Deep within the Wall Street Journal’s recent profile of LACMA’s Michael Govan is a paragraph that discusses one of the central issues of art museums in our time: their inability to display the vast majority of their holdings. Rival museum luminaries like Eli Broad have suggested creating lending-library like museums that would insure works are on display around the world instead of demurely waiting in storage. But numerous conservators and critics of mega-shows claim the constant movement stresses the art too much.

Govan envisions passersby watching curators set up exhibitions—activities typically shielded from the public. Rather than the usual 60 percent of museum space devoted to back-of-house uses, he wants to reverse the equation, and then some: As much as 80 percent of the square footage will house art on view to the public. Whole sections of LACMA’s collection—such as gems tucked away on the third floor of the Art of the Americas building—will be dusted off for the first time in years.

Many museums already have open storage and other accommodations to the surfeit of art on their hands but nothing that compares to Govan’s tantalizing inversion of the art museum.

If He Builds It, You Will Come (Wall Street Journal)

The inestimable Jori Finkel does the math on the new money raised at MoCA and discovers that the board is using some of Eli Broad’s matching funds to claim that they’ve made it to $75m of their $100m goal. The board members have finally ponied up to keep the museum independent but they’ve still got $25m more to go:

MOCA’s board co-chairs Maria Bell and David Johnson said Wednesday that reaching the three-quarter mark of its goal shows a vote of confidence for the institution and its recent decision to remain independent. […] Johnson and Bell, who spoke publicly for the first time since the LACMA offer, said that the new financial commitments, ranging from $1 million to $10 million, came from 21 donors. “The list represents many board members,” said Johnson. “I think by the end we will have essentially all of the board members.” […]

But they did confirm that their $75-million figure includes the full $15 million in matching funds from Broad’s offer. (Earlier this year, when the endowment stood around $22 million, the board had only been able to capitalize on $6.25 million of the matching funds.)

The museum expects to raise more money on Saturday through its annual gala, timed to the opening of the museum’s Urs Fischer exhibition. Bell, who has organized the galas since the popular Murakami fest in 2007, said this year’s event is on track with the others to gross at least $2.4 million. “And that’s at a time when we are also asking many people to support us for this endowment, so it’s very exciting,” she said.

MOCA hits $75-million mark, nearing endowment goal (Los Angeles Times)

Leonard Lauder is making a gift to the Metropolitan Museum that is valued at $1 billion and will transform the institution’s collection of Modern art:

“In one fell swoop this puts the Met at the forefront of early-20th-century art,” Thomas P. Campbell, the Met’s director, said. “It is an unreproducible collection, something museum directors only dream about.” […] The trove of signature works, which includes 33 Picassos, 17 Braques, 14 Légers and 14 works by Gris, is valued at more than $1 billion. […] Scholars say the collection is among the world’s greatest, as good, as if not better, than the renowned Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures in institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the Pompidou Center in Paris. Together they tell the story of a movement that revolutionized Modern art and fill a glaring gap in the Met’s collection, which has been notably weak in early-20th-century art.

Cubism, Which Changed Art, Is Now Changing The Met (New York Times)

The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the recently announced sale of works to benefit the Whitney Museum’s new building construction that will take place during Sotheby’s Evening sale of Contemporary art in May contains a little tension over expectations between consignor and auctioneer as well as between museum and artist:

Sotheby’s specialist Alexander Rotter estimates the auction will raise about $8 million, though the Whitney’s director, Adam D. Weinberg, said the museum is hoping for more. He said the sale will augment the $562.4 million it has already raised ($225 million of which is earmarked for its endowment), and that the Whitney is on track to open the new 200,000-square-foot downtown building, designed by Renzo Piano, in 2015.

“The Whitney has been there for these artists, especially early on in their careers before people really knew them,” said Mr. Weinberg. “I think for many of them, they feel that this is a way to give back.”

The Master, Judd Tully, has the list of works in his Artinfo.com report but none of the reports explain whether Sotheby’s will benefit from the sale as well or if it has decided to waive the buyer’s commission which has been common with museum sales:

led by the most expensive offering, Jasper Johns’s “Untitled” (2012), a color-saturated oil on canvas, chock full of the artist’s symbolic vocabulary (est. $1.5-2 million). Johns, who has had five solos and participated in more than 37 group exhibitions at the museum, expressly donated the painting for the cause.

Other delectable evening sale highlights range from Jeff Koons’s playful silkscreen on stainless steel with polychromed edges, “Balloon Monkey Wall Relief (yellow)” (2011) (est. $800,000-1.2 million), to a densely text-patterned canvas in oil, coal dust, and charcoal from Glenn Ligon, “Stranger #64” (2012), executed a year after the artist’s, mid-career survey, “Glenn Ligon: AMERICA” was staged at the museum (est. $350-450,000).

The offerings are a virtual Who’s Who of major postwar artists, from John Baldessari and Andy Warhol to Rudolf Stingel and Ed Ruscha. A strong Cy Twombly work on paper, “Untitled,” from 1971, bristles with his graffiti–like markings (est. $500-700,000), while John Currin offers a freshly minted nude, “Lydian” (2013) (same estimate). Such works appear with modest, come-hither estimates, strategically assuring art-market appetite.

Anchoring the May 15 day sale is Mark Bradford’s “Is That What She Told You” (2013), a positively statuesque mixed media collage on canvas (est. $350-450,000).

