The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal - "At Art Basel, Works With a Museum Presence" @nytimes by Carol Vogel

BASEL, Switzerland — In an old market hall adjacent to the cavernous center where Art Basel, the gold standard of contemporary art fairs, is taking place, there is a happening unlike anything ever staged here. Called “14 Rooms,” it consists of 14 mini-performances created by artists including Marina 

BASEL, Switzerland — In an old market hall adjacent to the cavernous center where Art Basel, the gold standard of contemporary art fairs, is taking place, there is a happening unlike anything ever staged here. Called “14 Rooms,” it consists of 14 mini-performances created by artists including Marina Abramovic, Damien Hirst and Yoko Ono, each secreted in a small space behind mirrored doors. Open one door, and there’s a Marina Abramovic look-alike naked and astride a bicycle seat, arms outstretched. In another, identical twins sit in front of identical spot paintings by Mr. Hirst.

“Performance art is usually at the periphery, so why not put it front and center?” said Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS1 in New York, who organized the project with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, a director of exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London. “It’s a temporary museum. Nothing here is for sale.”

But next door at Art Basel, almost everything is. As big and boisterous as ever, with 285 galleries from 34 countries participating, this fair is still a magnet for the contemporary art world. Spotted at Tuesday’s V.I.P. opening were big-money collectors like Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire; Daniel S. Loeb, the activist hedge fund manager and Sotheby’s new board member; Mitchell P. Rales, the Washington industrialist, and his wife, Emily; Jerry I. Speyer, chairman of the Museum of Modern Art; and Daniel Brodsky, chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his wife, Estrellita, an independent curator. Few artists ever make an appearance at art fairs but Oscar Murillo, the Colombian-born painter, did.

Last month, $2.2 billion worth of art changed hands at the big auctions in New York. The strength of those sales affected everything about this year’s fair, from the higher prices to the choice of art. So have museum exhibitions. “Collectors are driven by institutional context,” the dealer David Zwirner said. Prominently displayed in his booth is a shiny blue stainless-steel sculpture of a dolphin by Jeff Koons, whose retrospective is opening this month at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Priced at $5 million, it sold on Tuesday to a collector from China, Mr. Zwirner said. His booth also features paintings by the South African-born Marlene Dumas, who has a traveling show opening at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam in September; and canvases by Gerhard Richter, who is the subject of an exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel.

Mr. Zwirner wasn’t the only dealer touting works with a museum presence. Dominique Levy, a New York dealer, had a 1964 black-and-white comic book drawing by Roy Lichtenstein that was in a show at the Morgan Library & Museum four years ago. It sold for an undisclosed price to an American collector.

“Sotheby’s and Christie’s went through a record cycle, and that gives people confidence,” Mr. Zwirner said. “Basel is our biggest weapon, if we want to go mano a mano with the auction houses.”

Brett Gorvy, chairman of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, was here, too. Prices, he said, are “informed by the auctions.” “Collectors have sticker shock, yet they’re pulling the trigger,” he added, using as an example one of Andy Warhol’s “fright wig” self-portraits from 1986 that several people said had belonged to Thea Westreich, the New York collector and dealer. It was bought by another New York collector for around $34 million, according to Per Skarstedt, the dealer who sold it. In addition to examples of Warhol and Bacon — both top sellers at auction last month — Mr. Koons, whose sculptures had adorned the covers of both Sotheby’s and Christie’s contemporary art auction catalogs, was ubiquitous. The Gagosian Gallery is featuring “Hulk (Wheelbarrow),” a giant green painted bronze Hulk carrying a wheelbarrow filled with live flowers; it is priced at $4 million. Almine Rech, another dealer, brought two “Gazing Ball” sculptures made this year, one priced at $2 million and the other at $1.6 million. Both sold to European collectors, she said.

Younger trendy artists are also represented here, with paintings by Jacob Kassay, Joe Bradley and Mark Bradford, many of which were spoken for.

One young artist determined to control his market is Wade Guyton, the American painter who produces canvases on inkjet printers. Last month, protesting an enormous price asked for one of his paintings at auction, he made copies of the 2005 image from the original disk and posted them on Instagram. (Prices for his paintings were stronger than ever anyway, with one bringing nearly $6 million.) Undeterred, for Art Basel he gave each of the five dealers he works with — Frederich Petzel from New York, Gió Marconi in Milan, Galerie Gisela Capitain from Cologne, Galerie Francesca Pia from Zurich and Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris — a black painting, all the same size and all made from the same disk. They each had a $350,000 price tag, and all of them sold either on Tuesday or before.

In an email, Mr. Guyton explained that he instructed the dealers to hang his paintings at identical heights, “so each time you walk up to one, you would have a similar physical encounter.” He added: “On the one hand, it is a way to satisfy all my galleries simultaneously and fairly. It’s also a way of talking about the repetitive experience of seeing similar artworks throughout a fair and embracing that aggressively by showing almost identical works.”

For a few years now, people have complained that dealers have been selling or reserving work by sending collectors images of what will be on view in Basel well before the fair opens. That discussion grew louder this week. “Preselling should be forbidden,” said Philippe Ségalot, a private New York dealer whose antics in years past — including hiring a Hollywood makeup artist to disguise him so he could sneak into the fair before everyone and snap up the best works — have become Art Basel legend.

“If I had done that this year,” Mr. Ségalot said, “there would have been nothing to buy.”

Isabelle Collin Dufresne – known to the world as Andy Warhol's "superstar" Ultra Violet, died of cancer in New York City. She was 78.

Nearly four years ago, I interviewed Ultra Violet when she was in Miami Beach during Art Basel for the opening of a gallery featuring the works of photographer William John Kennedy, who frequently photographed Warhol.

Here is my 2010 interview with Ultra Violet:

srothaus@MiamiHerald.com

Ultra Violet, the Andy Warhol "superstar'' internationally known in the 1960s, demands more than her 15 minutes of fame.

"Today with the explosion of the media, the Internet, everybody has 15 minutes of fame. I'm trying to get 16 minutes, and it's very hard," she says. "Everybody has a camera, everybody has Facebook, everybody has a computer. If you can tell me how to get one more minute, let me know."

Ultra Violet -- born Isabelle Collin Dufresne 75 years ago in France -- is here from New York for Art Basel, showing off her own works and helping launch a KIWI Gallery retrospective of photographer William John Kennedy, who long ago captured images of UV, Warhol and Robert Indiana, whose iconic LOVE poster became a symbol of the '60s Pop Art movement.

In 1963, artist Salvador Dalí -- Ultra Violet's one-time mentor -- introduced her to ``this little woman, I thought."

"Her hair was weird: black rattail in the back, white on the top. It was a synthetic nylon wig. And that person, which I thought was a woman had a very strange voice," Ultra Violet recalls. "Anyway, Dalí introduced me, and he said, `This is Andy Warhol.'

"He was totally unknown then. Warhol said to me, `You are so beautiful, let's do a movie together.' I said when? He said tomorrow. Tomorrow, the next day, I went to The Factory [Warhol's New York studio], and this was the beginning of a very interesting era."

Among the photos on display at the KIWI Gallery off Lincoln Road: a series of Ultra Violet nudes shot by Kennedy almost a half-century ago.

"I have no regrets," she now says. "But this was the '60s and in the '60s everybody got undressed. In 2010, you do not get undressed. Not the right people. We were the right people."

UV says that during the sexual revolution, "the clothes would just fall off."

"But you know I'm a born-again Christian now and I don't take my clothes off," she adds.

Actually, UV wasn't totally nude in Kennedy's portraits. "I didn't want to be completely naked," she confides. "I needed something, so I [wore] one of his ties."

Kennedy, 80, now of Miami Beach, says this is the first major exhibition of his work.

His photographs are displayed full frame.

