact, the [Walter and Louise] Arensberg collection, with its focus on Duchamp, attracts artists and the public from all over the world. The collection was formally given to the PMA in 1954, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg took the train down to see it here in ’57—there’s been a constant flux of people traveling from all over to see it since the early days. Anyone who feels a connection to that legacy may feel a connection to the museum. That’s an amazing opportunity for us.

New York has extraordinary institutions, but they’re bunched in a relatively small area, and a lot of distractions come with that proximity. The pressures that result may preclude the kind of attention that institutions outside New York can give to artists and their legacies. That’s definitely been the case with Duchamp. Philadelphia has the largest collection of his work anywhere, with more than 200 pieces. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has exceptional works as well, but you wouldn’t be so quick to associate it with Duchamp, right?

AMYour Duchamp collection is always on view. When Philadelphia was entrusted with that gift, was that a promise it made to the Arensbergs?

CBWhen the Arensberg collection came in, there was a disposition that it had to be on display in certain galleries for twenty-five years. After that, when the museum was able to reinstall it, Anne d’Harnoncourt, the director at the time, decided to dedicate a permanent gallery to Duchamp. But that didn’t happen until the mid-1970s.

AMBefore the Arensberg collection came to the PMA, the museum received an entire collection on loan from Albert Gallatin that later turned into a major gift. Gallatin was a prominent collector, writer, and artist in the realm of abstract art. Part of his collection was displayed at New York University [NYU] from 1927 to 1942, in a space he called the Gallery of Living Art—an important place in the history of modern art’s exposure in the United States.

CBThe PMA’s first collection of modern art came from Gallatin—or actually the second, the first being the collection of Christian Brinton, which came to the museum in 1942. In the early ’40s the trustees of NYU basically told Gallatin, “You have to take out your collection because we don’t have room for it.”

AMWasn’t it hugely inspirational to figures like Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning when it was on view at NYU?

CBIt was. But the location was small and the collection was seen as occupying space that it needed for books. We have to remember that modern art was then a new idea. In fact, Gallatin started showing his collection at NYU a couple of years before the opening of the Museum of Modern Art. Anyway, a newspaper article reported that the collection had been pushed out of NYU, and Fiske Kimball, our director at the time, got on the phone with Gallatin and took the train to New York to see him. He was able to bring it to Philadelphia, first as a loan and then ultimately as a gift.

So we had the Gallatin collection by the late ’40s, and it was Gallatin himself who prompted the museum to start pursuing Walter and Louise Arensberg. If you look at encyclopedic museums at the time, Philadelphia was an anomaly. In fact, when those collections became part of the museum, they formed an entire section called “The Museum of Modern Art of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.” So it was a museum within a museum.

AMIt seems fair to say that Gallatin’s gift helped to shape the future of the museum. In 1949, Georgia O’Keeffe chose several institutions, the PMA among them, to receive gifts of work from her late husband, Alfred Stieglitz. Please tell us more about that gift and the impact it had on shaping the museum’s photography department.

CBIndeed. I asked my colleague Peter Barberie, the Brodsky Curator of Photographs at the museum, about the impact of that gift and he responded, “Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1949 gift to PMA was foundational for our photography program. There were no other comparable gifts of photography before that time. Subsequently, the museum slowly expanded our photography holdings, adding important works by Eugène Atget and Man Ray, among others. In 1968, Dorothy Norman committed her large collection, including hundreds of prints by Stieglitz and building upon O’Keeffe’s initial gift. That year, we founded the Alfred Stieglitz Center. One more thing to say about O’Keeffe’s gift: it included most of the American artists Stieglitz had championed at his gallery, An American Place. So it opened our museum up to the importance of modern American art (until then we were much more focused on European artists).” So the gift included paintings as well as photographs. Stieglitz passed away and O’Keeffe was the sole executor of his estate. Some of her own paintings were included in the gift, along with paintings by artists such as Marsden Hartley. It was a very significant collection of modern American art.

AMIn terms of the museum, what do these gifts mean? Do you build around them or start new conversations because of them?

