The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Strolling an Island of Creativity" @nytimes By KEN JOHNSON and MARTHA SCHWENDENER

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - George Lindemann - "Takashi Murakami's First Film, 'Jellyfish Eyes,' Opens in the U.S."

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - George Lindemann

Movies by visual artists often end up in art-house theaters, though some have broken into the mainstream. 'Jellyfish Eyes,' pictured, is the first feature film of artist Takashi Murakami, whose works have sold for more than $15 million at auction. See a smattering of both. Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co.

Takashi Murakami's candy-colored art is easy to recognize, whether on the walls of a museum or the side of a Louis Vuitton handbag. There is no mistaking the Japanese artist's fanciful hand in his new movie venture, either—"Jellyfish Eyes," his first feature film now playing on a handful of screens in the U.S.

The 52-year-old art-world polymath—a painter, sculptor and animator who has long embraced the merchandising of his own art—has created a live-action, science-fiction fantasy with the same kinds of multi-eyeballed aliens, gooey monsters and voluptuous characters that populate his other works.

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Takashi Murakami Koichiro Matsui

"Jellyfish Eyes," set in Japan after the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster, tells the story of a boy grieving his father's death who moves with his mother to a city filled with strange creatures that only children can see. Along the way he encounters black-cloaked villains trying to harness the children's pain for energy. Mr. Murakami, the director and producer, conceived of the story and its animated characters, which were created using computer-generated imagery. The movie, which runs just over 90 minutes, is intended for all audiences.

With the film, which flopped in Japan last year, Mr. Murakami joins the ranks of visual artists who have also directed movies, like Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Steve McQueen and Matthew Barney. Such films rarely reach wide audiences and are often screened at art spaces rather than movie theaters.

Creative tensions flared in the run-up to this film, the first in a planned trilogy. Mr. Murakami came up with an encyclopedia of animated characters—a froggy fighter that uses its long tongue like a weapon, a red-eyed monkey with a mean streak, a critter with a tin-can head and rocket thrusters—and sketched each one. He told his animators how the characters should move and then waited a month to see the results, which he rejected—again and again, over a year. "It's not a really amicable process," he said through a translator. "By the end of the film, the team was so fed up they didn't want to work on the second film."

The movie is named for its animated hero, a gummy sea-like creature with green eyes and an overbite that mixes its goofy cooing noises with kung fu kicks. A movie version of "Miss ko2," a busty blonde animé-inspired sculpture that is one of Mr. Murakami's best-known artworks, appears in an extended fight scene.

Mr. Murakami's auction record was set in 2008 at more than $15 million with "My lonesome cowboy," a sculpture of a masturbating man whose sale at Sotheby's in New York sparked fierce criticism in Japan. The artist said he has poured the profits from his art sales into the film trilogy, already spending $7 million on the first film and set to spend even more on the sequel.

The movie tour, organized by Mr. Murakami and one of his American galleries, Blum & Poe, started this month with a stop in Dallas and will run into June, screening mostly at museums in cities that include Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. Merchandise for sale at screenings includes plush toy characters from the film, posters, key chains and a T-shirt created with Billionaire Boys Club, the clothing line by musician Pharrell Williams.

The artist had been batting around the idea of a movie for years. After the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant, he worked in earnest. "There was the tragedy of the disaster and the reality that Japan couldn't really process or handle it, and the influence of that on the children," said Mr. Murakami, who makes no secret of his disillusionment with his native country.

"In Japan, there's a culture of putting a lid on anything bad. The entire Japanese society has this atmosphere of, 'We cannot say anything bad about Fukushima, we cannot say we are afraid, we just have to look away from the actual danger.'"

As a child, Mr. Murakami watched documentaries about why Japan lost World War II—"that type of thing was always on TV"—and heard frank talk about the nature of war from his father, a taxi driver who joined the country's military peacekeeping force and left magazines about weapons lying around the house. Along the way, he gorged on Japanese monster flicks and Steven Spielberg's alien blockbusters.

Searching for a vehicle for the supernatural in the film, the artist came up with smartphones, which the children use to summon their increasingly violent CGI sidekicks. Young children don't really understand how such devices work and see them as mysterious, he said, adding: "I thought it might be a good symbol of the dark side, something that resides beyond this black screen that is incomprehensible."

The artist leaves room for the mystical possibilities in his own life, too. On the first day of shooting, Mr. Murakami brought in a master of feng shui, the practice of creating harmonious surroundings based on a belief in the flow of energy. The exercise protected the cast and crew from accidents during filming, he said.

Mr. Murakami, who lives in Tokyo with his wife and their 3-year-old son and baby daughter, said he isn't trying to compete with Hollywood. "You ask me how it did economically and how the reaction was, I had to say, 'Well, it wasn't really great,' and that's sort of embarrassing,'" he said. Still, after some screenings, mothers have told him his movie was the first to make their children cry, which he considers a form of validation. "In terms of the quality of the work, I'm actually really happy with it, especially seeing it from the children's point of view."