George Lindemann Journal - "The Redesign of a Design Museum" @nytimes by ROBIN POGREBIN

Andrew Carnegie used the third floor of his Fifth Avenue mansion as a gymnasium where he practiced his putting. The current owner, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, plans to put a small mini-golf green there on Tuesday when the news media gets a preview of the mansion’s nearly completed $91 million renovation.

The gesture is partly a playful way to honor a piece of the building’s history. But it also represents a larger message that the museum is trying to send as it reopens later this year after three years of being closed: This institution, which highlights the importance of design in everything from architecture to umbrellas, can be fun for all kinds of visitors — not just specialists.

The reconditioned building, at East 91st Street, seeks to present an interactive experience — not just artifacts in glass cases — to draw more people in the door and keep them coming back.

“We’re really taking the dust off the place and making it an exciting destination for people,” said Caroline Baumann, the museum’s director, in a recent walk through the building. “We want to open our arms and say welcome to Cooper-Hewitt, and to build audience.”

Marketing the Cooper-Hewitt as “an exciting destination” can be a challenge, given the museum’s home, the Carnegie Mansion: a turn-of-the-century gem, but not a natural setting for cutting-edge contemporary design. But with its renovation — the largest in the museum’s history — the Cooper-Hewitt is trying to counter a fusty image. It’s also rebranding itself, with a new font and a new name: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

The third floor — which had housed the research library and was not open to the public — has been transformed into a signature 6,000-square-foot gallery for temporary exhibitions. The newly landscaped garden, with seating for 180, will be free to the public — with a new canopied entrance on 90th Street — and Ms. Bauman said she hoped to open it in the early morning before museum hours as a place to enjoy coffee and pastries.

The new second floor features “the immersion room,” where visitors can pick from 500 examples of the Cooper-Hewitt’s 10,000-piece wallcoverings collection — or design their own — and the pattern will be projected on two walls. “We expect a long line outside this gallery,” Ms. Baumann said.

And then there is the pen. The museum plans to encourage each visitor to use a special electronic pen that can collect information from works on view by tapping wall labels. The information can later be downloaded for additional study, and the system will remember patrons the next time they visit.

“It’s an entire record of what you did at Cooper-Hewitt that day,” Ms. Baumann said. “Our ambition is to make people repeat users: You’re creating and collecting throughout your experience at Cooper-Hewitt.”

Introducing the pen, the immersion room and croissants in the garden in an institution that has positioned itself as the national authority on design may raise questions about whether the museum is resorting to gimmicks. But design experts said the museum needed to take steps to cultivate repeat visitors and international tourists, among whom the museum is not always a popular destination — particularly because it is at the north end of Museum Mile.

“People tend to go there once a year,” said Karim Rashid, the industrial designer. “They need to have revolving, frequent, high-profile shows that bring people there every couple of months.”

Museum officials said that they viewed the pen, in particular, as a useful tool to gauge — and respond to — the viewing habits of visitors. “What are you looking at; what are you not looking at?” Ms. Baumann said. “It helps us better tweak the visitor experience.”

“It’s a global first,” she added. “We don’t know if it’s going to work.”

Through such efforts, the museum hopes to raise its annual number of visitors to as many as 500,000, compared with 225,000 in the 12 months before it closed in 2011 (which in itself was unusually high because of the Van Cleef & Arpels show that spring). By comparison, the Frick Collection, also in a Beaux-Arts mansion, had 420,000 visitors last year, and the Guggenheim, just down the block from the Cooper-Hewitt, had 1.2 million.

The Cooper-Hewitt also wants to increase its revenue. Being closed has cost the museum income and momentum. With the renovation, the institution’s annual budget has grown to $18 million from $16 million, and the Smithsonian, its parent, covers only 30 percent; the Cooper-Hewitt has to raise and earn the rest.

And the museum wants to double its endowment, to $20 million ($8.4 million of the additional $10 million has been raised so far).

When the renovated museum opens, by the end of the year, it will have 60 percent more gallery space for temporary exhibitions and shows of the permanent collection, which contains 212,000 objects. There will be new sunlit stairwells, with oversize numbers clearly designating each floor, and a new delivery entrance for art coming into the museum. (When the museum exhibited a Tata Nano automobile in 2010, it had to roll the podlike car up a ramp through the front door).

The project’s budget rose to $91 million from $64 million in 2008, partly because of additional work in the garden. The Cooper-Hewitt received about $14 million for the project from the city.

The museum enlisted several design firms in the effort, including Gluckman Mayner Architects, for the mansion’s overall interior renovation, in collaboration with Beyer Blinder Belle; Hood Design, for the landscaping; Diller Scofidio & Renfro, for the new retail space, entrance and some exhibitions; Local Projects, for the interactive media; and Pentagram, for a new graphic identity.

Every millimeter of the mansion has been restored, from the Caldwell & Company light fixtures to the oak walls, and almost the entire building has been turned over to galleries. (Offices that were there have been moved to the Cooper-Hewitt’s two adjacent townhouses on East 90th Street, which have also been renovated).

“You build audience by improving the quality and the number of exhibitions, and they can do that now,” said Richard Gluckman, one of the lead architects on the project. “It’s become a more flexible building.”

George Lindemann Journal - "An Artist Fills Galleries With Emptiness" by ROSLYN SULCAS

It was Day 2 of “512 Hours,” Ms. Abramovic’s first new work since her 2010 retrospective, “The Artist Is Present,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, transformed her from a pioneering performance artist to a celebrity. There, she sat motionless, six days a week, seven hours a day, looking straight at whoever sat down opposite her. This time there is no chair. “There is just me,” she said. “And the public. It is insane what I try to do.”

The idea of “512 Hours,” named for the length of time Ms. Abramovic will spend in the gallery over the duration of the exhibition (running through Aug. 25), is both simple and radical. There is nothing in the Serpentine galleries except lockers, where visitors can put their bags and electronic devices. Ms. Abramovic, as well as an assistant, Lynsey Peisinger, and several museum guards are there. What will happen in the space no one quite knows. “I honestly don’t know; I don’t have a plan,” she said in an interview at the house she is sharing with her assistants during the London show. “That is the point. The idea is that the public are my material, and I am theirs. I will open the gallery myself in the morning and close it at 6 p.m. with my key. I want to understand how I can be in the present moment, be with the public.” On Wednesday, hundreds of people lined up outside to enter the gallery, although on Thursday there was no wait.

Ms. Abramovic, who has long black hair and almost spookily unlined creamy skin at 67, was born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, to parents who had been partisan heroes during World War II. She started her performance career in Belgrade, but has lived most of her adult life elsewhere and speaks a throaty, lightly accented English. Even before the MoMA show made her a star, she was widely known in the art world as a pioneer in her field who had not just created performances of physical intensity — carving a star into her stomach with a razor, lying on a block of ice for hours, screaming until her voice gave out — but had also re-enacted the grueling performance pieces of other artists.

She said that she had been invited to the Serpentine, the small museum in the middle of Kensington Gardens that is mostly dedicated to experimental work, almost 17 years ago. (“Everything takes forever in my life,” she declared dramatically.)

When she and the gallery’s co-curators, Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, finally fixed a date, she thought she might show little-known early works, or sound pieces. “Then one night, in the middle of the night,” she said, “I woke up thinking: ‘This is wrong. I must do something really radical, there is no time to lose.’ I had this vision of an empty gallery — nothing there.

But there has been much ado about the word “nothing.” Two weeks ago, TheGuardian newspaper reported that a number of American art historians and curators had written to Mr. Obrist, accusing Ms. Abramovic and the gallery of failing to acknowledge the work of Mary Ellen Carroll, a New York-based conceptual artist. Ms. Carroll said in an email that she had been working on a project called “Nothing” since 1984, describing it as “an engagement with the public” without documentation. Ms. Carroll did not respond directly to the question of how Ms. Abramovic’s piece is imitative of her own. But she wrote: “There is a historical tradition/protocol for artists, curators and historians to acknowledge historical precedents. When they are similar, one would say it is necessary.”

