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

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 - "A Day in the Life of Artist Dan Colen" @wsj by Christopher Ross

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "A Day in the Life of Artist Dan Colen" @wsj by Christopher Ross

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FARM BOY | Colen at his property in upstate New York, where many of his large-scale pieces are constructed. Photography by Tim Barber for WSJ. Magazine

THE 34-YEAR-OLD ARTIST Dan Colen lives in Manhattan's East Village, but the majority of his work is made either at his new studio in Brooklyn's Red Hook, overlooking a blue expanse of the Upper New York Bay, or at his 40-acre farm in Pine Plains, New York, where roosters crow and the air smells of manure.

These are not his native environments: Raised in Leonia, New Jersey, he came to fame in the mid-aughts as a member of a gritty, decadent clique of artists (including Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley) who helped define the New York downtown arts scene and whose bacchanalian exploits are still legendary. Colen is sober now, and the location of his studios says something about the scale, direction and pace of his work these days. "Walking out of your studio and seeing water instead of the Holland Tunnel, that's going to affect how you create," he says.

This month, the Brant Foundation, in Connecticut, is mounting a comprehensive exhibition spanning his entire career. His trademark pieces blending abstraction with low materials—paintings made from bubble gum or resembling bird poop, papier–mâché boulders covered in graffiti—will be displayed alongside newer works that seem to reflect his change in scenery: small landscape paintings, a heap of scrap metal occupied by canaries. Preparing for the opening, he lopes around the museum with a rangy energy, wearing a tight-fitting jean jacket and Chuck Taylor All-Stars. Sporting a terrifically cowlicked head of hair, he sometimes resembles an overgrown boy. His irreverent former self appears in flashes, like when he mentions, as a cop car passes his Range Rover on the highway, that there is currently a warrant out for his arrest (he missed a court date for carrying a type of knife that's illegal in New York City).

Descending from a line of makers—his father sculpts with wood and clay, and his grandfather was a mechanic and inventor—it's not surprising that Colen now nearly resembles a construction foreman. In the course of a day, he consults with riggers installing an outdoor piece at Brant and discusses with foundry workers how to move boulders. At his farm, one member of his crew is strapping an ash-wood barrel shut while another is tinkering with guitar cases. He counsels his staff of artisans and workers not to focus so much on formal perfection as on an intuitive process of discovery. "I tell them it's not about virtuosity," he says. "It's about commitment."

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Sotheby’s Poison Pill Is Upheld by Delaware Court" @nytimes By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED AND ALEXANDRA STEVENSON

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Sotheby’s Poison Pill Is Upheld by Delaware Court" @nytimes By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED AND ALEXANDRA STEVENSON

Daniel S Loeb is seeking a seat on Sothebys boardSteve Marcus/ReutersDaniel S. Loeb is seeking a seat on Sotheby’s board.

A Delaware state court judge on Friday blocked efforts by the hedge fund mogul Daniel S. Loeb to overturn a crucial corporate defense at Sotheby’s, the auction house.

In a ruling issued Friday evening, Donald F. Parsons, a vice chancellor of Delaware’s Court of Chancery, decided that he would not overturn a so-called poison pill plan that limits Mr. Loeb to no more than 10 percent of Sotheby’s shares while letting passive investors hold as much as 20 percent.

The company’s annual shareholder meeting is Tuesday, when shareholders will cast their votes in what may be a watershed moment in the company’s 270-year history. And it may pave the way for companies to enact tougher defenses against outspoken activist investors pushing for change.

Mr. Loeb and his firm, Third Point, have nominated three director candidates, including himself, pitted against the current board at Sotheby’s.

Sotheby’s poison pill, formally known as a shareholder rights plan, had set off debate within the corporate governance community. While companies have used such defenses for decades, the auction house’s version specifically discriminated against activist investors, a move that Third Point had contended was unfair.

But in his ruling, Vice Chancellor Parsons wrote that Mr. Loeb’s primary argument — that the poison pill unfairly impedes his ability to wage his campaign — was flawed. Sotheby’s had presented evidence that the rationale behind its defense could be seen as both rational and proportional to the threat of an activist investor.

And even with his current 10 percent stake, Mr. Loeb has been able to fight the company to a draw. Vice Chancellor Parsons noted that the hedge fund manager had roughly 10 times the number of shares that Sotheby’s board now owns, and that his own expert witness testified that, even now, Third Point has a roughly 50-50 chance of winning the proxy contest.

Mr. Loeb even testified in a deposition that nothing has hurt his ability to reach out to other shareholders.

“There is a substantial possibility,” the vice chancellor wrote, “that Third Point will win the proxy contest, which would make any preliminary intervention by this court unnecessary.”

Mr. Loeb has already won the support of Marcato Capital, another activist hedge fund and Sotheby’s third-largest shareholder. Last week, the influential proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services weighed in with support for Mr. Loeb, advising shareholders to vote for two of his three board nominees.

Mr. Loeb has criticized Sotheby’s for not adapting quickly enough to sweeping changes in the art industry in recent years and has accused it of falling behind its main rival, Christie’s, in crucial parts of the auction business, Impressionist and modern art. He has also railed against the compensation packages of board members, specifically singling out the pay of the chief executive, William F. Ruprecht, who received $6.3 million in 2012.