Building on the Works of Its Artists (Wall Street Journal)

Johns, Koons, Other Stars Donate to Sotheby’s Sale to Benefit the Whitney (Artinfo)

Bloomberg has the announcement this morning from the French Culture Ministry:

“He is someone from a modest background who rose through the ranks,” Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti was quoted as saying by Agence France-Presse. […] Martinez, 49, joined the Louvre in 1997 shortly after a three-year stint in Greece where he took part in archeological digs in Delos and Delphi and helping renovate Delphi’s archeological museum. He is fluent in English, Spanish and Greek, and also speaks Italian.

At the Louvre, he oversaw the decade-long renovation of the Greek antiquities gallery, where the Venus de Milo is showcased.

Most recently, he curated the main gallery of the Louvre’s new branch in Lens, northern France, a former coal-mining town. Louvre Lens, opened in December, is the museum’s very first offshoot outside Paris.

France Names Jean-Luc Martinez as New Chief of Louvre (Bloomberg)

Roberta Smith gave the board of LA MoCA a talking to in the pages of the New York Times this weekend now that the board has rejected LACMA’s overture to merge:

Now the trustees need to prove definitively that they finally understand the cultural importance of their museum, the danger in which they have placed it and the need for action. Their first step should be to distance themselves from Eli Broad, their ruling if nonvoting trustee, who fiercely opposed the merger but has been instrumental in bringing the museum to this impasse.

Only with him gone will the museum be able to attract the serious money, dedicated board members, professional staff and — most important — strong, visionary director that it needs.

The combination of the domineering Mr. Broad and unusually passive trustees has forced to its knees one of the greatest American museums of the postwar era. Scores of critics have tried to convince the board of the value of the institution it is supposed to be stewarding. What this museum has done for art since World War II is something like what the Museum of Modern Art did for art between the two world wars. It has mounted groundbreaking surveys — “1965-1975: Reconsidering the Art Object,” from 1996, and “Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Art Object 1949-1979,” from 1998, come to mind. These have vividly defined the era’s artistic trajectories, laying out and revising on a grand, often global scale the origins and influence of phenomena like Minimal Art, Conceptualism, Performance art and film.

The contemporary museum has also built an exemplary collection of art of the postwar period. No other institution has achieved quite this combination; the city’s artists and other progressive museums in Los Angeles would not be where they are today without it. The international art world is also in its debt. The sad truth, however, is that the museum has achieved all of this by habitually living beyond its means, drawing down its endowment to meet operating expenses.

For a Museum on the Ropes, Survival Means Hard Choices (NYTimes)

Liberation reports the next director of the Louvre may soon be finalized:

Sylvie Ramond, directrice du musée de Lyon, est en pole position pour succéder en avril à Henri Loyrette à la tête du Louvre, dans une succession qui prend déjà des parfums de scandale. La ministre de la Culture Aurélie Filippetti a confirmé à François Hollande sa préférence, qu’elle avait arrêtée depuis plusieurs semaines selon son entourage. Le choix final reste cependant dans les mains du président, qui doit s’en entretenir vendredi matin avec Loyrette.

Succession Sous Tension Au Louvre (Liberation)

Robin Pogrebin has the details of another museum where the art has become more valuable than the resources available for its upkeep:

Cole’s “Portage Falls on the Genesee”held pride of place as the house was turned over to Seward’s son, then his grandson and ultimately became the Seward House Historic Museum in 1951.

But early one morning last month movers escorted by the police pulled up to the house, removed the Cole landscape, which measures roughly 7 by 5 feet, from the drawing room and hauled it away. The Fred L. Emerson Foundation, which owns the artwork and once oversaw the museum, says the canvas — painted in 1839 and appraised five years ago at $18 million — is too valuable to be left in an institution that does not have the resources to protect it fully. The foundation plans to sell the painting at Christie’s, share the proceeds with the museum and hang a copy in its place.

Painting’s Removal Stirs Outcry (NYTimes)

The NY Times’ ArtsBeat reports that the National Gallery is offering another option for LA’s MoCA, a five-year deal to share programming that might help keep the museum independent even if it doesn’t help it raise any money:

“The goal at this point is stabilizing them and get them standing as an independent institution,” said John Wilmerding, chairman of the board of the National Gallery. “We’d like to see them survive and thrive, and if we can help them, that’s all we’re doing.”

Mr. Wilmerding said the billionaire Eli Broad, one of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s biggest financial supporters, had approached the National Gallery and asked for assistance. Dismissing rumors of any merger or formal partnership, Mr. Wilmerding said the discussions so far had focused almost solely on joint programming and exhibitions. The National Gallery is also offering help with research, curatorial decisions and staffing advice, if needed.

Los Angeles MOCA Mulls Pact with National Gallery (ArtsBeat/NYTimes)

Jori Finkel proves once again why she’s among the best arts reporters out there with her exclusive news that the LA County Museum of Art has made an offer to acquire troubled MoCA:

LACMA Director Michael Govan and the two co-chairs of his board made the offer in a Feb. 24 letter to the MOCA board co-chairs, laying out the rationale for an acquisition.

The letter said that LACMA would preserve MOCA’s two downtown locations and operate them under the MOCA name, according to people who have seen the letter but were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

For its part, LACMA would agree to raise $100 million for the combined museums as a condition for completing the deal, these people said.

Exclusive: LACMA Moves to Take Over MoCA (LA Times)