Mr. Obrist, in a telephone interview, said that Ms. Carroll was one of numerous artists before Ms. Abramovic who had explored the relationship between art and nothingness.

“There are many people — John Cage, Yves Klein, Gustav Metzger, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys — who have worked with this idea, including Mary Ellen Carroll. Of course we take that seriously.” (Mr. Obrist did not mention Jerry Seinfeld.)

“From my point of view, it’s difficult for anyone to claim nothing,” Ms. Abramovic said dryly. “I think it’s a misunderstanding anyway. It’s not that I’m doing nothing — quite the opposite. It’s just that there is nothing except people in the space. But now we are getting letters every day from people who did nothing first. It seems to have become something.”

After “The Artist Is Present,” which drew more than a half-million visitors, Ms. Abramovic said she found it difficult to move on to another performance work. “I set up such a high bar I think everyone was thinking that was it and now I’d do my institute,” she said, referring to the Marina Abramovic Institute, a center for long-durational work in Hudson, N.Y., that she hopes will bring together figures from the worlds of art, science and spirituality. “And it is true that it was so incredibly complete I had to figure out how to get out of that. The solution was simple: To take away even the few things I had there — the chair, the structure of sitting and looking.”

The controversy generated by “512 Hours,” the first performance work that Ms. Abramovic has presented in a British gallery, is nothing new for this artist, who has been criticized for appearing to relish the fame that has accompanied her success: Lady Gaga has come to her for instruction and Time magazine put her on this year’s list of its 100 most influential people.

“I have moved from an art structure to a larger one,” Ms. Abramovic said. “‘This is not a public who usually go to museums; they are super young, and I become for them some kind of example of things they want to know. I think there is an enormous need to be in contact with the artist. It is a huge responsibility, there are huge expectations. It does not make my ego bigger, it gives me more to do.”

In the gallery she gave a small mirror to a visitor and told her to walk backward, using the mirror as a guide. “Reality is behind you,” she whispered.

"Think Big. Build Big. Sell Big." @nytimes  CAROL VOGEL

On a spring afternoon with his first major retrospective in New York looming, the artist Jeff Koons, nattily dressed in navy blue from head to toe, calmly boarded a helicopter heading for a foundry in upstate New York. His mission was to check up on his “Play-Doh,” a monumental sculpture depicting the squidgy material ubiquitous in American playrooms.

Back in 1994, Mr. Koons set out to replicate a colorful mound of Play-Doh configured by his son, Ludwig. It was to have been fashioned from polyethylene, and after seeing the model, a Los Angeles collector named Bill Bell agreed to buy “Play-Doh” on the spot.

“But as I started putting more and more detail in the piece, I realized I needed to make it out of aluminum to get a more hyper-realistic surface,” Mr. Koons said, as if to justify the sculpture’s long gestation.

Twenty years later, “Play-Doh” is still in 27 pieces, and Mr. Bell has never seen it finished. Neither has the Whitney Museum of American Art, where the 10-foot-tall work is to be a centerpiece of its coming Koons survey, one that will consume more space than the museum has ever devoted to a single artist, including Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper or Georgia O’Keeffe.

John von Schmid, sculpture manager of the Jeff Koons studio, demonstrates how a part of the sculpture “Play-Doh” (1994–2014) will get through the front door of the Whitney for its Koons retrospective.

“It’s never easy with Jeff,” said Mr. Bell, who owns 10 of his sculptures and is keenly familiar with the artist’s tardy ways.

The Whitney has had its share of challenging installations. Crews have had to handle toxic molten lead and contend with hanging thousands of pounds of mattresses from the ceiling and smearing them with Entenmann’s cinnamon cake.

But nothing comes close to the test the museum will face with the opening of “Jeff Koons: A Retrospective,” on June 27.

How, for instance, are the art handlers planning to move his 15,000-pound granite “Gorilla” into an elevator only equipped to safely handle 14,000 pounds? (Specialists from the Otis Elevator Company will have to raise the elevator with the sculpture inside it, using chain hoists.)

To get both “Gorilla” and “Play-Doh” inside the museum, the building’s front doors and transom must be removed — a first for the Whitney.

And then there are the supersize balloon dog of polished steel; the golden ceramic Michael Jackson with his pet chimpanzee, Bubbles; the black granite Popeye; basketballs floating in tanks of water; vacuum cleaners encased in vitrines, and the giant canvases painted by scores of assistants depicting figures from antiquity and pop culture.

“It’s the perfect storm of difficulties,” said Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s associate director of programs, who has spent four years organizing the exhibition and accompanied Mr. Koons last month on his helicopter journey. “There are the sheer physical demands of the objects themselves, their high values and the fragile materials, to say nothing of the cliffhanger of waiting for works that have been in production for years.”

Mr. Rothkopf, 37, who has written extensively about Mr. Koons since he was a student at Harvard, has a lot riding on this show. Not only will it fill nearly the entire museum, including the lobby and sculpture court, with some 120 objects, it is also the Whitney’s grand finale before moving to its new home in the meatpacking district in Manhattan next year.

While it would have been far easier to wait and hold the exhibition in the Whitney’s new Renzo Piano-designed building, which will be equipped with commodious loading docks, elevators able to handle unusually heavy artworks and column-free galleries, Mr. Koons explained that he likes seeing his work set against “the patina of the Breuer building,” adding, “There is a brute force reality about the Whitney spaces.”

At 59, Mr. Koons may be one of the most famous living artists around — and the most expensive at auction, a distinction he earned last year when “Balloon Dog (Orange)” sold for $58.4 million. But this will be the first time American audiences will see the sweep of his more than three-decade career in one gulp, 1978 to the present.

“These works resonate on so many levels, for the younger artists he has influenced and for the general public,” said Jeffrey Deitch, Mr. Koons’s former dealer and his friend, who was counting on holding the retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles when he was the director. (Mr. Deitch left the museum last year, and the show will not be traveling to Los Angeles.) “Despite their sophistication, they are accessible. Everybody can relate to a child’s toy or a vacuum cleaner. You don’t need to know art history to be knocked out by them.”

Mr. Koons, who has been making art out of kitsch since the 1980s, has been slammed by some critics as glibly calculating, even as others have praised him. In 1991, Michael Kimmelman wrote in The New York Times, “Just when it looked as if the ’80s were over, Jeff Koons has provided one last, pathetic gasp of the sort of self-promoting hype and sensationalism that characterized the worst of the decade.”

The occasion was a show at the Sonnabend Gallery of paintings depicting Mr. Koons and his first wife, Ilona Staller, the Italian porn star and politician called Cicciolina, engaged in sex acts. (He is now married to Justine Wheeler, an artist who worked in his studio, and they have six children.)

More recently, his work has received considerable praise here and in Europe, where he has had several shows. And one, at the Château de Versailles in France, got considerable attention good and bad for placing a plexiglass-enclosed display of vacuum cleaners and floor polishers in front of the official portrait of Marie Antoinette and installing a bare-breasted blonde holding a pink panther in the same room with a 1729 painting of Louis XV conferring peace upon Europe.

Part of Mr. Koons’s magic is the perfection and seemingly effortless appearance of his objects, but museum experts say they are among the most technically challenging produced today.

“Many of the sculptures are as delicate as Fabergé eggs,” said Mr. Rothkopf, describing their shiny, painted surfaces as one example of why this show is costing “millions of dollars,” for insurance and shipping and refabricating, for example, aging basketballs. (Mr. Rothkopf refused to give exact figures but said the show is the Whitney’s most expensive.)