CBThere are gifts that are completely transformational and that open up doors for generations. And then there are gifts that allow you to build up your holdings more slowly, over time. With Anselm Kiefer, for example, we made an early show, we acquired some work, some collectors in the museum family acquired works that they later donated, and now we are fortunate to have a substantial group. Once you have that substantial group and you acknowledge it as such, it starts a whole range of different conversations.

That’s a very good case of building from strength. But at other moments you might recognize that there are certain areas you want to develop, so you try to find ways to bring specific groups of work into the museum. Anne d’Harnoncourt once called museum collections “orchestrated chaos.” You have certain attractors and the collection is built around those attractors, and around thoughtful decisions that might create new attractors.

AMWhat’s the benefit of donating groups of works, as opposed to single works? At the PMA you have quite a few rooms dedicated to only one or two artists.

CBWe talk about the artist rooms in Philadelphia as if they’ve always been there, but that’s not the case. We already discussed the Duchamp room. Then for a long time we had rooms dedicated to Constantin Brancusi and Piet Mondrian, and those two spaces created a precedent for Mark Rosenthal, the museum’s first curator of modern and contemporary art (at the time it was called the Department of Twentieth-century Art), to start thinking about creating rooms with contemporary artists. That’s how we acquired Cy Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam [1977–78]. Mark went to Cy and told him, “I want to make a room of your work,” and that was very attractive to Cy, so he facilitated that acquisition. Once there’s a room, there’s a relationship with the artist, and it’s up to the curators to maintain it. If you invest in that relationship, then the collection keeps growing. Our Jasper Johns room was created ten years after the room dedicated to Twombly’s Fifty Days. There was a relationship and a precedent, and [curator] Ann Temkin assembled an extraordinary room of Johns’s works.

AMThe PMA seems to allow these rooms to stay on view long term.

CBFifty Days at Iliam has been on view continuously since it was acquired, in 1989, except when it went to the Twombly retrospective in Paris.

AMIs that relatively common? It feels quite unique to Philadelphia that I see these rooms on every visit. The Dia Art Foundation does that, but do other museums?

CBNo, it doesn’t seem very common to me, although I’ve seen many more museums temporarily creating rooms devoted to individual artists in the last five or six years.

AMWhat was the inspiration?

CBWhen Anne d’Harnoncourt devoted a room to Duchamp in the mid-’70s, I think she was inspired by the way the artist himself thought about his work. Duchamp clearly felt his works benefited from being seen together. That’s exactly what he did in the Boîte-en-valise [1935–41], a work that’s basically a display of everything he’d made up until that point. Anne, being a Duchamp scholar, may have thought it quite natural to create an extension of the Boîte in reality. Then that logic generated more rooms. We have a room for Ellsworth Kelly, and I’m very interested in creating new rooms, with different temporalities. In some ways it’s a series of understandings and misunderstandings that generate a tradition. And then people say, “Oh, that’s always been there.” Nothing has.

AMRecently the Cy Twombly Foundation gifted you several sculptures related to the Iliam series. Are there often conversations about complementing an institution’s existing collection, or perhaps finding different works that show a more diverse side of the artist’s output?

CBYes, Anne d’Harnoncourt felt it was important that the museum acquire a sculpture by Twombly, so I asked Cy if he’d produced a sculpture with the Iliam series. He actually had; there was a sculpture in process in the studio when he was making the paintings, it’s owned by Glenstone now—almost horizontal, like a boat with a sail—but when I asked him, he said, “No, but there are works that could resonate with the paintings.” So I asked him if he would select a group of works that could be shown in dialogue with Fifty Days at Iliam. That’s how the whole thing started.

AMIn the overall context of the museum, you see so many different artists and time periods, and then when you get closer to modern and contemporary art, it feels as though you’re more immersed in the work of single artists. With an artist like Cy, that lets you see the work in a new way: if you isolated one of those paintings from the rest of the series, it would take away from what he’s trying to do in the entire body of work.

CBThat’s absolutely right. They’re meant to be seen together; in fact they’re one painting in ten parts. And going back to the question of why artists make certain decisions: the European model has been for artists to create their own museums—Pablo Picasso is a good example—so the idea of a space dedicated to one artist is very much an artist’s idea, and possibly much older than the modern period.