Sotheby’s adopted its poison pill last October, after Mr. Loeb called for Mr. Ruprecht to step down, arguing that it was in the best interests of all shareholders to ”encourage anyone seeking to acquire the company to negotiate with the board prior to attempting a takeover.”

During the hearing earlier this week in Delaware, Vice Chancellor Parsons was shown emails in which board members discussed the merits of some of Mr. Loeb’s criticisms. In one email, a board member, Steven B. Dodge, wrote that Mr. Ruprecht’s compensation was “red meat for the dogs.”

Mr. Dodge also wrote that the board was “too comfortable, too chummy and not doing its jobs,” in an email to another director, Dennis M. Weibling. “We have handed Loeb a killer set of issues on a platter.”

A rival proxy advisory firm Glass Lewis has supported Sotheby’s slate.

Representatives for Mr. Loeb and Sotheby’s declined to comment.

Gregory P. Taxin, president of the activist hedge fund Clinton Group, said the ruling was disappointing: “In Delaware, stockholders are apparently supposed to be like children in the 1950s: the good ones do not speak unless spoken to.”

A version of this article appears in print on 05/03/2014, on page B7 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Sotheby’s Poison Pill Is Upheld by Court.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Camille Henrot: An Art World 'It Girl'" @wsj by Ellen Gamerman

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Camille Henrot: An Art World 'It Girl'" @wsj by Ellen Gamerman

RESTLESS ART Camille Henrot says she's inspired by eBay, turtles and nail polish, among other sources, for her videos, like 'Grosse Fatigue,' above. © Camille Henrot/ADAGP/Silex Films/kamel mennour, Paris

Turtles figure prominently in artist Camille Henrot's ambitious video chronicling the history of the world in 13 minutes. She sees the creatures as symbols of a prehistoric past and a burdened future. "The turtle, she's slow because she is carrying this massive round thing—it's like a figure of Atlas," she says.

Thinking hard about reptiles—and most everything else—is a hallmark of the 35-year-old French intellectual's work. On the heels of that video, "Grosse Fatigue," which won her the Silver Lion award for most promising young artist at the recent Venice Biennale, the artist is unveiling her first comprehensive U.S. museum exhibit. "Camille Henrot: The Restless Earth" opens Wednesday at the New Museum in New York.

The show features her abstract video telling the story of humankind through quick cuts of images like turtles and eyeballs, dead birds and oranges, fizzy water and the cosmos. Other pieces on view include her works on paper and a new installation of literature-inspired Japanese ikebana flower arrangements.

This spring, the New Museum is dedicating separate floors to three young artists rather than doing a group show. "It's a way to give exposure, to show the artists who are changing how art is being made," says curator Gary Carrion-Murayari. "Camille was a very easy choice for us in that respect."

Ms. Henrot created "Grosse Fatigue" during an artist fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington last year. She scoured the collections, filming employees opening drawers of exotic-bird specimens, flipping through files filled with dead bees, and so on. The film advances quickly through time by using overlapping windows on a computer desktop—search results from the Smithsonian's database. She incorporated her own footage and studio shots of brightly painted fingernails—a nod to her discovery that even the weightiest words in a Google search often seem to match the name of a nail polish.

It wasn't a solitary effort: Ms. Henrot worked with a cinematographer and film editor, as well as a makeup designer, models and production assistants. A writer created the text, which is performed like a spoken-word poem, and her partner, a musician named Joakim Bouaziz, created the score.

Ms. Henrot finds inspiration from disparate sources including eBay, where her purchases range from firemen's boots to nude vintage photographs. Sometimes she buys an item just because she likes the picture of its seller. After moving from Paris to New York in late 2012, she says the cargo container with all her stuff was held up by authorities for months—she suspects because its contents were so weird.

As a child, she wanted one day to have a "real job," eager to distinguish herself from her mother, an artist. Nevertheless, she attended art school in Paris, studying animated film. She took a job in an advertising agency, where she learned tricks like how to shoot a piece of cake to make it look more delicious (blow it with a hair dryer so it seems fluffy). Along the way, she was making films on her own, including an inventive music video for the band Octet in which the musicians were rendered as half-real, half-animated bodies. The film was shown in a 2005 exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, a contemporary art center in Paris, and her career as an artist was launched.

Ms. Henrot didn't grow up traveling—she says her mother was afraid of flying—but now her experiences in foreign cultures feed directly into her work. The videos featured at the New Museum include "Coupé/Décalé," an experimental film illustrating a coming-of-age ritual on Pentecost island in the Vanuatu archipelago where young people jump into a void while being held by liana vines around their ankles.

Sometimes her images can be hard to watch. Those turtles in "Grosse Fatigue" are featured with close-ups of their slick tongues and stony eyes. Ms. Henrot, who as a child had a pet turtle named Zoe that escaped through a window of her Paris home, shot the creatures during a vacation in the Seychelles. She filmed a little girl giving a huge turtle a banana and included the footage in her video. "I was interested in the stupidity of man feeding wild animal," she says.

Ms. Henrot brought home a souvenir from that trip: A scar on her hand from a turtle that bit her when she too tried to feed it.           