A list of its lenders reads like a Who’s Who of today’s powerful collectors, including the British artist Damien Hirst, the Los Angeles financier Eli Broad, the hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, the luxury goods magnate François Pinault and the real estate developers Harry Macklowe and his wife, Linda.

By all accounts an artist with this much celebrity should have had at least one major show in a New York museum by now. Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, who also emerged in the 1980s with Mr. Koons, have each had two.

It’s not for lack of trying. Starting in 1996 the Guggenheim Museum had a Koons exhibition on its schedule. But skyrocketing costs coupled with difficulties in making the works to Mr. Koons’s exacting standards killed it. (Not all has been lost for the Guggenheim. After the Whitney’s show closes, it will travel first to the Pompidou Center in Paris and then the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.)

Asked why they finally abandoned the idea, Lisa Dennison, a former Guggenheim director who is currently a chairwoman of Sotheby’s, said that besides the rising costs, “finding the technology to match Jeff’s vision became impossible.”

It is still his biggest problem. In addition to “Play-Doh,” crews are racing to finish several significant sculptures from his “Celebration” series, a group of childlike objects, including party hats, Easter eggs, kittens and the now famous “Balloon Dog.” (And Mr. Bell has yet to see two other purchases: a black granite “Popeye,” which is slated for the retrospective, and a 10-foot tall “Party Hat,” which is not.)

And so, on that spring day, greeting his helicopter pilot like an old friend, Mr. Koons rose above the rush-hour jam on his flight to the Polich Tallix foundry in Rock Tavern, N.Y.

In its cavernous space dozens of workers stood by, anxiously watching Mr. Koons’s reaction to the progress of “Play-Doh.” The artist gently caressed a rippled portion of the aluminum surface and said, in his signature monotone that almost seems scripted in its sincerity: “Look how sensual these forms are. When you rip Play-Doh apart and stretch it, you get these lines. It’s like a Rodin sculpture.”

Later in the day, back at the artist’s Chelsea studio — where more than 100 assistants were performing any number of tasks, including painting canvases and choosing which of some dozen store-bought inflatable monkeys might be replicated as sculpture — it was easy to see why everything Mr. Koons does takes so much time.

Realizing “Play-Doh” was “almost Pharaonic,” Mr. Rothkopf said. There was also a re-creation of the Liberty Bell under way, made of bronze. An assistant was painting its wooden stand, choosing from a palette of 129 shades of brown, each matched precisely by computer to the original.

“It’s a moral exercise to make something as realistic as possible,” Mr. Koons said, explaining that he liked his Bell not only for its “sense of history” but also for its sensuous shape, a “feminine form.”

His choice of colors for “Play-Doh” was equally exacting. Mr. Koons ran off, coming back with a tray with small containers of vintage, dried-up Play-Doh, dating to 1994. “Over the years, the company has changed its colors,” Mr. Koons explained, asked why he had saved the samples and original containers. “They are easy to refresh with a little water.” Tiny mounds of bright yellow, blue, purple, red and green will be matched and spray-painted on the cast-aluminum parts at a company in Connecticut that specializes in decorative painting of hot rods and vintage cars. Then they will be assembled into a gigantic mound.

Finishing “Play-Doh” in time for the retrospective is one hurdle. Installing it on the museum’s fourth floor is another.

A few days later, Mr. Rothkopf and Graham Miles, an art handler at the Whitney, were hunkered down in the museum’s subbasement, planning maneuvers. “It has been like a military operation,” Mr. Rothkopf said. The installation of the show will take three weeks, with crews working seven days a week in 11-hour shifts.

Not leaving anything to chance, Mr. Miles’s team, working with assistants from Mr. Koons’s studio, made a video of a small-scale model of “Play-Doh” to chart exactly how it will move through the museum lobby, into the elevator and up, where it will join other works from the “Celebration” series.

“Every 16th of an inch is critical,” Mr. Miles said. “There’s no room for error. It’s like getting a ship in the bottle 30 times over.”

Mr. Rothkopf said he and others from the Whitney felt it was crucial that the museum’s last show, which is expected to generate record crowds, be like no other.

“We didn’t want to leave uptown feeling nostalgic, we wanted to go out with a bang,” he said. “Let’s just hope we don’t bring the building down with us.”

George Lindemann Journal - "Are Museums Selling Out?" By ELLEN GAMERMAN

A Bulgari snake bracelet-watch on display in Houston. Julie Soefer for The Wall Street Journal

A display of Bulgari jewels in Houston features cases of spot-lit gems, photos of Angelina Jolie and Keira Knightley laden with signature baubles and testimonials about the company's "shimmering, iconic jewelry."

Pretty typical for a jewelry presentation except for one thing: It isn't in a store, but a museum.

The exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, "Bulgari: 130 Years of Masterpieces," includes slick video and screen displays, hologram-like installations and glowing descriptions of the pieces—all created by Bulgari, which supplied most of the jewels, footed half the bill, and provided the catalog essay.

The timing of the exhibit is also notable. The same week the museum show opened in May, Bulgari unveiled a gleaming makeover of its boutique in a Houston luxury mall. The company brought in experts from Rome to help rebuild the shop, which is partly inspired by the Via Condotti flagship store and features some of the same images of gem-covered movie stars on its walls as the museum exhibit, along with leaflets and window banners advertising the show.

Exhibits featuring luxury fashion and jewelry brands are increasingly jamming museum calendars. For cultural institutions, the shows offer the potential for a blockbuster that attracts a broader range of visitors, brings in big first-time donors and tours the world. To date, more than one million people have seen a traveling global exhibit about designer Jean Paul Gaultier, what museum experts call a record number for any fashion exhibit.

For luxury companies, museum exhibits are becoming an important new tool in their marketing arsenals. Fashion and jewelry executives have long cultivated museum shows to provide a stamp of legitimacy and a chance to stand out in a crowded marketplace. Now, big brands have gone further, hiring curators to shop shows to museums, spending millions to build their archives for exhibit loans, wooing arts venues in strategic markets and enlisting stores and VIP clients to help secure and promote these shows.

Individual luxury items that boast a museum pedigree can soar in value. A Van Cleef & Arpels art-deco diamond brooch sold for more than $662,000 at Christie's in New York in 2011—more than eight times its high estimate. The sale followed the piece's appearance in "Set in Style: The Jewelry of Van Cleef & Arpels," a 2011 exhibit at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum that drew record-breaking crowds in New York.

"These exhibitions are very, very important for us," says Nicholas Bos, CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels. "When clients see some pieces exhibited in the museum that are pretty similar to ones they've bought, it confirms to them that it's a valid choice, and it's a good incentive to add to their collection."

The explosion of recent exhibitions featuring fashion, jewelry and other luxury accessories includes shows created with input and money from the featured brands. Chanel curated and paid for the creation of its brand-related exhibits, known as "Culture Chanel," which museums and arts institutions went on to stage in Moscow, Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, China. A Chanel spokeswoman says the company sometimes helps cover installation costs at the venues, too. This year, a collector of David Webb jewelry and a major dealer sponsored an independently curated show about the society jeweler at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla. An exhibit on Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry that closed earlier this year at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif., was curated by a Van Cleef employee with production costs paid partly by the jeweler.

Even for shows whose curators or sponsors have little connection to the luxury business, a brand's cooperation is often pivotal. A coming September exhibit curated by the Brooklyn Museum, "Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe," will feature lent pieces from a wide range of established and emerging designers including Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin. (A museum spokeswoman says the show has no confirmed sponsors yet.) Cartier didn't sponsor the Denver Art Museum's new fall exhibit, "Brilliant: Cartier in the 20th Century," but it opened its gem vault and various archives to the museum's curator more than a dozen times. The Gaultier retrospective, making its ninth stop this fall in Melbourne, Australia, was originally conceived by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts without funding by the brand. But its curator, former model Thierry-Maxime Loriot, worked closely with Mr. Gaultier and sought his approval. "It's his baby, it's my baby," says Mr. Loriot.

