← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
What's New at the Guggenheim
00:29:41
We speak to new Guggenheim director Mariet Westermann.
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Listener Support
Listener support WNYC Studios.
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I am really grateful you are here. There are just a couple of days left to grab tickets to our Public Song Project event at Joe's Pub. It's happening this Wednesday, January 8th at 7pm Join us to celebrate the Public Song Project album and hear performances from special guests like Joanna Sternberg and DJ Reika. There'll be music trivia prizes and kazoos. For tickets and more information, head to wnyc.org publicsong Again, that's Wednesday night, January 8th at 7pm get your tickets at wnyc.org publicsong that is in the future. Let's get this show started. Okay, the weather is cold. It is a perfect time to visit our city's museums. Today we're looking at four big shows that will energize you and intrigue you. First up is an institution that has a new leader. Since June 2024, the first woman to lead the Guggenheim foundation, director and CEO Margaret Mariette Westerman has overseen the Guggenheim in New York, Venice, Bambaoa, and the future Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi. And maybe you're thinking, okay, she must be a suit. Well, sometimes she is. But she also has a PhD in art history. She was able to put her studies to work in curating an exhibit that is now on display at the Guggenheim nyc. Pique Mondrian even further. It's the first in their new series, Collection in Focus, and we are so glad to have her in studio. Mariette, welcome.
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Mariette Westerman
So thanks so much for having me.
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Alison Stewart
You have told a story that you visited New York City as a teenager from the Netherlands, and the first museum you saw was the Guggenheim. What do you remember about that day?
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Mariette Westerman
Well, the story's true, and it has come back to me time and again as I walk into the building almost every day now. My mother took me to New York because I was going to school in the United States for college, and it was very exciting. But she felt it was essential that I first visit New York. And on the first day, the first museum she wanted me to visit was the Guggenheim. And I remember coming up on this building having no idea what to expect. I thought I would see something like the British Museum or a temple of art. I saw a temple of art and a temple of spirit, as we call it. And it was the Guggenheim. And I remember being so stunned by the architecture, this swirling form upward from the outside. I found it an odd. And from the inside, I was completely inspired to realize you could walk up and down and see people across looking at art. And I also remember thinking, wow, they have Kandinsky and Picasso here. I was so naive. I couldn't believe they had European art because I'd come from Europe, from the Netherlands. And my mother later asked what I thought of it, and I told her some of these things, and she said something like, I'm so glad because I love this museum. I wanted you to see it because only in New York would they build such a thing.
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Alison Stewart
It's amazing. As I was, I go to the museum regularly, and I'm always amazed as you walk up on it with the big apartments on either side, and then there's just this giant spiral. It just. It gets me every time I see it.
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Mariette Westerman
It's an inspiring building inside and out.
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Alison Stewart
When did your interest in art begin?
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Mariette Westerman
I think I was informally interested in art almost all my life. Because in the Netherlands, you grow up with museums, these great resources that you've already talked about. And I would be left alone in the Rijksmuseum or taken to the Van Gogh Museum or, you know, it was just part of my life. But I never thought it would be a professional interest for me. And I set out to want to become someone like you. I wanted to be a journalist, or I wanted to be a newscaster or someone who did something important for society. And then I went to this college called Williams College and was a history and political history major. And late in my years there as an undergraduate, I took art history the way almost every student there did. This little place in Massachusetts, amazing college. And I realized all of a sudden that you could do history in this totally different way, looking at objects, at works that had been made far away and long ago often, and that still spoke to us in a very direct way. And as often, when you like something, you also tend to be sort of good at it. So I recognized that I could do this and that I could become. I didn't know what I could become. A curator, a professor, a writer, work in the trade. I had no idea what I would do with it, but I knew I wanted to learn more about it. So then I went on to the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU for my graduate work.
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Alison Stewart
Well, Williams has a little bit of an art mafia. Were you aware of it at the time?
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Mariette Westerman
I was aware that some 90% of all students took a full year of art history, which seemed amazing since most of them obviously weren't majors and most were Economics majors, probably in science matters. But I hadn't heard of this Mafia thing until later, when I went into that world and realized that so many museum directors in particular, and curators like Kirk Varnadow and Rusty Powell and Jim Wood and all these amazing people had gone through there. But I didn't necessarily feel myself a part of it because I wasn't an undergraduate major later on. Now I realize that people that. It did have a lot to do with where I am now.