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Secret Power of Synonyms" @nytimes by KEN JOHNSON

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Secret Power of Synonyms" @nytimes by KEN JOHNSON

View slide show|5 Photos

‘Mel Bochner: Strong Language’

‘Mel Bochner: Strong Language’

Credit Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Words have been the subjects and primary constituents of the enigmatic yet acerbically provocative paintings Mel Bochner has been creating over the past 12 years. “Mel Bochner: Strong Language,” an elegantly produced exhibition at the Jewish Museum, gives them their due and traces their roots back to text-based works that Mr. Bochner created in the ’60s and early ’70s, when he was one of New York’s pre-eminent Conceptual artists.

Mr. Bochner wasn’t alone in his preoccupation with language then. Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson and many other avant-gardists at the time made word art. Also, like Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Smithson, Mr. Bochner wrote critical and theoretical essays with a rigorous, analytic fervor determined to extinguish sloppy, sentimental thinking and writing about art.

The new paintings still revolve around philosophical issues that were dear to the Minimalists and the Conceptualists of the ’60s. The way they flip viewers back and forth between seeing visual forms and reading verbal texts prompts rumination about different modes of perceptual and cognitive consciousness.

They feature lists of synonyms, many gleaned from Roget’s Thesaurus, and often colloquial and vulgar ones. While some are made with a brushy touch, others are neatly lettered in juicy colors and in horizontal rows on flat, colored backgrounds, like Modernist stripe paintings. “Crazy” (2005) offers more than three dozen synonymous words and phrases in rows filling a 5-by-6 1/2-foot brown rectangle, with each word a different color. The list begins with “crazy,” continues with “nutty,” “daffy,” “dippy,” “dizzy” and “loopy” and ends with “foaming at the mouth.” “Die,” also from 2005, runs from “decease,” “expire,” “perish,” “succumb” to “push up daisies” and “sink into oblivion.”

Almost every painting is devoted to more or less negative words, as indicated by titles like “Nothing” (2003), “Useless” (2005), “Contempt” (2005) and “Obscene” (2006). An especially unsettling one is “Jew” (2008), which lists anti-Semitic labels in impulsively printed yellow letters on a brushy gray and black background, colors that pointedly evoke those of the Star of David armbands that the Nazis forced European Jews to wear. (Mr. Bochner, born in 1940, grew up in an observant Jewish household.) More lighthearted, though also rendered in yellow on black, is “The Joys of Yiddish” (2006), where you find words like “nudnick,” “nebbish,” “schmoozer” and “schlemiel.”

There’s an accusatory feeling in some pieces. One made of brushy white letters on a dark brown ground begins with “Liar,” “prevaricator,” “fabulator,” “dissembler,” “deceiver,” “hypocrite.” Who is addressed by these names, you might wonder? Am I the accused? “Silence!” “Cool it!” “Gag it!” “Swallow it!” commands one of the show’s biggest paintings — it’s 10 feet wide — in neat, cheerfully colored letters, as if to cut short your protestations of innocence. Several paintings say only, “Blah blah blah blah,” sarcastically reflecting, presumably, the sort of empty blather produced by advertisers, politicians, government bureaucrats, talk show personalities, journalists, pundits, bloggers and art critics.

The exhibition, which was organized by Norman Kleeblatt, the museum’s chief curator, also includes a selection of Mr. Bochner’s word-based works from the 1960s and ’70s. Among these is a series of small verbal portraits of other artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Dan Flavin and Eva Hesse, made of letters and words composed in configurations that formally reflect the subject’s art. “Portrait of Eva Hesse” (1966) has words like “wrap-up,” “secrete,” “cloak,” “bury” and “obscure” inked in concentric circles, mimicking the circular forms of some of Hesse’s sculptures.

But the newer paintings have a visual and affective impact that Conceptual art of the ’60s and ’70s rarely had. Far from coolly analytic, they’re hotly assertive, charged it seems with crotchety indignation and furious exasperation. And therein lies the crux: What are they so worked up about? It’s hard to say.

Taken one at a time, the paintings are lushly sensuous and bracingly punchy, but seeing many of them together is enervating. The volume is always turned way up; you feel as if you were being yelled at by a word-mad autistic savant. Styles and techniques may vary — some recent pieces have letters with the thickness of cake frosting applied to velvet — but the format of listed words,forcing you repeatedly to read left to right, and top to bottom, enhances a bullying effect.

At the same time, it seems that some of the paintings are mocking themselves. With “Babble” (2011), which begins with “babble,” “blather,” “blabber” and ends with “ad nauseum” (the painting spells it this way), it’s as if it were making fun of its own logorrhea. As with the blah blah paintings, there’s a hint that the artist himself might be wrestling with some kind of inner conflict, possibly between his imaginative, creative self and his skeptical, critical self. It’s hard to say for sure, though. The paintings are resolutely impersonal.

In this regard, a Conceptual piece from 1970 that Mr. Bochner has recreated for the exhibition is worth considering. Irregular letters chalked on a black background painted directly on the wall state, “Language is not transparent.” This might be true literally, if it makes any sense at all. Taken metaphorically it’s debatable. We do speak of some writings as clear and others as impenetrable. Reading Tolstoy you can feel as if you were “seeing through” the words on the page to the characters, landscapes and events they describe. Paintings often are metaphorically transparent, too; they can be like windows onto other worlds or into the depths of an artist’s psyche.