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

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Christie’s First Spring Sale Drops Prices Back to Earth" @nytimes By CAROL VOGEL

A Modigliani portrait from 1919 was sold for $17.6 million, above its high estimate of $12 million, at Christie’s on Tuesday. Credit Christie's Images, 2014

After all the predictions that prices were only going one way — up — the spring auction season got off to a tepid start at Christie’s on Tuesday night, where some examples of Impressionist and modern art by Picasso, Kandinsky and Dalí brought far less than expected; others barely skimmed by, and two classic works by Degas were left unsold, victims of estimates that were simply too high.

Christie’s was kicking off two weeks of sales, including the more buoyant segment of the market, postwar and contemporary art, and expectations were running high. The opening night could be seen as a reality check.

“The market continues to be discerning at the highest level,” said Conor Jordan, deputy chairman of Christie’s Impressionist and modern art department. The evening was not without its bright spots. A portrait of a russet-haired young man with blue eyes that Modigliani painted in 1919 brought $17.6 million, well above its $12 million high estimate. It had last been on the market in 2002 at Sotheby’s, where it was sold by Robert C. Guccione, publisher of Penthouse magazine. Back then it brought $8.4 million.

Christie’s had high expectations, having secured several of the season’s high-profile estates, including that of Huguette Clark, the reclusive copper heiress who died in 2011 at the age of 104. Both her father, Senator William A. Clark, and his second wife, Anna, loved all things French, including their art. The most expensive painting was Monet’s dreamy “Nymphéas,” or Water Lilies, painted in 1907 and inspired by the artist’s garden in Giverny. Mrs. Clark had bought it in 1930 from the Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York, and it had not been seen in public since. Four bidders went for the painting, which sold to Elaine Holt, a Christie’s expert in the Impressionist and modern art department based in Hong Kong, who bid on behalf of a client. She paid $27 million, above its $25 million low estimate but far short of its $35 million high.

Asian bidders, especially from mainland China, helped fuel many of the auction’s higher prices, Christie’s officials said. Of the evening’s 53 works, six went unsold. The evening totaled $285.9 million. It had been estimated to bring $244.5 million to $360.4 million.

(Final prices include the buyer’s premium: 25 percent of the first $100,000; 20 percent of the next $100,000 to $2 million; and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

Also coming to auction were three paintings by Renoir, including “Jeunes Filles Jouant au Volant” (“Young Women Playing Badminton”), painted around 1887. Mrs. Clark had purchased it in 1958 for $125,000, a high price at the time, when the Minneapolis Institute of Arts deaccessioned it; on Tuesday night it sold with only one bid at its low $10 million estimate, or $11.3 million with fees. (The painting had been on loan to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington.)

But another Renoir saw some action. “Les Deux Soeurs,” a colorful scene of two sisters with wide-brimmed hats reading, painted around 1890 to 1895, sold to Sumiko Roberts, from Christie’s in London, who was taking bids on behalf of a client. She paid $8 million, well above its high $6 million.

Works from the estate of German collectors Viktor and Marianne Langen brought fairly solid prices and also some bargains. A 1942 Picasso, “Portrait de femme (Dora Maar)” of the artist’s lover and muse, regally posed in purple, was estimated at $25 million to $35 million. Paul Gray, one of the owners of the Richard Gray gallery in Chicago and New York, snapped it up for $20 million, or $22.6 million with fees. “Le Modèle,” one of Braque’s Cubist interiors, this one from 1939, that was expected to sell for $8 million to $12 million, sold for $9.1 million including fees. And a colorful 1909 landscape by Kandinsky sold to a telephone bidder for $17.1 million, above its low $16 million estimate.

Works on paper were in demand. The Langens’ Picasso watercolor, “Composition: Nu sur la Plage,” which he painted on July 13, 1933, was estimated at $1 million to $1.5 million but brought $2.5 million. Five bidders went after a gouache on paper of a Surreal setting — a giant leaf rising and round white ball — with two tiny people in a landscape that Magritte created in 1963. It had been expected to fetch $700,000 to $1 million, and sold for $1.25 million

As the crowd was pouring out of the auction house afterward, people were trying to draw conclusions from the evening’s results. “People are selective,” said Christophe Van de Weghe, a New York dealer. “Yes there’s a lot of money around — but the market is getting smarter.”      

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Fight Over Guggenheim’s Legacy Roils Her Palazzo" @nytimes by DOREEN CARVAJAL

The names of two New York donors next to that of Peggy Guggenheim outside her museum palazzo in Venice. Credit Laia Abril for The New York Times

VENICE — The battle now raging over the Peggy Guggenheim Collection started with just a few words written in brass letters above the sculpted lions that guard the 18th-century palazzo turned art museum here.