Putting the Shine on Display

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A look at luxury brand shows at museums across the world. Leonardo Finotti

The sheer number of luxury shows today—and the differing levels of corporate involvement for each—have some critics increasingly concerned. While some museums assert complete curatorial control and refuse brand sponsorships, others install exhibits with major corporate involvement, and varying degrees of disclosure about that relationship.

"Nobody ever said museums are pure, but at least there's an element of public trust that when you go to a museum, what you're seeing is museum worthy," says Bruce Altshuler, director of New York University's Program in Museum Studies. "The widespread exhibiting of luxury-brand goods erodes that trust."

Other museum professionals argue that some of these exhibits cede too much control over content.

"When the company is the curator, it's the appearance of a conflict that we stay away from," says Alex Nyerges, director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where officials recently rejected a proposed exhibit about a movie remake because it seemed too promotional. "The notion that we may be in bed with a commercial venture in a less than appropriate fashion—it's not worth it."

Many museum curators say luxury exhibits featuring work by living designers are no different from art exhibits featuring living artists. Why is it a conflict to work with a wildly creative couture or jewelry house, they ask, when the economic benefits from museum shows could be even greater for fine artists? In the end, they say, the only thing that matters is quality.

"The hunt for conflict of interest is irrelevant to the museum visitor—the exhibition stands or falls on the strength of the artistry of the material displayed," says Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. As the former head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's modern art department in New York, Mr. Tinterow was an early supporter of a widely debated show about a jeweler known as JAR. "I've worked with lots of living artists, I've worked with dead artists—there are always interests at stake."

A Cartier necklace will be displayed at the Denver Art Museum. Cartier

With stepped-up competition from rivals, fashion and jewelry labels are investing heavily in museum outreach. In 2011, Chanel hired a former curator at the Louvre in Paris, Emmanuel Coquery, to head its "patrimony department," which is responsible for compiling heritage pieces that can be shown in museums. The company, which opened a sprawling new space for its archives outside Paris last year, uses its Culture Chanel shows to demonstrate the art world's influence on the brand, a spokeswoman says. The shows display paintings, photographs, archival materials and other objects next to Chanel pieces such as the little black dress, jewelry or perfume. The company's biggest Culture Chanel show opens in Seoul this summer.

Christian Dior CDI.FR +0.34% has been busy, too. "The last five years have been very rich ones for the house of Dior when it comes to exhibitions," Sidney Toledano, president and CEO of Christian Dior Couture, said in an email.

Dior works closely with museums to place its fashions alongside art in a series of themed exhibits with names like "Inspiration Dior" and "Esprit Dior." The company, which collaborates with external curators for the shows, declined to discuss the funding arrangements for these exhibits.

In 2011, a Dior show at Moscow's Pushkin Museum paired haute couture pieces with paintings by masters like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse; a show at Shanghai's Museum of Contemporary Art last year presented an Alberto Giacometti sculpture next to dresses from Raf Simons's first haute-couture collection for Dior. Attempts to reach the two museums were unsuccessful.

The venues in growing luxury markets like Russia and China aren't accidental. Bain & Co. says Chinese consumers make up nearly 30% of the global luxury market. Russia ranks third in the number of the world's billionaires, according to Forbes. "The country and city are chosen firstly for strategic reasons, based on the markets in which we want to focus our communication," said Mr. Toledano, adding that sometimes museums approach Dior to initiate a show.

The Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif., chose to have its 2013-2014 Van Cleef & Arpels show curated by the company's "heritage director" Catherine Cariou, who joined Van Cleef in 2000 after working in French auction houses. Museum President Peter Keller said it made sense to have Ms. Cariou curate because of her access and expertise. "She's in charge of the foundation archives—she knows the collection better than anyone," he said. The museum's budget is too small to cover in-house curators so all shows are guest curated.

MUSEUM BLING A Bulgari sautoir necklace once owned by Elizabeth Taylor is featured in a current exhibit in Houston. Museum shows can burnish a brand's image and increase gem values. Bulgari

The show opening at the Bowers coincided with the expansion of a Van Cleef boutique in nearby Costa Mesa, Calif. Although the Bowers noted the store unveiling in its media materials, Mr. Keller says he planned the show well in advance of the store renovation. He calls the museum's efforts on behalf of the boutique too minor to qualify as marketing: "Just because it's in a press release? How many people read a press release?"

A Bulgari exhibit that opened at the Grand Palais in Paris in late 2010 was a private event staged by the company rather than a project organized by independent curators, a distinction that might have been lost on the general public at the time, says Grand Palais chief curator and exhibitions director Laurent Salomé. The Grand Palais is considering changes to make it clearer to audiences when private interests are at work, he adds: "Bulgari was maybe the big problematic exception."

The line between retail promotion and museum exhibits has become increasingly blurred. For this year's exhibit on the society jeweler David Webb, the Norton Museum of Art employed the same architect and designer who worked on the brand's Manhattan flagship location to design the galleries for the Florida museum show, too.

"We wanted people who were accustomed to creating luxe interiors," says Norton deputy director James Hall. Designer Katie Ridder says she used the same color scheme for the interiors and velvet for the display cases as she did for the Madison Avenue boutique: "I think it definitely has a similar feeling as the store."

The exhibit was first proposed by the husband of a board member who collects David Webb's jewelry and was partly funded by that couple, Mr. Hall says. A major local dealer of David Webb jewelry also paid for the show. The exhibit, assembled by a freelance curator, was chosen because of the strength of the pieces and the jeweler's connections to Palm Beach, says Mr. Hall, adding that he doubted the show increased the market value of the jewelry.

The American Alliance of Museums guidelines on exhibition ethics don't specifically address brand-themed shows, and, regardless, all of its suggestions are voluntary. Most museums write their own institutional codes of ethics and are subject to local, state and federal laws and international conventions governing nonprofits.

At the Bulgari exhibit at Houston's Museum of Natural Science one recent afternoon, images of bejeweled stars such as Jennifer Aniston and Jessica Alba flashed on screens. A former cast member from "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills," Camille Grammer, perused the vitrines with her Louis Vuitton purse slung over her Chanel jacket. Cocktail music tinkled in the background.

Two people familiar with the exhibition planning say a staffer from Houston's Bulgari boutique made the initial overture to the museum in 2012. Joel Bartsch, the museum's president, and Alberto Festa, president of Bulgari North America, say they can't quite remember who initiated negotiations over the show.

Cartier in Paris Pierre-Olivier Deschamps/Agence VU/Cartier

Bulgari officials eventually made a presentation to Mr. Bartsch, suggesting ways a recent Bulgari exhibit at the de Young museum in San Francisco could be retooled for Houston. He was impressed.

"They had done their homework," he says, adding that the Bulgari team was familiar with the museum's gem collection and its commitment to jewelry exhibits.

Houston socialites soon were helping with loans to the show. Joanne King Herring, a political activist and widow of a natural-gas tycoon, volunteered her Bulgari sautoir necklace with scores of diamonds, a piece she spotted in a window of New York's Pierre hotel in the 1970s. "My husband said, 'Well, do you want that or the state of Rhode Island?'" she recalls.

People with knowledge of the Bulgari negotiations say the museum exhibit was the main impetus for the Houston store's makeover. Workers toiled all weekend to get the boutique ready for the show's debut, one person said. Mr. Festa says the timing was coincidental and largely due to the expiration of the shop's 10-year lease and its outdated design.