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Alison Stewart
When you were at Williams and you decided that art history was going to be something that you would be interested in, what did you see as your goal when you graduated?
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Mariette Westerman
You know, interestingly, it sounds like such a luxury to say this today. I'm talking now about the mid to late 1980s. And I pursued a PhD purely because I wanted to know more about it. I was so inspired about art of all ages, really. I wanted to know more about the amazing art of my own country, the Netherlands. Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals. And I thought I could work in the trade. I could curate or work for a museum or be a professor, like these people who inspired me in my college. But I really had that luxury, in a way of thinking at the time that a job would be there. I know that today that's not realistic, but I didn't know what it would be. And the truth is, I've done a little bit of all of it.
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Alison Stewart
What did you do your graduate work in?
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Mariette Westerman
I wrote my dissertation on a comic painter of the 17th century, really one of these Seinfelds of his time, making art about his own life through painting. And I found it an amazing thing that you could make comic painting that is silent after all, but really make people laugh and connect to the popular culture of the time. And then pretty soon, though, I went into all sorts of other fields because I was always interested in art as something that human beings make and have done so for as long as they've been conscious on this earth. So I take a very broad sort of anthropological view of art and have worked in that vein also.
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Alison Stewart
That's interesting, you said, because it's what people make. Could you talk about that a little further, why that's so important?
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Mariette Westerman
Yes, it's very interesting when you think about what unites human beings and a species, if anything at all, in comparison to other species, that we have strong relations to. After all, we're very similar to them in so many ways. Human beings are very conscious of the fact that there were people before them and that there will be people after them if we get things right. And therefore they make things for other people to look at, to listen to, to dance with, to experience that are not necessarily utilitarian, that are not immediately useful, that are not immediately verbal or not immediately numerical. The way we organize our society, mostly. And I think that art, therefore, is a very inspiring thing that carries across cultures and that indeed all cultures we know about make something that they might not call it art by our word art, but that has this kind of non utilitarian function to help us think about our existence or our relation to each other or to the world, or to time, or to heaven, whatever you may be believing.
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Alison Stewart
What was something that you learned in your work, undergraduate, graduate, PhD, that you have found has really helped you in your career?
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Mariette Westerman
That is such a profound question. And in my work, what I've learned most profoundly is that you can keep learning all the way through your life. And that are the best educational institutions. And there are so many of them, of course, the best schools and the best cultural institutions, the best museums really lean into that so that they are for everyone to be able to learn something new they didn't already know or didn't even know they wanted to learn or perhaps didn't want to learn, in fact. And I think that that has connected the many different aspects of my career.
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Alison Stewart
What is something that you learned that ultimately you had to unlearn once you began working in the field?
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Mariette Westerman
Talking too soon and too fast.
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Alison Stewart
Why? Just it comes out of your mouth and you think, oh, maybe I shouldn't.
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Mariette Westerman
Have said that, or not so much. But if you talk a lot, you don't listen as much. And I grew up in a wonderful family, close to my siblings of four. I myself have four children. And when you're in that kind of situation around the dinner table, you gotta kinda claim your space. So you gotta wait for that moment for someone to breathe and kind of jump in there. But I've learned, especially in the United States, especially in my liberal arts education and as a teacher, later on, as a professor, I learned that sitting back and waiting and lying in wait, you often hear things that you might never have known about or that can really move a conversation forward.
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Alison Stewart
My guest is. Make sure I'm saying this right. Mariette.
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Mariette Westerman
Yes, correct.
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Alison Stewart
Mariette Westerman, Director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. You know, a decade ago, I was looking for information to see how you talk. So I know how you talk. And I was watching a lecture you gave at a prestigious university about a decade ago. And you were making an argument for liberal arts education. First of all, do you still feel that way?
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Mariette Westerman
Liberal arts education is the most capacious and generative kind of education invented by humanity. It's a tremendous luxury. It shouldn't be. All education should have some of it. I feel even community college education in particular, giving access to ideas and opening horizons is important. So, yes, I still absolutely believe that liberal arts education can do this. The models may need to change for how we do it.
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Alison Stewart
I was going to say, if someone has a liberal arts education, where could they work? Now it's just pie in the sky.