AMWould you say that one of the most important considerations for artists, when they’re thinking about gifts, should be to find an institution actively committed to showing their work as often as possible and as in-depth as possible?

CBYes, ultimately artists want their works to be seen by as many people as possible, and in the right context.

AMWhat about combining artworks with more archive-type gifts, such as sketches, preparatory drawings, and other studio source materials? Are museums suited to the responsibility of maintaining gifts of that type? Or is it more practical to gift those types of materials to institutions in which archives are primary?

CBThat’s an important question. Many institutions don’t have archives, or don’t have good ones. In Philadelphia we didn’t have an archivist until fifteen or twenty years ago. But when the PMA received the Arensberg collection, the gift came with all of the Arensbergs’ papers, which contain a trove of information, for example about their friend Duchamp. And that archive was increased later on, when Anne d’Harnoncourt coorganized the Duchamp retrospective in 1973. So we have one of the most important Duchamp archives, and in Duchamp’s case the archive is essential to understand the work. For conceptually based art and artists from Duchamp on, documentation becomes crucial: it tells you what role artists have in the fabrication of their work, for example, and gives you insight into what was in their minds. Some artists have actually drafted their own press releases. So an artist’s agency gets distributed beyond the objects they produce. For many artists, an archive is crucial, and curators should be as mindful about bringing archives into their institutions as about actual artworks. They also need to create a dynamic relationship between archives and displays—that’s something we need to do more and more.

That said, not all museums are prepared to maintain archives. You need to have trained staff, dedicated space, and more—it can be very expensive. And there are institutions, for example the Archives of American Art and the Getty, that have enormous archival collections and astonishing facilities.

AMGiuseppe Penone recently gifted over 300 drawings to the PMA, making it the most significant repository of his drawings in the United States. He gave a similar gift to the Pompidou, in Paris. He himself meanwhile lives and works in Italy. I’m curious how complicated it is for international gifts to come into the museum.

CBAnother good question. When we think about the art history of the last fifty years, we see extraordinary figures working not in western Europe or the United States but in other parts of the world. Someone like Hélio Oiticica, for instance—his work was for a long time preserved by his family and a few friends in an apartment in Rio de Janeiro. Then the city of Rio gave it a space, but the family and the city never truly managed to work together, and ten years or so ago there was a fire in the storage that housed his work and much of that material was tragically lost. The care of contemporary artworks and collections is expensive and demanding, and that can lead to them leaving the sites of their cultural heritage.

AMThere’s an element of security in having works distributed across multiple locations. In the long term, the work is more protected by not being all in one place. Is that connected to what you’re saying?

CBYes, it is. And when artists are thinking about the preservation of their legacy, they sometimes find that the institutions in a position to do the best job for their work are not in their home city or country.

AMForgive me if this is too sensitive or direct, but in terms of practical considerations, what legal or tax benefits are there for living artists making donations?

CBUnfortunately there are none, at least not for us, because we can only acknowledge the cost of the materials. I wish there were more of a benefit, that would be a blessing for us.

AMBut if it’s a collector making a donation—

CBThe collector gets a tax deduction, of course. That’s often a pivotal motivation for a collector’s giving, but not for an artist’s. For artists it just has to be about the preservation of their legacy.

AMHow do conversations with artists differ from conversations with collectors?

CBThey’re equally engrossing but completely different.

AMDo collectors expect an understanding of the context of their collection, or is it more about—

CBYes, their own legacy as collectors, and their association with certain artists, are often very important to them. If they give on a large enough scale, for example, their gift may be associated with the naming of a gallery, or even a wing.

AMCollectors tend to be closely affiliated with a museum over many years—these are long relationships. Is that true of artists as well?

CBWith collectors you develop a partnership over many years; with artists, on the other hand, in my experience it’s love at first sight. I would say it’s the difference between a strategic partnership and a passionate alliance. But in all cases there is a need for trust and empathy and generosity on both sides, and that needs to be very tangible.