On a wall facing the Grand Canal, the names of two Long Island art donors appeared last summer in letters nearly as large as those naming Guggenheim, who bequeathed her home, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, and vast art collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York before her death at 81 in 1979. It was a step too far for some of her relatives.

“I will sue. I will sue. I will sue,” Sandro Rumney, her grandson and a former art dealer, vowed when he confronted the museum’s director during festivities for the Venice Biennale last summer, family members say.

And so they have. Seven descendants who live in France are pressing a lawsuit in a Paris court, with a hearing scheduled for May 21. They charge that the foundation ignored Peggy Guggenheim’s last wish for the collection, which consists mainly of Cubist, Surrealist and abstract postwar art: that it be displayed in the palazzo in its entirety and without additions.

They say the museum has removed nearly half the works and added pieces donated by Rudolph B. and Hannelore B. Schulhof, the parents of Michael P. Schulhof, now a foundation trustee. The relatives are seeking to revoke Guggenheim’s donation if the collection is not restored to its initial state, a requirement that they say was stipulated by the heiress in a 1969 letter. They are demanding that the posted names of the later donors be removed, and that their artworks be taken out of the palazzo and garden.

The family also contends that rentals of the museum garden to well-heeled donors desecrate Guggenheim’s grave. Her remains are interred there in a wall alongside a tribute to “my beloved babies,” as she called them, 14 dogs with names like Cappuccino and Sir Herbert.

The foundation counters that its actions are faithful to Guggenheim’s memory, and that she attached no conditions to the donation. But the family says the foundation is violating her principles by pursuing a New York-centric corporate strategy, including aggressive merchandising of the collection. The museum boasts a new mascot, a bright yellow vinyl “Cappuccino” named for one of Guggenheim’s Lhasa apsos that is being sold in a limited edition for 140 euros ($195) each.

“They are absolutely running Peggy’s collection as a corporate enterprise,” said Sindbad Rumney, 27, a great-grandson and filmmaker who sniffs at the mascot, saying it is more appropriate for Disneyland. “In her lifetime, she would open her house for free to make it accessible,” he said in a phone interview. “She was not a merchant. She was an art lover, a patron. She did not want to be involved in commercial things.”

Peggy Guggenheim lived at the palazzo for the last three decades of her life and was one of the last people in Venice to maintain a private gondolier. The child of Benjamin Guggenheim, who died in 1912 in the sinking of the Titanic, she inherited her fortune in 1919, when she turned 21. After buying the palazzo in 1949, she amassed a 326-piece collection that included paintings and sculptures by modern European and American masters including Picasso, Kandinsky, Miró and Calder.

She began opening her private collection to the public on a seasonal basis in 1951. After her death, the Guggenheim Foundation opened it year round and began expanding the museum by buying up neighboring buildings. The annual number of visitors has since increased to almost 400,000 from 35,000, according to the foundation.

The New York-based foundation, which oversees the Peggy Guggenheim collection, was founded by her uncle Solomon in 1937. The institution owns and controls the Venice museum and exhibitions, which the family acknowledges; what is in dispute is whether managers have respected her wishes as described in the letter.

“The foundation’s efforts have only honored, preserved and enhanced the memory and reputation of Peggy Guggenheim, “ said Betsy Ennis, a spokeswoman for the foundation in New York, noting that none of the works that she collected have been sold, and that they have been carefully conserved. She added that while the family objects to the nature of the garden parties, family members have attended some of them in the past.

But the family’s criticism of the Guggenheim Foundation’s corporate style and ambitions tends to resonate in Europe, where the Guggenheim proposes to create a new €130 million ($180 million) branch in Helsinki and opened a satellite in Bilbao, Spain, in 1997. Another branch is under construction in Abu Dhabi.

The lawsuit filed by the family seeks more financial information about the Venice collection, saying that the foundation has not issued an annual report about it since 2011 and does not disclose information about its revenues. On Monday, the foundation filed a response of nearly 100 pages to the suit in the Paris court, emphasizing that in a 1976 gift deed, no conditions were attached to Peggy Guggenheim’s donation.

But it also submitted a 1974 agreement spelling out her vision for the collection, including conditions outlined in the 1969 letter to her cousin Harry Guggenheim, then the president of the New York foundation. In the letter, she asked that “the collection be kept as a whole in the palazzo.” She was so detailed that she also directed that her earrings should be kept on display. The foundation argues, though, that the accord was not legally executed by lawyers.

It is not the first legal skirmish between the foundation and Peggy Guggenheim’s descendants. In 1992, they sued in a French court over museum displays in Venice that they said clashed with the collector’s vision. The two sides negotiated a settlement that led to the creation of a family committee to keep the descendants informed about museum activities.