For the exhibit openings in Houston and San Francisco, Bulgari boutiques in those cities were supplied with stacks of tickets so employees could offer VIP customers and foreign visitors tours of the galleries, according to people familiar with the exhibits. In some cases, the shop set up appointments ahead of time so that visitors could go straight from the museum to the store, one person said.

Mr. Bartsch, a gems expert, says the exhibit's aim is educational: "This is about the design and quality of the stones, with a connection to natural history and the technology that goes into making the pieces," he says. "One of the major points is that these pieces are not for sale and are not going to be for sale. This is a historical retrospective exhibition."

Bulgari, an Italian jewelry company purchased in 2011 by Paris-based luxury conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, MC.FR -0.24% started its push for exhibitions five years ago with a 600-piece show at a cultural center in Rome. The next year, Bulgari rented the Grand Palais in Paris for an exhibit. Bulgari shows followed in Beijing and Shanghai, and Mr. Festa says China is interested in more.

"Clearly now there are going to be more exhibitions world-wide, which is an initiative of LVMH," says Amanda Triossi, an independent curator who created Bulgari's heritage collection and helped develop many Bulgari museum exhibits.

In recent months, Bulgari executives have approached the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Perez Art Museum Miami as well as institutions in Dallas and Chicago to lobby for shows featuring its jewelry archive, says Mr. Festa, adding: "I approached other institutions in the country mainly where we have stores."

For more than a decade, Bulgari has been buying back its collection of archival jewelry—the pieces often displayed in museum shows—including nabbing more than $20 million worth of Elizabeth Taylor's jewelry at a Christie's sale in 2011.

People familiar with Bulgari's business practices say that while archival pieces aren't for sale, customers can ask the company to create a custom-made piece that draws inspiration from the original as long as it is valued at $50,000 or sometimes more.

For Ms. Grammer, who paused in the Houston show to stare at a 1967 necklace with emeralds, rubies, sapphires and diamonds, the exhibit renewed her love for the brand. She owns two Bulgari pieces, gifts from her ex-husband, the actor Kelsey Grammer. "People have questioned me, 'Why would you wear anything your husband gave you after the divorce?'" she says. "Why wouldn't you? They're works of art."

Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com

George Lindemann Journal - "El Anatsui’s Miami Beach exhibition at Bass merges colonial past with contemporary art" @miamiherald by George Fishman

Gravity and Grace is an apt title for this retrospective of internationally celebrated artist El Anatsui. But look for playful notes as well. The Bass Museum, Miami-Dade County’s oldest municipal exhibition space, is celebrating its 50th year, and this dazzling show provides a fitting complement to current and planned presentations.

Anatsui’s voluptuous, fluid, metal wall sculptures dominate the show. These breakthrough works have catapulted the artist into global acclaim during the past decade. Combining the homey appeal of vibrant patchwork quilts with the sophisticated color blending of tessellated mosaics and digital pixelation, his category-crossing works dramatically swoop and drape from wall to floor and convey the majesty of natural phenomena.

In Africa, where resources are often scarce, milk cartons, soft drink cans and other found objects are used to make toys and household goods. Anatsui uses them not out of necessity, but as a reference to the history of colonialism, which the artist, born in Ghana, knows well.

Bass curator of exhibitions José Carlos Diaz provided a comprehensive tour that began on the ground level with an array of floor-mounted sculptures called Peak, which resemble miniature mountain ranges . He explained that these were fabricated from the lids of shiny/rusty milk cans.

“Peak” also is a brand of canned milk that is ubiquitous in Ghana and in Nigeria, where Anatsui has lived since 1975. The lids are a residue of the historically lopsided trade between Europe and Africa. As it says on the Dutch company’s website, “For millions of Nigerians, Peak is milk and milk is Peak.”

Since the late ’90s, the artist has taken thousands of such tin can lids and liquor bottle caps, directing a crew of studio assistants to cut, pierce, fold and wire them into distinctive forms and compositions.

On a nearby wall, Ink Splash, the smallest work in the show, spills onto the floor, representing the intersection of painting and sculpture. “It looks a lot like a mosaic, but then you start noticing the ruffles and folds. The piece is very much in movement,” Diaz says. “It’s not static and it wants to either touch the ground or creep elsewhere.”

SLAVE TRADE

The liquor bottle caps bear a grim association with the slave trade route connecting Europe, Africa and the Americas. Anatsui’s work is not overtly political, but the back story remains potent.

Ellen Rudolph, the former senior curator of the Akron Art Museum, first conceived and organized the show there. Bass Director Silvia Karman Cubiña recognized an inspired fit for South Florida’s multifarious audiences. It will complete its five-stop tour in San Diego.

The tour continues along the ramp that connects the Bass’ first and second floors, providing unique viewing positions. Peak, when seen from above, flows caterpillar-like. Mask of Humankind transforms from pixelated patchiness into a blended color field “painting” when viewed from near and far.

Diaz says, “As you approach them you can see that each bottle cap has a combination of colors — whether it’s from the graphic logos, whether it’s because they’re paired together with similar other bottle caps, whether the bottle cap is in reverse, so you’re seeing the metal and not the actual color of the logo or the graphic.”

The eight segments of Drifting Continents evoke the varied character of topographies — and of people. They nudge one another along the wall flanking the ramp.

“Just the way they are unique in their presentation, they are unique in their construction. They’re asymmetrical, and there are no 90-degree angles.”

As we approach the top of the ramp, Diaz points out that Ozone Layer’s “fabric” has been opened up, and individual squares gently flap in the breezes provided by an array of semi-hidden fans.

The next gallery is devoted to Wall. This five-part installation explores how mankind creates barriers. But by using only the bottle cap rings, Anatsui created a lacy translucency through which visitors are revealed and obscured.

“Although we’re physically prevented from traveling through them, we can visually experience the whole room without the barriers blocking our vision,” Diaz remarks as we pass among the diaphanous veils.

Fabrication and installation are both labor-intensive. “In his studio in Nigeria, individuals pound and weave together small sheets of these bottle caps. They’re placed on the floor, and El Anatsui, in an abstract way, pieces together colors and textures to find a final resolution … and with the studio assistants he is able to play with texture and color and when he’s satisfied, able to combine them,” Diaz says.

Even the seemingly monochromatic Red Block and Black Block — both as elegant as evening gowns — reveal nuances of pointillist color blending when closely examined in their second-floor gallery.

INSTALLATION

Like enormous rugs, the crated metal works arrive stacked or rolled. Although the artist gives considerable latitude to each venue for installation, the Akron Art Museum sends their experienced preparator for guidance. The jagged and malleable pieces are beautiful to look at but hazardous to manipulate.

“We’ve used two scissors lifts,” Diaz says. “We have to take the whole work rolled up, and essentially drop it down. As it cascades down we’ll start to place hooks, lift portions of the work so it can start taking some of the weight and essentially creating all these grooves and curves and folds.”

“There is an excitement to see what one hook, one screw can do to transform the whole piece.” Then, during final days, the artist made a variety of “tweaks.”

The tour next takes a look back. “The orange room we are entering is the very middle of the exhibition,” says Diaz. “It features the wooden works that El Anatsui has made since the mid-’80s. What’s interesting to note is that the room also includes preliminary sketches for these.”

Anatsui doesn’t sketch his metal pieces, but the wooden sculptures and drawings prefigure these later works in several ways.

“You’ll see the appearance of colors. You’ll see the appearance of motifs that look like gathered circles — cut circles, which would become bottle caps,” Diaz explains. “The works also have early elements of the use of copper wire. You’ll see copper wire that’s coiled around the wooden posts.”

There are anthropomorphic and totem-like qualities in these pieces, which reveal the artist’s deep grounding in African visual and social history. Also, lively patterning. Comparison to African kente cloth and to European tapestry is inevitable but limiting. Although surrounded by weavers during his childhood, the artist had no affinity for fabrics during his student years. And he has expressed regret that some viewers look no deeper than this facile association with textiles when assessing his work.