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Mariette Westerman
Well, you know, they could be director of Guggenheim. They could be at wnyc. I would imagine that NPR has quite a few people working from liberal arts education. But it's amazing. If you look at CEOs of big companies, if you look at tech industry that is so depends on innovation and keeping an open mind. Liberal doesn't mean a political disposition necessarily. It's the free deployment of this greatest gift we have, which is the capacity to think, to learn, and to grow. It can be useful in any field. Now, you may need more technical education to follow, or professional education, like an MBA or of course, a medical degree. Liberal arts is not enough. It's a great starter in life. And you can push more of it into high school, I feel, and probably extend a little bit more of it into professional schools to get the same result.
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Alison Stewart
What were you doing right before the Guggenheim job?
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Mariette Westerman
I had this amazing job. I was the head of New York University, Abu Dhabi, which is a university liberal arts college, plus graduate programs, plus an MFA and PhDs and so forth, based in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. But it is also fully a school of New York University, based in our very city here. And so it's a very global and international place with about 2,500 students, undergraduates and graduates from 125 countries. And I was trying to help that institution forward. I had helped create it many years before, between it opened in 2010.
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Alison Stewart
So why did the Guggenheim job appeal to you?
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Mariette Westerman
Well, the reason I went into higher education, when you think of it, was art. I was so interested and motivated in art and art history, learning how art is made by people, for people, what they do with it in their time and later. That's what I wanted to share with the world. And so one way to do that is through publications, through making exhibitions, and through teaching. And for many, many years, I did it through teaching, but then was drawn into these leadership positions at the Mellon foundation and at NYU Abu Dhabi. And then your work really broadens out to all these different disciplines. You can't be a university leader only for the arts. You have to be for science, engineering, business, whatever it is. And so, although I had expected to keep doing that actually a good three to five years longer, it was just so incredibly tempting to think about that job when it became a possibility for me. Certainly the emotional aspect of knowing that my mother would have been exceedingly pleased. You're always a child of your parents, even after they've passed long before that was special. New York is our home city for my family, too. But it was also the public mission, the idea that I could really do something with this very inspiring institution grounded in the Frank Lloyd Wright Building in New York, the most inspiring museum building on the planet, probably, but also with a very international extension. Because the Guggenheim is more than just one museum. It is actually an idea about connecting art to people and place. And it's been doing that in New York, but for a long time also in Venice, through the Peggy Guggenheim Collection that's part of the foundation. And since 1997, in Bilbao, through the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, a very, very long, clever partnership with the authorities in the Basque country. And the Guggenheim has long been preparing, together with the partners in Abu Dhabi, to open the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi in the next couple of years. And I had watched and been close to that because my university is right near that site. So the idea that I could bring something of my international experience back into what brought me the first love that brought me to this whole journey, which was art, was just irresistible.
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Alison Stewart
You are described as someone who knows how to transform an institution. So what's on your list for the Guggenheim?
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Mariette Westerman
Well, the first thing you should do is see all the things that are already great and remind people of it. And so we do that. So there's a lot that will stay and should stay, which is that rigorous commitment to the art of modernism and of today, of the contemporary world, ever further, ever more international. That will stay. Making great exhibitions will stay. But I think there are other things we can do, particularly in New York, for example. We can shine a brighter light on our collection, our founding collections, which really have kept growing ever since 1929, when Solomon R. Guggenheim began to collect the art of today. That was a radical move. At the time, his peers were collecting old Masters, as he had been doing. And from that journey, he creates the museum. But others have given us art over time that goes all the way back to the late 19th century and, of course, all the way forward to today. And like most museums in the world, we don't show more than a tiny percentage of our collection. That's because we also preserve and collect and do research and publish about them. It's okay. It's alright. Not always to show everything. You also need to care for things. But I think that especially our many New Yorkers and our visitors from abroad and around the country would love to see a little bit more of these great works they know we have because they can see them online. And so we started this new series of exhibitions, collection in Focus, which will be dedicated nimbly, one gallery at a time, while other great big, huge exhibitions are going on to one specific part where we can show a theme in depth, an artist in depth, a special movement or development, or even our more recent acquisitions. And that's very exciting. And yeah, it seems that visitors, as they go in, are excited to know about that.
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Alison Stewart
And we'll hear more about that with your debut exhibition, Piet Mondrian, after a quick break.
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Rachel Leviev
This is all this week on the New Yorker Radio Hour. The problem of Alice Munro, a revered artist who chose to hide a terrible secret in her family.
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Mariette Westerman
Her writing makes you think about, like, art. At what expense? Like, it felt so literal, like, you know, trading your daughter for art.
