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| Feature |
The New Face of Patronage
Suzanne Mcgee
12/01/2005
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Robert Rosenkranz is quite adept at acquiring art created by long dead, often anonymous, artists. By all accounts his collection of
Chinese finery is exquisite; its highlight is a prized series of rare Ming
Dynasty paintings. But Rosenkranz’s assemblage lacked a certain vitality, an au
fait aspect—that is, until he met Mu Xin about six years ago.
 | | GEESE ARRIVING Over a Pavilion by Mu Xin from the Rosenkranz collection.(Photograph by John Bigelow Taylor, N.Y.C.) |
In 1982, Mu Xin
fled political imprisonment in China, carrying his series of 33 small ink
and gouache landscapes, bleak scenes that drew as much from the Dutch landscape
masters of the 17th and 18th centuries as from Chinese tradition. Rosenkranz,
who met Mu Xin through a mutual acquaintance, was stunned when he saw them. “I
thought they were the best works of Chinese ink painting I had seen produced in
the 20th century,” he says. “And yet, Mu Xin was a complete unknown, even to
many in the field. I wanted to change all that, to put this guy on the map.”
Mu Xin had completed the paintings in the late 1970s, after his release from
a people’s prison (a converted air-raid shelter). He painted at night to avoid
detection by the police, who kept him under house arrest. After arriving in New
York via Hong Kong, he ceased producing art, working instead with other Chinese
artists and scholars to educate members of the Chinese diaspora about their
cultural heritage. Soon after they met, Rosenkranz set about persuading Mu Xin
to resume painting, his first step toward becoming an art patron.
 | | 9TH-CENTURY marble Tang Dynasty Luohan from the Rosenkranz collection. (Photograph courtsey of Li Yin Oriental Art Co., Ltd.) |
In an
era of growing wealth and a concomitant rise in appreciation for all things
cultural, perhaps it is inevitable that art aficionados—art in the broad sense,
both performing and visual—would bring a sharp, entrepreneurial instinct to
their passions and strive to show the world something new. Today, the main
thrust of this trend seems more commercial than cultivated. Every affluent
theatergoer and museum maven has been hounded by pleas offering patron status in
return for a five-figure donation. Many of the country’s large ballet companies
reflect— some would say uncomfortably—the Renaissance style of patronage by
serving up their principal dancers as open to sponsorship. Contemporary writers
are the sole group that is wholly averse to such merchantry, many of them
fearful of being perceived as the voice of a wealthy patron.
 | | A TANG period horse sculpture. |
That cozy
personal relationship in which a patron commissions works to his own taste is
the way this tradition operated from the days of the Medicis until the 19th
century. Yesterday’s patron class was comprised of royalty, aristocrats and
wealthy merchants, who inhabited a world wherein they and their peers were the
primary audience for the works that they commissioned.
Today patronage is
back en vogue for devotees such as Rosenkranz, but their motivations appear to
be more enlightened. They desire a face-to-face relationship with the artist
that revolves around discovering the best channels to create a reputation for
the art, in an increasingly crowded aesthetic marketplace. It is also a
marketplace filled with experts—critics, theater directors, museum curators and
literary editors—who may not take kindly to the opinions of people they view as
dilettantes with more cash than taste.
Yet opportunities exist to not only
become a patron to a visual artist, but to work with new organizations that have
sprung up to connect visual artists, musicians and composers with respective
patrons. (See “Match Makers” below.)
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