But that sort of transparency is not to be found in Mr. Bochner’s paintings. They are adamantly opaque, both literally and metaphorically. Whatever psychological dynamic animates them is hidden behind their optically aggressive and verbally peevish surfaces. It’s frustrating. You suspect that there’s something deeper activating them, something that would explain their splenetic moods, but you don’t know what it is. What’s he repressing?

As if sensing such questions might be on viewers’ minds, one of the last works in the show demands in loosely written white letters on a small, silver-painted canvas, “Do I have to draw you a picture?” As if you were an idiot for asking. You might want to say: “Well, sure, maybe a picture would help. Maybe all those words are just getting in the way.”

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Whitney Edits a Tale of a Nation" @nytimes by CAROL VOGEL

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Whitney Edits a Tale of a Nation" @nytimes by CAROL VOGEL

A year away from opening, the new home of the Whitney Museum of American Art is still a construction site, but it is already a vivid presence in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, and curators have mapped out months’ worth of exhibitions there.

The first show to go on view next spring — an opening date has not yet been set — will tell the story of 20th- and 21st-century American art entirely through the Whitney’s permanent collection. It will include many prominent favorites: Alexander Calder’s “Circus,” Edward Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning,” Andy Warhol’s “Green Coca-Cola Bottles,” Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Music Pink and Blue No. 2,” Jasper Johns’s “Three Flags.” There will also be plenty of work by artists of later generations — Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Kara Walker — who are “now considered pillars of contemporary art,” said Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s chief curator.

Using all 60,000 square feet of the gallery space, including outdoor terraces and rooms for film and video, the exhibition will even capture what American artists have been producing for the last decade.

Photo
 “Blues” (1929), by Archibald Motley, who will be the focus of a show at the Whitney in 2015-16. With its space doubled, the museum will have room for more exhibitions. Credit Collection of Mara Motley and Valerie Gerrard Browne, Chicago History Museum

The building, designed by Renzo Piano, calls for “an entirely new mind-set,” Ms. De Salvo said as she surveyed a capacious gallery, strewed with wires, that has high ceilings and views of the Hudson.

The new structure has more than twice the space of the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue, which allows the museum to take stock of its holdings, she said. “A lot of the collection will be a mystery to the public, either because things have not been on view for decades or, in the case of acquisitions, have never been shown at all,” Ms. De Salvo explained.

The exhibition, to remain on view for around four months, will explore how the meaning of “American” has changed over the years. Artists who live and work in the United States may have been born elsewhere (or vice versa) yet play important parts in an ever-expanding national mix.

The artworks will be arranged chronologically. Making its first appearance at the museum since 1994 will be “V-yramid,” a recently conserved sculpture and video installation from 1982 by Nam June Paik. The room-size piece consists of 40 television sets stacked like a ziggurat, with blurring images and a soundtrack of rock and traditional Korean music.

New acquisitions in the show will extend beyond today’s trendy names and help deepen the diverse narratives woven into the history of American art. For example, the Whitney plans to exhibit a terra cotta head from 1947 by the African-American sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, associated with the Harlem Renaissance. It has never been shown before.

More space will allow for more exhibitions. Scheduled for the fall and winter of 2015-16 is the first full-scale survey of paintings by another figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Archibald Motley, known for his colorful scenes of urban life in Chicago. Running concurrently will be the first full-scale Frank Stella retrospective in this country since the Museum of Modern Art organized one in 1970. (MoMA organized a smaller Stella show 17 years later.)

“A lot of younger artists are particularly interested in Stella’s work,” Ms. De Salvo said, “because of his formal innovation and unending willingness to explore color, form and space.”

Also planned for that period is a show of contemporary art from the collection of the married art advisers Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, who pledged their American art trove to the Whitney two years ago (and their holdings of European artists to the Pompidou Center in Paris). The exhibition will reflect the full range of their collection.

In the spring of 2016, the Whitney plans shows devoted to the artist and filmmaker Laura Poitras and to David Wojnarowicz, the painter, photographer, filmmaker and AIDS activist who was prominent in the East Village art scene of the 1980s.

Because of the complex logistics of the move, Ms. De Salvo said, the next Whitney Biennial will not take place in 2016, as it normally would, but a year later. She said the exact dates have yet to be determined. The current biennial runs through May 25.

THROUGH GOOGLE GLASSES

Always looking to embrace the next big thing, the New Museum says the Google Glass eyewear brand will be the lead sponsor of its 2015 Triennial, which opens next February.

The Triennial explores the work of emerging artists around the world, and this edition is being organized by Lauren Cornell, a curator at the museum, and Ryan Trecartin, the Los Angeles artist and filmmaker.

“The show is very much about the future,” said Lisa Phillips, the New Museum’s director. Neither she nor Janine Gianfredi, who oversees marketing for Google Glass, whose software connects to the Internet, would specify how much money Google was providing for the show.