Eleanor Goldhar, a spokeswoman for the Guggenheim Foundation, said the committee was “purely symbolic” and did not hold formal meetings, although descendants “received regular communications and updates from the director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.” Relatives contend that communications broke down, and that when some of the grandsons began suffering from ill health, they were ignored.

Santiago Rumney, 22, a son of Sandro who worked as an intern at the Venice museum, suggested that the latest clash began with a series of slights. After relatives were startled by the waterside sign bearing the Schulhofs’ names, he said, he was initially denied entry to an evening gathering in the house. Members of the Schulhof family attended that party to celebrate the donation, but the two sides did not mix, he added.

Hannelore Schulhof died in 2012, and her husband, Rudolph, died in 1999. Michael P. Schulhof, their son, who is now a member of the advisory board of the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation as well as a trustee of the New York-based foundation, declined to comment on the dispute.

The advisory body includes no Guggenheim descendants, something that Santiago Rumney said he wanted to change. “We want to recreate the advisory board with people who care about art, so it is not just for businessmen,“ he said.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "A Romp in Gossamer, 8 Tons’ Worth" @nytimes by HILARIE M. SHEETS

The ceiling has been reinforced. The guards have been retrained. Touching is allowed. Swinging like Tarzan is not.

After almost a decade of institutional effort and expense, an installation by Jesús Rafael Soto, a pioneer in the Kinetic art movement, is finally ready to open at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Now come more challenges.

Ethereal and pristine, “The Houston Penetrable,” as it is called, may not remain that way for long after it makes its public debut on Thursday, in soaring Cullinan Hall, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1958. Sixty visitors at a time will be allowed into its sea of 24,000 glistening clear plastic tubular strands hanging 28 feet from ceiling to floor and spanning the open mezzanine. Floating within is an orb of radiant yellow created by strands painted to compose a perfect ellipse. Viewers can activate the perceptual maze of vibrating light and color by playing among the tubes, as the work’s artist intended.

Born in Venezuela in 1923 and based after 1950 in Paris, where he exhibited alongside Alexander Calder and Jean Tinguely, Soto made over 25 Penetrables in his career; he died in 2005, at 81. A blend of geometric abstraction, Minimalist sculpture and playground, these simple grids of colorful PVC tubing were usually suspended from free-standing frames and often placed outside. Soto always considered them ephemeral, and only a handful have survived the inevitable wear and tear.

Mari Carmen Ramírez, the Houston museum’s curator of Latin American art, commissioned a Penetrable for its permanent collection when Soto visited the museum for its landmark survey of Latin American Modernism, “Inverted Utopias,” in 2004. Soto completed this site-specific design — his largest piece and the only Penetrable to have a painted image — just weeks before his death.

“I have always seen this as an end-of-life work, with this sublime ellipse in the middle as a kind of presence,” Ms. Ramírez said, noting that all the previous Penetrables had been monochromatic.

The museum has tried to stay true to the artist’s free spirit toward his Penetrables while carrying out its essential job of preserving artworks. This year, the piece will stay up through Labor Day.

“This is an important thing to do, because many of Soto’s Penetrables, just like other works of Kinetic artists, whether they be Latin American or French or American, have deteriorated,” said Edward J. Sullivan, an art history professor specializing in Latin American art at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. “There’s been a great deal of debate in conservation circles and in academic circles about how to restore these things and how to display them.”

Ms. Ramírez said, that because Soto’s artworks “really require the viewer to complete the piece,” the museum has “a responsibility to both the artist and audience to figure out how to show those works.”

“Contemporary artists have made it a point to erase the division between art and life and to make their work a participatory experience,” she added. “These works are leading museums to make commitments that would have been unheard-of a few decades ago.”

“The Houston Penetrable” is another in a long line of big-production experiential museum installations in recent years that have included the roof garden environments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Dan Graham (its current exhibition) and Doug and Mike Starn’s labyrinthine Big Bambú, in 2010; James Turrell’s immersive light piece filling the rotunda of the Guggenheim last summer; and Random International’s “Rain Room” at the Modern in 2013.

Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, compared the scope of the Soto undertaking to the efforts to mount Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass,” a mammoth boulder installed outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2012. (Mr. Tinterow declined to give the cost of the project.) Few museums would have dedicated its resources to an artist who, though acclaimed in Latin America and Europe, has little name recognition here. The Houston museum, however, has invested over $50 million in its Latin American program since 2001.