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Rachel Leviev
Rachel Leviev on Alice Monroe. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC Studios. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Alison Stewart
Love it. You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest in studio is Marriott Westerman. She's a director and the CEO of the Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. Okay, we're going to get to the exhibit which you curated. It's so exciting. It's part of this collection in Focus and it's on Piet Mondrian. Why Piet Mondrian?
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Mariette Westerman
Piet Mondrian is probably one of the three or four most radical modern artists of the 20th century. He created an art of pure abstraction that almost anyone can visualize, even who's listening to the radio. You can imagine these often square or rectangular paintings that are divided into grids by black lines that are only horizontal and vertical, creating these right angles. And these panes that are created between them are filled with primary colors, red, yellow and blue. And what he sometimes thought of as non color shades of white, gray, and another kind of black than the black lines. Those are the famous paintings and I've always found them very satisfying from a very young age because Piet Mondrian grew up in the Netherlands. He even Lived in a town where my parents lived the longest of their marriage, La Ren. And there was an artist colony there where he did some of his most important early innovations. But what was so amazing to me when I arrived at the Guggenheim was that I realized that although I know this artist very well, that we had many more of his paintings and drawings than I even had known from what was published about them. And so diving into one of our wonderful store facilities with one of our great curators, Tracy Bashkov, I was looking at it and I said, like, whoa, here are nine paintings just in New York alone. We have three more works in Venice. Do we have drawings, too? And they're like, yes, we have drawings. And we have the two only extant sketchbooks that are still in their original form. So I looked at these 18 works, and I thought, can we pull these out? Can we show these? Because I realized that you could tell the story of Piet Mondrian leading up to those iconic works in red, yellow, blue, gray, and white and black, but really showing the journey from his very early days in my home country of the Netherlands. Then he goes to Paris, where these innovations come, and he ends up in New York, where in 1944, he actually passes away. He's buried in Queens. Very few people know that, I think, but it's amazing to see the journey and be able to tell it painting by painting, drawing by drawing of how he arrives in the 1920s. He was born in 1872, but how he arrives at this solution that becomes so famous and so influential, but he didn't invent that out of whole cloth. He goes ever further, step by step, from a deep ability to paint nature. And we show that we have these works.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah, this chrysanthemum.
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Mariette Westerman
The chrysanthemum.
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Alison Stewart
The chrysanthemum is a beautiful drawing. It's a beautiful painting. Would you describe it for us?
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Mariette Westerman
Sure. In 1908, when he's been a painter for some time, he discovers the art of Van Gogh, who was a great draftsman besides all these wonderful paintings, you know. And he makes a drawing of a single stem of chrysanthemum. Not a whole bouquet, a single stem by itself in this black chalk that is very accented and oily. So he, instead of showing you a colorful drawing, he shows you this faceted, almost very analytical approach to the flower. You have no doubt it's a chrysanthemum, but you can see precisely a little building blocks from which it's made. It is not a flowing kind of leaf structure that he shows Your petal structure. He shows you really how he thought about the essence of this flower. And from that period on, he really goes ever further from the appearances of nature into something that could create sort of this image of a world that lies behind visual impressions.
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Alison Stewart
It was really interesting. There are two pictures called Gingerpot 1 and 2. And you really see the evolution into Cubism. Could you describe what is different between Gingerpot 1 and Gingerpot 2?
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Mariette Westerman
I'm so glad you saw these paintings so closely. Still Life with gingerpot number one, he makes in 1911, when he's living in Amsterdam and he and some fellow friends, artists, he has a whole society around him. They hear about this thing called Cubism in Paris. They hear about Braque and Picasso in particular, and they work together with the local Museum of Modern Art that already exists to bring some of these still lives. And they look at them and he realizes that particularly some of these still lifes by these Cubist painters point a way to creating an image of reality that is not so impressionistic like Impressionism, that doesn't try to replicate the world, but says something about the way we perceive things. It breaks down all these objects into these horizontal vertical lines, curves and so forth in a very much reduced palette. Ochres, grays, browns, some black. The ginger pot is bright turquoise, which upsets him a little bit later on. But for the time being, the bright pink Turkish Gingerpot is there. That picture you can still see very clearly. This is his studio. There's a table, you can see some canvases, you see some tablecloth, you see a window, you see glasses, pots, everything he needs to paint. He finds it unsatisfactory. In the end, he says, no, no, this is not right. He leaves it in Holland, he moves to Paris, and half a year later, well, he leaves the Jinderpot in Holland. He brings the painting, and half a year later he paints Still Life of Gingerpot too. And if you didn't know that other painting, you would not know so readily that that was his studio. It really has flattened dramatically. He's been talking to the Cubists. He's learned how to do their work. And it's amazing to see so fast an evolution in the work step by step. And that's what's amazing about Monerail. He really left things behind and could say goodbye to what he'd done and move on to the next thing and still find something of value in what he'd done before.