They did say that the Glass eyewear would be available to visitors at the exhibition. How it will be used is still being discussed and tested, they added. Ms. Gianfredi said she imagined that the viewing experience might in some way replace the conventional audio tour.

Concerns have been raised about the potential of the Glass software to collect information in a way that invades users’ privacy, and the headwear has yet to achieve mainstream acceptance.

But Ms. Gianfredi said that through its apps and social media, Google had identified a consumer appetite for new ways of using technology to create, view and appreciate art. A onetime New Yorker, she said she considered the New Museum a good fit for a trial run. “It is very experimental,” she said.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Door to Art of the World, Barely Ajar" by HOLLAND COTTER

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Door to Art of the World, Barely Ajar" by HOLLAND COTTER

On a pay-what-you-wish Saturday evening in late February, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum rotunda was dense with visitors to a new show, “Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe.“

Suddenly, a bugle squawked out a few notes, and from two upper ramps banners unfurled. One was painted with the words “Wage Theft.“ The other carried a drawing of a world globe accompanied by the phrase “1% Museum.“

A call-and-response chant began: “Who is building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi?“

“Migrant workers in labor camps! Is this the future of art?“

Then a single voice called out: “The Guggenheim Museum has a museum empire. The Guggenheim should not be on the wrong side of history.“

After about 20 minutes of this orchestrated interruption, which included a tossing of leaflets and the posting of a manifesto, the demonstrators left the premises.

They were members of an activist political group called G.U.L.F. (Global Ultra Luxury Faction), which is affiliated with two larger groups, Gulf Labor and Occupy Museums. For two years Gulf Labor, a coalition of international artists, has been protesting, largely through the web, the state of what some critics likened to indentured servitude of laborers, many from South Asia, brought in to work on a new Guggenheim franchise located on Saddiyat Island — “Island of Happiness” — just off the coast of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

Photo
Protesters at the Guggenheim. Credit G.U.L.F. (Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction)

Asked for a response to the protest, the Guggenheim’s director, Richard Armstrong, said the complaints were misplaced. Construction on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, designed by Frank Gehry, had not yet begun at the time of the demonstration. G.U.L.F. countered that all the labor-intensive structural groundwork that would make the building possible — roads, sewage systems — had been underway for some time, and reports of worker abuses were rife.

Whatever the reality, in the eyes of at least some art world citizens, the Guggenheim was doing at the very least a convincing impersonation of a globalizing corporation with new headquarters, built by and for the rich at the expense of the poor, to supply a luxury leisure and tourist spot in the Middle East with global art exhibitions.

Global — as in globalism and globalization — has been a period-defining word in talk about art and its institutions in the last few decades. And along with certain other zeitgeisty terms like multiculturalism and postmodernism, it once had a utopian ring.

When the economy, including the art market, bottomed out at the end of the 1980s, walls came down, and long-excluded art came in. Not only did the art of African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Native Americans gain admittance, but so did new art from Africa, Asia and South America, art that we barely even knew existed.

Back then, globalism seemed to hold one main promise: finally bringing us all, with our manifold colors and languages, to the table, where we wouldn’t all just break bread side by side, we’d cook up whole new fusion cuisines.

Photo
Cleaning a work by Jeremy Deller, installed near M+, a Hong Kong museum opening in 2016. Credit Laurent Fievet/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Even before the financial crisis in the late 1980s, there were indicators of incipient change. One came with the 1984 exhibition “‘Primitivism‘ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern“ at the Museum of Modern Art, organized by William S. Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, that paired examples of traditional African, Oceanic and Native American objects with Western modern art. The take-away idea was to demonstrate the ingenious use Western artists had made of those “primitive“ sources. Non-Western art objects were reduced to illustrating Western accomplishments.

The response was explosive. In a widely read review in Artforum, the critic Thomas McEvilley, who died last year, slammed the museum with accusations of cultural colonialism. The curators came back with a defense, only to have Mr. McEvilley demolish it and, by doing so, to decisively accelerate a broad rethinking, already underway, of the blinkered attitudes of Western museums toward the rest of the world.

The debate had international repercussions. In 1989 an exhibition called “Magiciens de la Terre,“ organized by Jean-Hubert Martin at the Pompidou Center in Paris, was conceived as a corrective to the MoMA exhibition and had the distinction of being one of the first truly global museum shows, bringing together 50 contemporary artists from Europe and North America with 50 from Africa, Asia, South America and Australia.

But in a different way from MoMA, it gave the non-Western work a primitivizing gloss, beginning with the title. Art by the Western artists was, for the most part, presented for cool contemplation, but the work chosen by many of the non-Western participants had an ethnographic spin as if the objects were expected to do something: heal, receive prayers, create magic, be spiritual. Despite the show’s stated intention to create something like a globalist balance of values, a West-in-control-of-the-rest perspective remained intact.

Still, a door to a larger view of the world did open. But has it stayed open, and if so, how wide?

Photo
Workers last year at the future site of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, near where the Guggenheim is building a branch. Credit Marwan Naamani/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In terms of genuine globalist reach, MoMA is a more expansive institution than it was in 1984, but only in the area of contemporary art. Global modernism remains either outside its ken or perhaps hidden away in its storage vaults. In any case, we rarely see it.