With the artist no longer present, the museum had to assume the primary role of producer. It reached out to Soto’s longtime collaborators in Paris, Paolo Carrozzino and Walter Pellevoisin, for technical expertise. Since no Penetrable had been painted before, they had to do extensive tests to determine what kind of pigment would adhere well to the plastic tubes. (Diluted silk-screen ink was the solution.) Several artisans worked for close to three years hand-painting and labeling the 18,000 elements composing the yellow orb. (Misplace a length of yellow, and it’s no longer a perfect ellipse.)

Mr. Carrozzino, an architect, designed a steel grid with 240 modules, each threaded with 100 strands, that affixes to the ceiling of Cullinan Hall. Other Penetrables were intended to last a few months. “When the museum explains they’re going to keep this for years and years, you need to think about the handling and organization just to mount, dismount, store and remount,” he said. “It’s almost sacred elements that will be part of the collection. It changes the attitude you have.”

Another complication was the weight. Cullinan Hall was designed by Mies so that art could be suspended from the ceiling. But tests showed the hanging points could not support the Penetrable, which weighs more than eight tons. The ceiling had to be reinforced with steel beams, which necessitated asbestos removal. The fund-raising and execution added several more years to the timeline.

Now that the transcendent playground is finally ready, no one knows if the ellipse will warp from the tubes stretching, or how stable the materials will be over time. Cleaning will not come until it’s removed in September for storage.

Ms. Ramírez envisions the Penetrable as a summer perennial. “We hope it will become a cult thing,” she said.

The museum has 400 spare tubes on hand, just in case.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "An Artist Who Let His Ideas (and Others) Do the Work" @nytimes By A. O. SCOTT

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Minimalist Retrospective Gets a Master’s Touch" @ wsj by RANDY KENNEDY

A Minimalist Master Returns

A Minimalist Master Returns

Carl Andre is one of America’s greatest living sculptors. He has been mostly absent from the American art scene for decades, but recently returned to oversee the installation of a new retrospective.

Credit By Oresti Tsonopoulos on Publish Date May 4, 2014

Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Carl Andre, a father of Minimalism and one of the greatest living American sculptors, decided to retire a few years ago, in his mid-70s. And for an exacting artist who usually insisted on arranging and installing most of his pieces himself, on site, retirement had a special ring of finality.

“People ask me what I do now,” Mr. Andre said recently. “And I tell them I do something most Americans find very, very hard to do: I do nothing.”

He was so determined to do nothing, in fact, that when the Dia Art Foundation began more than two years ago to plan a huge, long-overdue retrospective of his work — the show opens on Monday at the foundation’s outpost in Beacon, N.Y. — he told a reporter that he had informed the curators in no uncertain terms: “I can’t stop you from doing it, but don’t expect me to do anything to help.”

But over the last several weeks, to the foundation’s surprise — maybe even to his own — Mr. Andre has been making treks from his Manhattan apartment to Beacon to help oversee the installation, emerging from a kind of self-imposed seclusion that had begun long before his retirement; sightings of him in the art world, for more than two decades, were rare occurrences.

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A Minimalist Retrospective

A Minimalist Retrospective

Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

In part, this absence came about because of what happened early one morning in 1985, when Mr. Andre’s third wife, the promising Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, fell to her death from a bedroom window of their 34th-floor Greenwich Village apartment. She had had an argument with Mr. Andre, who later told the police he was not in the room when she fell.

He was acquitted of second-degree murder. But the death and highly publicized trial created a deep divide in the art world. It caused museums to shy away from him and his work for years and cast a shadow over a career that had been difficult to begin with, composed of work that, as much as any made in the 1960s and ’70s, occasioned the sometimes angry question “Why is that art?” (Asked in a 2011 interview about the effect of Mendieta’s death on him and his career, Mr. Andre said only: “It didn’t change my view of the world or of my work, but it changed me, as all tragedy does. But I have people who love me and believe in me.”)

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During an era when many artists were pulling sculpture off the plinth and making it part of the world in a new way, Mr. Andre went further, taking it all the way to the ground, in pieces made up of metal tiles arranged simply in grids, lines or triangles, meant not only to be looked at but also walked on and experienced with the body. And while other artists were finding beauty and new meaning in raw industrial materials, Mr. Andre used such materials barely altered: aluminum ingots piled in pyramids; firebricks in rectangular stacks; timbers in dimensions available from the sawmill, arranged in basic geometric shapes.

“He was interested in the matter of matter, in what was right underfoot,” the sculptor Richard Serra said. “For me, when I first started out, that was enormously important.” He added: “I hope that Carl’s work is given the recognition that it deserves. And I really hope that younger sculptors pay attention to it.”

While Mr. Andre’s work is in many prominent public collections, there has not been an American survey of his career in more than 30 years, and awareness of his pioneering role in an important postwar sculptural movement has diminished along with his public presence. More than most artists of his generation, his presence was also integral to his art: He worked without a studio, traveling the world to galleries or places that commissioned pieces and often finding the materials to make the works in whatever city he was in. The sculptures were decisively human scale; Mr. Andre usually chose components sized so that he could move them all himself.