FINAL GALLERY

The Drainpipes series is both playful and sinister. According to Diaz, “They appear to be coming from the wall and appear snakelike, crawling toward you. They have that element of danger with the sharpness, the rust, which essentially would prevent you from touching the work or wanting to approach it.”

The Waste Paper Bag sculptures suggest the bane of insufficient recycling programs, as well as the transience of all things. Using discarded newspaper printing plates to fabricate them, Anatsui has enlarged these mundane forms to monumental scale.

“[Y]ou can actually make out actual Nigerian newspaper — whether it’s sports, advertising politics or crime. So, there is the sense of history being gathered in the way that you would with a history book or a scrapbook or an album.”

In this same enormous room, Garden Wall flows smoothly down from its wall moorings and unevenly across the floor. “The artist actually moved into the piece and started creating piles. He wanted to give the reference that the work was still growing from the ground up,” Diaz says.

“Colors meet and merge, referencing nature both through texture and color. Color combinations resemble details of a Turner painting.”

Diaz’s tour concludes with Gravity and Grace, the namesake of the exhibition, which merits its title. “The artist wanted the piece to have a sense of being grounded and a sense of elevating. It’s very special because the work is able to take on one of the largest walls in the museum and have such a presence in the room.”

During the day, natural clerestory light enlivens its richly modulating colors and textures.

Art historian and educator Adrienne von Lates was among the first visitors. She spoke about Anatsui’s transformation of materials. “He turns these things into magnificent constructions that sometimes look like they’re going to come alive.”

“He is trained in Western art and the abstract tradition, but he also takes some of the African tradition of using recycled objects and does it so brilliantly — so [he] combines African and modernist ideas to create something that gives you that sense of the sublime that we’re always talking about when we’re looking at big abstract art.”

George Lindemann Journal - "America’s least wealthy art collectors see 50/50 vision realized" @timesofisrael By Renee Ghert-Zand

Audiences around the United States are streaming into museums to view contemporary art collections enriched by two of the country’s least wealthy art patrons. Although Herbert and Dorothy Vogel are retired civil servants without independent means who live in a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment, they amassed a collection of close to 5,000 pieces of conceptual and minimalist art. In 2008, they gifted 50 works to 50 museums, one in each state.

The Vogels donated the art works with the provision that they would be exhibited within five years. Now, midway through 2014, nearly all of the museums have complied with the stipulation, and a film has been made documenting the impact of the Vogel’s 50/50 vision on the museums and their audiences.

“Herb & Dorothy 50×50” by Brooklyn-based director Megumi Sasaki, reveals the Vogels’ story captivates museumgoers and art lovers as much as the art itself. (The film is a sequel to the 2008 film “Herb & Dorothy,” which introduced the couple to an audience outside the art world.)

“The story of Herb and Dorothy goes beyond a story of art,” Sasaki tells The Times of Israel. “I think the most striking thing is that they could have been millionaires, but they never sold anything. It’s hard to believe such people exist — especially in New York!”

In 1992, the Vogels entered in to an agreement with the National Gallery of Art, granting it stewardship of the couple’s collection. At the time, they had 2,400 paintings, objects, drawing, photographs, prints and illustrated books. Although they gave some pieces to other institutions, they chose to entrust the vast majority of their collection to the NGA because of its practice never to de-accession, or sell off, any works.

By the time the NGA assisted the Vogels in actualizing the Fifty Works for Fifty States project, the collection had basically doubled in size, and included works by Robert Barry, Will Barnet, Lynda Benglis, Sol LeWitt, Edda Renouf, Richard Tuttle, Pat Steir, Robert Mangold, Mark Kostabi and 168 others.

The couple was known for befriending and patronizing artists before they became famous.

“We only bought what we could afford, and we bought what we liked,” Dorothy Vogel explains in a phone conversation with The Times of Israel. They lived off Dorothy’s public librarian salary and used Herb’s postal clerk pay to acquire art.

“They defied ‘art collector’ stereotypes and stuck to their own rules. They —  especially Herb — had an amazing eye,” says Sasaki.

Cheryl Laemmle (American, b. 1947), Happy Birthday 1990, 1990.Oil on canvas. 18 x 13 7/8 inches. Fleming Museum of Art, 2009.4.19

Herb Vogel died just shy of his 90^th birthday in July 2012, but Dorothy, 79, continues to live in the apartment they moved to soon after their 1962 marriage. It’s also where they stored their massive collection.

While Dorothy no longer collects art, she does keep close tabs on what is being done with the pieces that she and her husband gave to the museums across the country.

“The website has not been completed,” she noted with some impatience about Vogel5050.org, the site created to document and publicize the project. The museums are expected to upload all the works donated to them by the Vogels as soon as they have been exhibited.

At the same time, Dorothy admits that keeping up with the administrative tasks associated with an art collection can be daunting.

“I gave up on trying to keep a cataloguing system at some point,” she recounts about the years when all the art was somehow crammed in to the apartment, along with her, her husband and a menagerie of cats, turtles and fish. The walls, ceilings and floors were covered with art works, and hundreds of others were stored in closets and cabinets, on shelves, and even under the bed.

“Sometimes there were pieces I never even got to see. Herbie would come home with something and stash it away while I wasn’t there,” she recalls. “The first time I saw them was when they were exhibited.”

The couple never thought to rent a storage unit. “To tell you the truth, I was always the one who was worried what we should do with the collection,” Dorothy shares. “I worried there might be a fire or a theft, but nothing happened.”

Archival photo of art lovers and collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel (Courtesy of Fineline Media)

Well, not exactly. One thing did happen. A fish in a tank placed in front of an Andy Warhol jumped up and splashed the artwork. “We had to restore that one piece,” she says.

Herb was the driving force behind the couple’s appreciation for and collecting of art. Born to an Orthodox Jewish immigrant family in Manhattan, he would visit museums with his father. According to his wife, his first interest was nature, but at some point his passion shifted to art. Although Herb never finished high school, he studied art history and took painting courses at New York University.

“He hung out with artists and wanted to be a painter,” Dorothy says.

Dorothy, who describes herself as a proud, cultural Jew (“I don’t fast, but I don’t go out on Yom Kippur”), grew up in a Conservative family in Elmira, New York. Although her first love was music history, she learned to embrace the visual arts after meeting Herb at a reunion event in the city for young people who had vacationed at a Jewish resort in the Poconos.

Although she doesn’t consider herself religious in any way, Dorothy does not believe in mere coincidence.

“Things are set in motion beyond. I was meant to do this,” she says of her meeting Herb and the ultimately far-reaching art collection journey they set out on together.

Vik Muniz (American, b. Brazil 1961)
Untitled
1999
photographic image on porcelain
Overall: 12 3/8in. (31.4cm) dia.

They had no initial inkling that their collection would ultimately make so significant an impact on institutions and individuals nationwide. Janie Cohen, director of the Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont, one of the Fifty Works for Fifty States recipients, appreciates the Vogel collection for its thoughtfulness and the fact that it covers a very specific period in American art with “a pretty broad reach.”

The Fleming Museum has mounted two exhibitions of its Vogel collection, one of paintings and sculpture and one of works on paper.

“The shows generated a lot of interest,” Cohen notes. “And the impact has been not only with the public, but also with our teaching at the university.”

The 50 works gifted to the Huntington Museum of Art in Huntington, West Virginia filled a gap in its collection. “We had little in our contemporary collection that was minimalist and conceptual,” shares senior curator Jenine Culligan.