The Guggenheim has been more on the ball, though too often in a self-aggrandizing, one-shot way. For a show in 1996 imported from the Royal Academy of Arts in London, called “Africa: The Art of a Continent,“ it jammed hundreds of “traditional“ African objects, representing dozens of cultures, into its rotunda in an inchoate, context-free display. It took roughly the same omnibus approach in “China: 5000 Years“ in 1998 and in “Brazil: Body and Soul,“ which opened in 2001. It was no coincidence that these blockbusters came at a time when the museum was working hard to establish international branches.

The situation at the museum has improved. The Guggenheim has mounted some large Asian shows since — a Cai Guo Qiang retrospective in 2008, the 2013 Gutai show — and there are on-staff Asian art curators. But the museum’s much advertised global art acquisition initiative has gotten off to a disappointingly stingy start. The first installment, last year’s “No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia,“ was small and tucked away in a side gallery.

In New York it has been left to smaller museums, often short of money, to pick up the globalist slack in a consistent and venturesome way. These include the Queens Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, the Studio Museum in Harlem and Asia Society. Most innovative of all was the Museum for African Art, which opened in 1984 and revolutionized ideas about how to present non-Western culture in a Western context. Dismayingly, last year the museum changed its mission and name — it is now the New African Center — leaving its future as an exhibiting institution unclear.

And, of course, what has changed most boldly over the last decade is the global art landscape and the place of museums in it, a story still very much in the process of unfolding. With “Magicien“ as an originating model, international biennials and art fairs have proliferated. Essentially pop-up events, they plunk down large shipments of price-tagged pluralism everywhere, standardizing and neutralizing the experience of “difference” — editing it to a manageable market and determining what we will see in our big, ostensibly “global” museums, the “1%” as the protesters had it.

Photo
A painting seen in “Gutai.” Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times

Some of the newest of these institutions are in the Middle East and China. For the last several years China has indulged in a spectacular binge of museum construction, thanks both to competitive nationalism and to new wealth. New regional museums of archaeological or other traditional material abound. So do private museums housing personal collections amassed by members of the newly rich. There are even museums of world culture, all but unheard-of outside the West until now. Two state-run museums that opened in Shanghai in 2012, one devoted to modern and the other to contemporary art, are mandated to show at least some Western work.

In Hong Kong, among the exclusive shops and restaurants of the developing West Kowloon Cultural District, the colossal M+ museum is in operation even though its building won’t be finished until 2016. The institution’s bias is 20th- and 21st-century Asian-centric work, but it will incorporate significant Western material.

The M+ pointedly calls itself a visual cultural museum rather than an art museum. But with a starter collection that appears to draw heavily on the internationally approved contemporary Chinese canon, it could, without strong curatorial direction, adhere to a now standard-issue global format.

Is there any place to escape from this model among new or newish museums outside the Western sphere? Southeast Asia presents serious possibilities, with a lively art scene and interesting contemporary spaces in Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. And Africa, where large-scale Western-style museums are all but impossible to sustain, produces alternatives almost by default.

Institutions like Bandjoun Station in the western region of Cameroon; Zoma Contemporary Art Center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and Raw Material Company in Dakar, Senegal, are all small, artist-built-and-run institutions that multitask as exhibition venues, archives, libraries, studios, guesthouses, gathering spots and schools.

Far from being part of the floating world of a market-driven museum culture, they’re thoroughly grounded in a local context, yet, through social media, networked internationally. Given their slender means, they have to stay flexible, light on their feet and open to alteration. In most cases, the one component they lack is a permanent collection. Deeply committed to the idea of art being, intrinsically, a form of social activism, their very existence carries a political charge.

Our big globalizing institutions of modern and contemporary art carry no such charge. Despite their fabulously rich holdings in art, any spark of a vision of the museum as a community of cultures, a forum of equal Others, is hard to find. In this context, globalism is shut down, out of fuel.

Even unbuilt, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi feels like a white elephant, corralled on the Island of Happiness with others of its kind: an Abu Dhabi branch of the Louvre designed by Jean Nouvel, and a performing arts center designed by Zaha Hadid, all constructed by people who will most likely never get in the doors and whose art is still hard to find in comparable museums in New York. Yet it would take a real cynic not to speculate about how this might be different. What if seemingly incompatible institutional features — humane local wisdom and custodianship of treasures of art — could be made to coexist? We’d have museums that are on the right side of history, and in which the future of art would be secure. That ideal is worth storming an empire for.

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George Lindemann Journa by Goerge Lindemann - "For the Whitney’s Move, Boxes and Burly Men Just Won’t Do" @nytimes by ROBIN POGREBIN

George Lindemann Journa by Goerge Lindemann - "For the Whitney’s Move, Boxes and Burly Men Just Won’t Do" @nytimes by ROBIN POGREBIN

The Whitney Museum's new space is in the final stages of construction. Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Anyone who has ever unwrapped a chipped piece of Wedgwood understands the headaches and peril associated with moving.

Now imagine what the Whitney Museum of American Art is going through as it plans to transport more than 14,000 items, including delicate pieces like Alexander Calder’s sculpture “Circus” and landmark paintings like Edward Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning” — to its new downtown home.

Let’s just say the logistics go well beyond buying some Bubble Wrap.