“It’s always been easier for me to do it myself, rather than to explain to somebody what to do,” Mr. Andre said, sitting one recent morning, looking at a 1979 piece composed of 121 square pieces of Douglas fir. “But I must say, as I have grown older, my physical capacities have been very much reduced. So I used to be able to sling those timbers around like nothing at all. And I don’t want to try nowadays.”

Asked why he decided to become personally involved in the installation of the retrospective, he shrugged. “People keep un-retiring me,” he said, “and eventually I just give in.”

Mr. Andre — who was raised in Quincy, Mass., and once worked as a railroad brakeman to pay his bills — is slightly unsteady on his feet these days. But he is as quick-witted and dryly caustic as he was said to be in his youth, when he was known as a kind of philosopher-scourge of SoHo, a Marxist who chafed at the commercial art world and being “a kept artist of the imperial class.” At 78, he looks like a Melville-ian sea captain, with a thick white beard under his chin and blue bib overalls, a utilitarian uniform he has worn for years, varied only by the occasional addition of a loose blue sweater vest knitted for him by his fourth wife, the artist Melissa Kretschmer, who is usually at his side.

Yasmil Raymond, Dia’s curator, said the prospect of installing more than four decades’ worth of his work without his input would have been daunting. Before his arrival one recent weekday, she and others had arranged a 2005 work of copper plates and graphite blocks, intended to be placed along a floor with a look of randomness.

“He might just laugh when he sees this,” said Ms. Raymond, who organized the show with Philippe Vergne, Dia’s former director, and the curator Manuel Cirauqui. “I’m trying to make it look random, but I’m looking at it and I’m seeing too much order.” (Upon arriving, Mr. Andre didn’t laugh; he suggested some changes and sympathized with the curator: “Even listing random numbers is hard, you know? Patterns start appearing.”)

Surveying the vast space allotted to his work inside Dia:Beacon, a former box-printing factory, Mr. Andre seemed a little daunted himself. “My work isn’t so big,” he said, almost plaintively. “It’s not big enough.” But he allowed that the diffused daylight coming in through angled skylights was ideal for seeing his sculpture as he intended, with a degree of directness that might seem simple but is never easy to achieve. “People want to spotlight things, and I hate that,” he said. “I like even light, shadowless.”

“No melodrama,” he added, waggling his fingers in the air.

Later, as Mr. Andre stood outside the museum supervising the re-creation of a 1968 piece, “Joint,” which consists of nothing more than hay bales he uses to “draw” a straight line on the earth, joining woods to field, it became apparent just how difficult simplicity can be. The line kept stubbornly curving, as workers laid the bales up the incline into the woods. “How many people does it take to make a straight line?” Ms. Raymond whispered to Mr. Andre.

George Lindemann Journal By George Lindemann "Sotheby's, Third Point Reach Settlement" @wsj by David Benoit

Sotheby's expects Picasso's 'Le Sauvetage' will fetch at least $14 million at auction on Wednesday. Sotheby's

Sold!

Activist investor Daniel Loeb and auction house Sotheby's reached a settlement on Monday that concluded his seven-month campaign to shake up the company a day before shareholders were to vote on his board candidates.

The pact gives Mr. Loeb three board seats by expanding the board to 15 people rather than having Mr. Loeb's candidates go up against company nominees. The deal also caps Mr. Loeb's stock ownership at 15%. His hedge fund, Third Point LLC, currently owns about 9.6%, but it had sought the ability to go to 20%, a request the company had blocked, leading Third Point to sue.

On Monday, Sotheby's shares closed up 3.25%, or $1.41, to $44.80, at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange trading.

Settlements, even just hours before a scheduled vote, have become more common for activists and their targets because advisers believe it is better to hammer out a deal than risk a divisive shareholder vote.

Through last week, there have been 20 settlements between companies and activists so far this year, tied for the most to date since 2009, according to FactSet SharkWatch, a data provider.

In a joint statement on Monday, Mr. Loeb said: "As of today we see ourselves not as the Third Point Nominees but as Sotheby's directors, and we expect to work collaboratively with our fellow board members to enhance long-term value on behalf of all shareholders." Sotheby's Chairman and Chief Executive William Ruprecht also said the last-minute agreement "ensures that our focus is on the business."

The agreement came after a Delaware judge blessed Sotheby's so-called poison pill that limited how much stock Third Point could acquire. Beyond that legal issue, a court hearing last week in the suit enabled Third Point to surface internal board emails showing support for Mr. Loeb's point of view; also disclosed were inflammatory comments by Mr. Loeb. The airing of the various remarks added to the drama of a campaign that had captivated Wall Street and the art world.