“Some of these works, like Richard Tuttle’s notebook drawings, are really different and they sparked a conversation among viewers about what art is,” she reports. “It’s an important question, especially since our audience is made up of a lot of first-time museumgoers, as there are not many museums in our region.”

Looking back, Dorothy realizes she misses the people more than the art.

“Being part of the art world was important to me. It’s interesting to know the art and artists of your time.”

Ronnie Landfield (American, b. 1947), Step in Time, 1985.Acrylic on canvas. 22 x 15 inches. Fleming Museum of Art, 2009.4.23

Herb and Dorothy slowly withdrew themselves from the art world as Herb’s health deteriorated in his last years and Dorothy focused her energies on taking care of him. But for as long as they possibly could, they attended the openings of the exhibitions at the 50 museums, Dorothy pushing Herb in his wheelchair through the galleries.

“I did the right thing,” says Dorothy as she looks back not only on the decision to share her and her husband’s collection with the people of the United States, but also on her life with Herb.

“He did what he wanted to do and I helped him. I enjoyed doing it with him.”

Read more: America's least wealthy art collectors see 50/50 vision realized | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/americas-least-wealthy-art-collectors-see-5050-vision-realized/#ixzz34A8XdI00
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"Delaware Art Museum's Planned Sale of Homer Work Draws Ire" @wsj by Scott Calvert

'Milking Time' by Winslow Homer, which the Delaware Art Museum is planning to sell to help pay off debt. Bridgeman Images

For a small institution, the Delaware Art Museum is wrestling with a big conundrum.

The museum is moving ahead with plans to sell at least two paintings to pay off a debt, including a popular piece by American master Winslow Homer. The rare move has roiled the art world, where a collection is considered a public trust.

The museum says selling as many as four works is the only way it can retire a $19.8 million debt and replenish its endowment. It says the alternative would be closing the century-old Wilmington institution and its 12,500-object collection.

Disposing of art for a reason except to buy more art violates the ethics policy of the Association of Art Museum Directors. The group warns it may sanction the museum, which could block it from sharing works with most other U.S. museums.

"It's a tragedy when works that belong to the community get sold," said Ford Bell, president of the American Alliance of Museums, which also decried the planned sale.

Delaware museum officials say their decision was made with the community in mind. "I am sad about this, but as a trustee of the museum—not any one piece of art the museum holds—I am in support of doing what is necessary to keep the museum open," said Paula Malone, one of 19 trustees.

Other institutions have faced similar struggles. In March, the museum directors association, which represents 240 directors in North America, sanctioned Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va., and its Maier Museum of Art after the school sold the George Bellows painting "Men of the Docks" to the National Gallery in London for $25.5 million. In Detroit, some creditors are pushing to sell off at least some city-owned works at the Detroit Institute of Arts to restructure roughly $18 billion in long-term obligations as part of the nation's largest municipal bankruptcy case.

The college's president, Brad Bateman, said the museum was being unfairly punished for the college's decision. Such decisions don't necessarily mean art will vanish from public view: The Maier gets about 7,000 visitors a year, a fraction of the foot traffic at the London museum.

Michael Miller, chief executive of the Delaware Art Museum, declined to comment on specifics except to confirm the museum's previously announced intention to shed "Isabella and the Pot of Basil" by William Holman Hunt. The piece is scheduled to be auctioned this month in London, where Christie's expects the 1867 pre-Raphaelite work to fetch as much as to $13.4 million.

Homer's "Milking Time" could be next. The 1875 painting depicts a pastoral scene, with a woman standing beside a boy who gazes at cows while perched on a wood fence. It is undergoing conservation at Sotheby's ahead of being shopped on the private market, a person familiar with the matter said. Only eight Homer paintings have gone to auction in the past five years.

Sotheby's declined to comment on the Homer painting.

The Delaware museum's former executive director, Danielle Rice, called the two pieces among her favorites in the galleries. A poster of "Milking Time" goes for $15 in the gift shop, and it was used in a 2012 advertising campaign for the museum.

"I'm actually aching inside at the thought of losing those objects for the public," she said.

Ms. Rice said that when the American Folk Art Museum in New York faced financial woes in 2011, it sold its midtown Manhattan site instead of dipping into its collection.

Mr. Miller said selling the Delaware museum's building wouldn't raise nearly enough. The museum says it has cut staff and exhibition funding and tried to refinance the debt. The goal is to raise $30 million, mostly to pay off debt from a 2005 expansion and renovation.

—Matthew Dolan contributed to this article.

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

George Liindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Pharrell Williams Gets Happy About Art" Inti Landauro

Pharrell Williams —the rapper, record producer, fashion designer and hat-toting singer of pop smash-hit "Happy"—is diving head first into the Paris art scene, curating an exhibition of modern art at one of the city's premier galleries. Photo: Getty Images

Happiness is curating.

Pharrell Williams —the rapper, record producer, fashion designer and hat-toting singer of pop smash-hit "Happy"—is diving head first into the Paris art scene, curating an exhibition of modern art at one of the city's premier galleries.

Called "G I R L," like his most recent album, the show displays art produced by Mr. Williams's friends on the contemporary art scene, such as street artist JR and two artists known for mixing fine arts and Japanese pop culture, Takashi Murakami and a Japanese artist who goes by the name "Mr." Also in the show: Brooklyn-based painter-graphic designer KAWS, Belgian sculptor Johan Creten and French performer-sculptor Prune Nourry. The exhibition opened Tuesday and will close June 25.

                                  

Pharrell Williams at the press conference for the exhibition 'G I R L' at the Galerie Perrotin in Paris. Charlotte Gonzalez for The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Williams's latest creative exploit is a cross-pollination of his different artistic worlds. "It says 'curating by Pharrell Williams,' but it should really be 'the education of Pharrell Williams,' because I'm just learning," said the musician.

French gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin, whom Mr. Williams met in 2007, introduced him to the world of art. The idea for the "G I R L" art show came after Mr. Williams gave the album of the same title to Mr. Perrotin. Both men played with the idea of accompanying the album's launch with an art show, but the huge success of "Happy" brought the record launch ahead by two months.

Mr. Williams isn't a total novice. The musician, age 41, has already created art pieces himself and collaborated with artists on a couple of projects. His first artwork—a series of chairs with human-shape legs, made with the support of Mr. Perrotin—drew positive reviews. He then met several artists, some of whom he ended up working with on projects, as often happens with other musicians.

Photos: Pharrell Williams's Paris Art Show

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Pharrell Williams in front of Takashi Murakami's 'Portrait of Pharrell and Helen - Dance,' 2014. Charlotte Gonzalez for The Wall Street Journal

With Mr. Perrotin and his Galerie Perrotin team, Mr. Williams selected and commissioned art pieces around three themes, building in just 50 days a collection that spreads over two floors of an old townhouse in the chic Marais neighborhood in Paris.

First come art pieces inspired by the singer and made for the show by other artists. There's a tribute to women by a diverse array of artists with varying artistic and political views. Finally, Mr. Williams has picked works by female artists inspired by their relationship to their own bodies.

Being the subject of artworks feels "weird," said Mr. Williams. He worked on some of those pieces, including a collaboration with American artist Rob Pruitt on a couch covered with drawings related to Mr. Williams's career. The pieces of that section include a cast of the singer made of resin and covered with broken glass, by Daniel Arsham. The work required Mr. Williams to stand motionless for several hours, and breathing through a straw for a long period.

Other artworks focus on the music and videos: A painting by Japanese artist Mr. depicts Mr. Williams as a manga-style character dancing amid girls from a host of countries.

While he doesn't see himself as an activist—"I make no apology for my affinity for women"—Mr. Williams says he is a firm supporter of gender equality and doesn't hesitate to speak in favor of causes he considers worthwhile. On Twitter last week, he spoke out for the Iranian youths jailed for posting a video of themselves dancing to "Happy."