There are intricate packing and crating concerns, matters of truck scheduling and insurance and, of course, security, as artwork worth hundreds of millions of dollars is transported through Manhattan. When the Barnes Foundation moved its museum to Philadelphia from the suburbs for its 2012 opening, the movers, as a precaution, stripped all the signage from their trucks.

“Everything about it is monumental,” said Ron Simoncini, who was the director of security at the Museum of Modern Art when that institution moved to and from temporary quarters in Queens during its 2004 renovation. (The move from Manhattan took 400 truck trips and involved about 100,000 works of art, MoMA said.)

“It’s not like moving a business or moving a home,” Mr. Simoncini added. “It’s not like you call Staples.”

The Whitney’s transfer from its Upper East Side home at Madison and 75th Street to Gansevoort and Washington Streets in the meatpacking district is still a ways off.

The museum will shut down after its Jeff Koons retrospective closes on Oct. 19, and staff members will start moving into the new building in the fall. The art will be transported after that, so that the museum is ready for its spring opening. (A firm date has not been set.)

“We’re still making plans for the actual moving of art,” Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, said in an interview last week.

The new $760 million project, at the base of the High Line, designed by Renzo Piano, is entering the final stages of construction. (Members of the news media are to get a look at its progress on Thursday.)

Mr. Weinberg said it was not yet clear how many trucks will be involved, how many trips they will take and when they will begin pulling up to the new museum; those details will not be released even when they are determined, because of security concerns.

The Whitney, however, is no stranger to moving, Mr. Weinberg said; the downtown location will be its fourth. Founded in 1930, the museum opened on West Eighth Street in 1931, then moved to an expanded site on West 54th Street in 1954 and finally to its current building, which was designed by Marcel Breuer and opened in 1966.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art signed an agreement in 2011 to occupy the Breuer building for at least eight years.

Mr. Weinberg said he is excited at the prospect of being able to put more of the Whitney’s permanent collection on view. In the new building, which includes outdoor areas, the museum will double its total exhibition space to 63,000 square feet.

It will also be able to consolidate its administrative operations; the Whitney’s staff is spread around five different locations. “We have not all been under one roof for eight years,” Mr. Weinberg said.

John S. Stanley, the Whitney’s chief operating officer, is overseeing the move, Mr. Weinberg said.

“It’s one set of details after another,” said Mr. Stanley, who added that he did not yet have a cost estimate.

A major part of the effort will be ensuring adequate security. The Barnes Foundation had a door-to-door private security escort. “They were invisible but they were there,” said Hal Jones, whose Philadelphia-based company, Atelier Art Services and Storage, handled the move.

“It took us a year to prepare for the job,” Mr. Jones said.

The company spent six months creating the packaging for the Barnes move. Crates were packed inside of crates. Art was insulated with specialized foam, which was customized, based on the weight of each object.

The art traveled in Atelier’s climate-controlled trucks, which are equipped with a cushioning suspension system. Not all the art went over at once, to avoid attracting attention and snarling traffic. “You couldn’t just jam up the whole place,” Mr. Jones said. About four or five trucks made several trips.

“We were like an ant trail,” Mr. Jones said. “Going and coming all the time.”

And then there was all that insurance to deal with. “We have to cover everything we do,” Mr. Jones said. “Commercial; auto for vehicles; packing insurance; shipping insurance; you need insurance for your bricks and mortar; health insurance for all your employees; you need workmen’s compensation; and you need to be able to offer insurance to clients who don’t insure their work.”

The Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York is preparing to move some of its 200,000 design objects back into the renovated Carnegie Mansion on Fifth Avenue. The security requirements won’t compare to the museum’s 2011 show on Van Cleef & Arpels (armed guards), but the move is nevertheless “a complicated Rubik’s Cube,” said Caroline Baumann, the director.

The bulk of the Whitney’s collection is works on paper, most of which will be moved to the new building’s study center. Of the remainder — paintings and sculptures — it is still unclear which pieces from the permanent collection will be installed when the Whitney reopens.

The rest of the Whitney’s collection will remain in its undisclosed off-site storage center. Because of the cost — and flood considerations — the museum decided against building a storage facility at the new site, Mr. Weinberg said.

After the Madison Avenue building closes to the public, there will be some private events there through the holidays, and then the Whitney plans to upgrade the Breuer building for its new tenant, the Met, officials said. To prepare for the move (and with support from the Henry Luce Foundation), the Whitney is thoroughly documenting its holdings to make sure each piece has been adequately conserved and digitally photographed.

“It’s basically getting your house clean before you move,” Mr. Weinberg said. “We have never gone through our entire collection, object by object.”

The reinstallation of the collection in the new galleries will be overseen by longtime members of the Whitney’s staff. However unnerving the prospect of this undertaking is, Mr. Weinberg said, he’s confident that it is in very good hands.

“They are people who are fully tested,” he said.

“They know this collection, they’ve traveled this collection,” he added. “These are their babies.”