Mr. Loeb is not a stranger in board rooms where he has spent time publicly attacking. At Yahoo Inc., YHOO +0.51% Yahoo! Inc. U.S.: Nasdaq ^$37.10 +0.19+0.51% May 6, 2014 1:23 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 8.24M P/E Ratio 30.58 Market Cap $37.15 Billion Dividend Yield N/A Rev. per Employee $383,012 37.2037.0036.8036.6010a11a12p1p2p3p 05/05/14 Sotheby's, Third Point Reach S... 05/05/14 Box Still Targets Microsoft, G... 05/05/14 CMO Today: Facebook Getting Ag... More quote details and news » YHOO in Your Value Your Change Short position before he joined the board, he waged a several-month war that saw a newly hired CEO fired. Yahoo's shares rose more than 85% during the time he was on the board, which was just over a year.

New York-based Sotheby's had criticized his exit at Yahoo in its presentations to shareholders, just one of the points of contention that will now need to be put aside in the auction house's boardroom.

In one such instance, according to a Friday court ruling, Mr. Loeb had emailed allies that he was waging a "holy jihad," with the plan being to "undermine the credibility" of Mr. Ruprecht. Mr. Loeb said the email was intended as a joke and not meant to offend.

Mr. Ruprecht referred to Mr. Loeb as "scum" to another board member and said the campaign was about "ego," the judge's ruling said.

But other directors worried Mr. Loeb's criticisms were on point and raised concerns about the company's spending and Mr. Ruprecht's compensation, according to court testimony.

Putting such distractions behind the company is "good for shareholders," Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analyst David Schick wrote on Monday, because it allows the firm to get back to focusing on its auction business.

That will include Sotheby's spring series of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art sales, which are expected to total at least $684 million during the next two weeks. Mr. Loeb has argued that Sotheby's has fallen behind rival Christie's International PLC in selling contemporary art. Christie's contemporary sale on May 13 is expected to bring in at least $500 million.

Mr. Loeb is among an emerging class of hedge-fund executives and art collectors who frequent both the major auction houses, ratcheting up prices for contemporary artists and quickly reselling their purchases for a profit.

The average holding period for contemporary art works has shrunk to about two years from at least a decade previously, according to a former Sotheby's specialist.

—Kelly Crow contributed to this article.

Write to David Benoit at david.benoit@wsj.com and Sara Germano at sara.germano@wsj.com

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Sotheby’s Yields to Hedge Fund Mogul and Allies" @nytimes by MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED and ALEXANDRA STEVENSON

Julie Jacobson/Associated PressPreparing for Sotheby’s spring sale, beginning on Wednesday.

Updated, 11:48 p.m. | For months, Sotheby’s fought tooth and nail as the hedge fund mogul and longtime client Daniel S. Loeb waged a boardroom war against the auction house in an effort to win board seats and a change in strategy.

Shareholders were set to pick sides at the company’s annual meeting on Tuesday. But as preliminary vote totals late last week showed that Sotheby’s was badly trailing its opponent in investor votes, the company waved a white flag. It agreed on Monday to give Mr. Loeb and two allies the board seats they had been seeking and to allow his firm to increase its stake to 15 percent.

The cease-fire could not have come soon enough. Tuesday is the beginning of the spring auction season in New York, when Sotheby’s and its archrival Christie’s hold their multimillion-dollar sales of Impressionist and contemporary art, the kind now favored by ultrarich collectors around the world. Among the pieces Sotheby’s plans to sell this time around are works by Monet, Matisse and Giacometti, some expected to fetch tens of millions of dollars.

But even as the two sides make peace in one of the bitterest corporate fights in recent memory, fixing Sotheby’s storied reputation as it contends with seismic changes in the business of selling art will be a long slog.

To boot, Sotheby’s will now have an outspoken critic in its boardroom — one who had likened the auction house to “an old master painting in desperate need of restoration” — as the 270-year-old company grapples with competitors eager to claim a cut of the revenue from rare and prominent pieces.

“It’s going to be fascinating what happens next,” said Jeff Rabin, a co-founder of the industry consulting firm Artvest Partners. “I expect a much more aggressive stance from Sotheby’s,” he said, adding that the auction house would focus on changing the strategic direction of the business.

Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Popeye” by Jeff Koons and “Six Self Portraits” by Andy Warhol will be auctioned by Sotheby’s.

Since its founding in 1744 to dispose of a British estate’s rare books, Sotheby’s has become one of the most prestigious names in the art world, with a claim to being the oldest listed company on the New York Stock Exchange. And it has survived numerous setbacks, including a nearly ruinous price-fixing scandal and the financial crisis of 2008.

