Off the Wall: White House Drops Painting - ArtsBeat Blog - NYTimes.com

by By Randy Kennedy

“But through copying Matisse,” Mr. Cotter added, “she began to work out a format she would use again and again.”

Some conservative Web sites, like Freerepublic.com , had criticized the painting as a fraud, calling it a “re-colored reprint” and questioning the wisdom of hanging it in the White House. By late October, the painting, which had been destined for the East Wing, had been removed from the list of works bound for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, ARTnews reported, though a second Thomas painting from 1973 remains on the list. The Hirshhorn Museum, which owns the painting, confirmed that the 1963 work had been sent back, but no one involved with the White House loans at the museum would say why, the publication said.

Semonti Stephens, the deputy press secretary for Mrs. Obama, said that the painting had been intended to go in the first lady’s office and that the the decision not to put it there was made only because its dimensions did not work in the space in which it was to hang.

“This piece just didn’t fit right in the room,” Ms. Stephens said, adding that the first lady continues to admire the work of Alma Thomas and is happy to have one of her works in the White House. “There’s no other reason,” she said of the other painting. “It really has nothing to do with the work itself.”

Calls to the Hirshhorn Museum about the issue were not immediately returned Wednesday afternoon.

As a curator who has sometimes found that a work borrowed for a specific exhibition did not fit well when the show was actually installed, I sympathize with Michelle Obama. She is a lawyer, not an exhibition organizer, and can’t be expected to anticipate the presence a work will exert in a particular space. The picture didn’t work well in the place for which it was intended and so it wasn’t hung.

“…the work takes a Matisse collage and, as Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times, praising the selection, “shifts the pieces around…”

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