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Alison Stewart
I'm curious how the external world. World War I, World War II influenced his work.
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Mariette Westerman
It's Interesting you ask this, because although he was clearly upset by the rise of National Socialism, he mostly treated these situations as a great inconvenience to where he wanted to be working. He'd gone to Paris in 1914. When World War I begins, he has to go back to the Netherlands, and he does some beautiful things there that you can see in the exhibition In My Hometown. Then he goes back to Paris in 1919, and by 1938, he realizes that the Nazis are coming, that France will be affected, and that there has been this terrible exhibition of. And Arthur de Kunst, Degenerate Art in Munich. He wants to leave. And via London, he eventually, in 1940, makes it to New York. But he goes to New York not just to be in safety, because in England, essentially, he was safer than he would have been in Holland or Paris. He goes to New York because he loves the city he's always wanted to go, because he thinks of it as the ultimate modern metropolis, which at the time, it was. He knows that jazz music has come from there. He loved music. Music. The abstraction of his art has a lot to do with the abstraction of music, if you think about it, the rhythmic qualities. And so I think that although he was affected by the war and he thinks about it, he lived for and through his art. And you really can see that.
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Alison Stewart
A personal question for you. You must have loved that you were CEO, and you're like, hey, can I go into this storage locker and look at these Piet Mondrians?
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Mariette Westerman
Because I've got.
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Alison Stewart
Because I would like to. Because I'm the boss.
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Mariette Westerman
I hope I said it, not because I was the boss. It was actually a coincidence. So much in life is coincidence is happy serendipity. I was there just to get to know the people a little bit better. And this lead curator was there to do the color testing for the catalog of our wonderful show, Harmony and Dissonance. Yes, orphism in Paris, 1910-1930. And she said, you know, let's just go look at some of our treasures, which, of course, we always love to do. And it is the responsibility of the head of museum organization like this to know your collections well. Because you continue to collect, you have responsibility to preserve and to show and to know what your curators are interested in. You're not the lead curator. I don't consider myself that. So it was just pure luck that I happened to. They happened to pull out this rack for me to look at. Maybe they set me up a little bit to do it, but our people are incredibly talented, so they immediately could see that. But to make a show of 20 works is actually not so difficult. You can do it if you put your mind to it. And we did it in three months.
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Alison Stewart
How do you think about the role of art museums in a diverse society?
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Mariette Westerman
Art museums are tremendous resources precisely because they represent art and they show art. And art, as I've mentioned, is an enduring human endeavor that all cultures share. So in theory, our museums, our art museums are great storehouses of the creativity of humanity, also of things that are difficult. Much art is not so easy for people to take, of course, or addresses conditions in the past or the present or perhaps the future that may be difficult or should be discussed. So I think these are tremendous resources. I think that especially because a museum like the Guggenheim is a place of what I call inadvertent learning, by which I mean that most people who come to museums, they have a sense that they'll learn something there, but they also come for enjoyment. They come to see that great world Heritage site that we are, the spiral, who wouldn't want to see it and walk it? They want to know more about that. They know it's a destination. They want to go to the shop or see a movie or we also have great performances. But as that happens, and many people go because they want to go for Mother's Day or do something nice for their dad or whatever it is, a friend, go on a date, all of those are totally legitimate reasons to go to museums. But when you come, there is so much that a museum can do to make sure that it's a satisfying learning experience because everyone can learn and people, after all, most people are quite curious. And we can tap into that curiosity. And artists, and especially modern contemporary artists above all are very curiosity driven. So that's in a way a perfect match to the needs of a diverse society for all of us to see and understand each other a little better.
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Alison Stewart
Marriott Westerman is the director and CEO of the Solomon R. Gunaheim Museum and Foundation. Thanks for coming to the studio.
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Mariette Westerman
It was a great pleasure. Thank you.
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Alison Stewart
A new exhibition at the Jewish Museum places the work of two artists in conversation with each other. One is dead, one is alive. The common thread, the pursuit of social justice. Coming up, we'll hear from artist Trenton Doyle Hancock and curator Rebecca Schakin about Draw Them In, Paint Them Out. That's next, right after a quick break.
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