But it could not best one of its most pugnacious foes to date, one of the most successful corporate dissidents of the last two decades. Over the last several months, Mr. Loeb has incessantly criticized the company’s board expenses and attacked what he called chronic underperformance in what should be a robust market for high-end art.

So-called activist investors, professional money managers who seek to shake up companies in a bid to raise their stock prices, have grown in might over recent years. They have amassed huge war chests, to take on some of the biggest names in corporate America — and win more often than not. Companies are increasingly choosing to settle rather than drag out fights with these hedge fund managers: Twenty-two settlements have been announced so far this year, double the figure two years ago, according to the data provider FactSet.

But from the beginning, more has seemed at stake in the Sotheby’s battle. Mr. Loeb is already one of the most feared activists around, and his firm, Third Point, has claimed victory over the likes of Yahoo.

This, however, was about more than making money for his fund: It has also become a test of his art credentials. The billionaire has cultivated a reputation as a top collector; his vast holdings have included works by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. (One of the Sotheby’s counterattacks that appeared to hit hard was the company’s questioning of his art bona fides.)

The auction house has also faced fierce competition from Christie’s and raced to court the new class of Asian millionaires set to reshape the art sales industry.

Michael Nagle for The New York TimesDaniel S. Loeb, who gained board seats and a larger stake in the firm.

Mr. Loeb began the fight last October when he lobbed a firebomb of a letter to Sotheby’s board demanding the ouster of the longtime chief executive William F. Ruprecht. By that point, he had amassed a 9.3 percent stake — now 9.6 percent — and argued that the company spent too lavishly on its board members and had fallen behind on private sales and technology upgrades.

Another hedge fund, Marcato Capital Management, called for an increase in payouts for shareholders. Together, the two posed a serious threat: The investment firms controlled more than 15 percent of Sotheby’s shares, while its board collectively owned just 1 percent.

In January, the auction house announced a plan to return $450 million to investors through dividends and stock buybacks. And key figures on its board and management reached out to Mr. Loeb, seeking a truce by offering him a directorship with assignments on covetable board committees.

But Mr. Loeb, incensed by what he viewed as insufficient offers, began a public battle by seeking three board seats.

Months of political-style campaigning ensued, with flurries of pointed “fight letters” flying back and forth between the two sides.

Behind the scenes, quieter work was being done. Among those opening communication lines from Sotheby’s side were Domenico De Sole, the co-founder of the fashion house Tom Ford and a respected figure on the auction house’s board, and Patrick S. McClymont, a former Goldman Sachs banker who is now Sotheby’s chief financial officer.

And Mr. Loeb and his two board nominees — Harry Wilson, a corporate restructuring expert, and Olivier Reza, a onetime investment banker from a jewelry family — worked the phones constantly from Third Point’s sleek offices in Midtown Manhattan, calling big investors in an effort to build support.

Months of simmering internal frustration erupted into public view last week, when internal emails from both Sotheby’s board members and Mr. Loeb’s camp emerged as part of a lawsuit over a controversial defense maneuver that the company had adopted to defend against the hedge fund manager.

At one point, Mr. Loeb wrote that he would wage a “holy jihad” to “make sure all the Sotheby’s infidels are made aware that there is only one true God.”

A Sotheby’s director, Robert S. Taubman, wrote in a note to the company’s corporate advisers last fall that Mr. Loeb’s suggestions were “terrible — and not good for the business.”

He continued that he thought the company would make a short-term deal with “the devils and it will hang over us forever.”

Though a judge upheld Sotheby’s defense late Friday, the damage had been done. With roughly two-thirds of shareholder votes in going into the weekend, the company’s board nominees were behind Mr. Loeb’s nominees, according to a person briefed on the matter. There was little choice but to pursue peace.

Mr. Loeb said in a statement, “As of today we see ourselves not as the Third Point nominees but as Sotheby’s directors, and we expect to work collaboratively with our fellow board members to enhance long-term value on behalf of all shareholders.”

Investors and analysts seemed relieved that an armistice had been reached, ending months of uncertainty and letting Sotheby’s get back to work. “This is good for shareholders and we are supportive of the settlement,” analysts at Stifel wrote on Monday.

Still, many within the art world have questioned the toll that Mr. Loeb’s campaign has taken on the company, with Christie’s using it as ammunition to smear its competitor’s reputation when pitching for new business.

Sotheby’s officials say their coming sales will be among the biggest in the company’s history, though they will still be smaller than those at Christie’s.

That was much the same last fall, when Sotheby’s contemporary art sale fetched $390 million, while its rival reported $691 million. (Christie’s is privately owned by the French billionaire François-Henri Pinault and discloses no financial results.)

This weekend, it appeared to be business as usual at the Sotheby’s galleries. Among those viewing works by Miró, Picasso and Jeff Koons were the comedian Steve Martin, the hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen and the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.