Correction: April 29, 2014

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the cost of the new building. It is $422 million — not $760 million, which is the total cost of the project, including the building, the endowment and other expenses. Also, an earlier version of this correction erroneously stated that the total cost is $720 million.​

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Rarely One for Sugarcoating" @nytimes by BLAKE GOPNIK

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Rarely One for Sugarcoating" @nytimes by BLAKE GOPNIK

The smell hits you first: sweet but with an acrid edge, like a thousand burned marshmallows. Then you’re struck by the space, five stories high and more than a football field long. The storage shed of the Domino sugar factory, on the East River in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, was built in 1927 to hold mountains of raw sugar due for whitening. The plant was shuttered a decade ago, yet its crumbling walls still drip with molasses.

But head farther in, and that mess gives way to the pristine: Rising to the rafters and stretching 75 feet from paws to rump is a great sphinx, demure as her Egyptian cousin but glowing from a recent sugar coating. It is a sight so unlikely it seems Photoshopped.

Kara Walker, the beast’s creator, appears dwarfed by her almost-finished colossus, an ode to the cane fields’ black labor that she has chosen to make grotesquely white. She has titled it “A Subtlety” — after the intricate sugar sculptures that were centerpieces for medieval feasts — even though it is absurdly unsubtle. Its subtitle is “The Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World.”

The work was commissioned by Creative Time, the group known for its public art projects. “This feels like a Cecil B. DeMille set,” said Nato Thompson, Creative Time’s chief curator, gazing up at the result. From May 10 through July 6, on Fridays through Sundays, the public will get to be its cast of thousands.

Ms. Walker is a proudly tall woman — “5-10,” she tells me, correcting my guess of 5 feet 8. For protection from the room’s floating sugar, the artist wears yellow rubber overalls and a blue bandanna with shamrocks. Her face bears an uncanny likeness to her sphinx.

“I just noticed that her nose and profile are me, for sure,” Ms. Walker said. The “just” is hard to believe: In March, when I first visited studio in Manhattan’s garment district, she talked about enlarging the nostrils on an early draft of the head and, maybe unconsciously, pointed to her own nose as she did so.

Doubters — and there are more than a few — might read the sphinx as being all about inflating Ms. Walker’s ego and status. But it could as easily be a sendup of the genius-artist role foisted on Ms. Walker by others. “To joke about it isn’t necessarily to dismiss it,” she said, “but it is to acknowledge the complete folly of that whole notion.”

In the 20 years since her breakout installation at the Drawing Center in New York, when she was only 24, Ms. Walker has become a towering figure herself, an African-American visual artist who has achieved unparalleled global success. Her cut-paper silhouettes and animations, exhibited and owned by museums across the United States and abroad, harness genteel 19th-century imagery to magnify the dysfunctions bred by slavery.

“Mommy makes mean art,” was the judgment that the artist’s daughter, Octavia, delivered 12 years ago, when she was 4, and that gets pretty close to the truth. Awarding Ms. Walker a $190,000 “genius” grant in 1997, the MacArthur Foundation noted that Ms. Walker’s images explored the “vestiges of sexual, physical, and racial exploitation” handed down by slavery. She has portrayed sex of every conceivable kind between master and mistress and slave; her panoramic views of the antebellum south include scenes of defecation, amputation, emasculation and decapitation. Violent, yes, but Ms. Walker also sees an absurdist side to the gore in her work.

 

Ms. Walker’s first museum survey, in 2007, was organized by Philippe Vergne for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and traveled to the Whitney Museum in New York and several other cities. As a Frenchman, he said he finds that her work transcends the context of slavery or race or even American culture. “You just need to open any newspaper anywhere in the world to see that the gender abuse, the sexual abuse, the power abuses are part of our fabric, unfortunately,” Mr. Vergne said from Los Angeles, where he is the new director of that city’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Kerry James Marshall, an older black painter who won a MacArthur the same year as Ms. Walker, says he appreciates her work almost as much for its formal elegance as for its content.

“Because you have to keep oscillating between the two aspects of the work, it becomes destabilizing in a way,” Mr. Marshall said by phone from his Chicago studio. “But that kind of tension between those two things is a really interesting place to be.”

Not all of his colleagues agree. In 1997, the veteran black artist Betye Saar led a letter-writing campaign against Ms. Walker’s work, railing against negative stereotypes of blacks as both victims and aggressors that she said catered to the expectations of whites. Ms. Saar spoke of “a sense of betrayal at the hands of a black artist who obviously hated being black.”

Ms. Walker said she was aware of the risks her work runs and of the issues it raises about revealing dysfunction versus celebrating achievement, about loyalty to race versus “kowtowing to the dominant culture.” She insists she likes the idea of a “protesting audience” that is so engaged by her art that it is willing to be enraged by it, too. Ms. Walker casts her conflict with Ms. Saar in clash-of-the-titans terms: “You are Biggie, and you are Tupac, and you battle it out through your art, and the art is the stronger for it.”

Or at least bigger.

“In some ways, doing a project like this is a bit of a nose-thumbing at detractors, naysayers, haters,” Ms. Walker said of her Domino sphinx. With her earlier work, even her supporters conceded that the recurring antihero of Ms. Walker’s work — known as “the Negress” — had never had true control of her fate. But with Ms. Walker’s Negress-as-sphinx, that underdog may have at last become the unbeatable overcat.

Ms. Walker told me of reading about a monument that lawmakers proposed in 1923 to honor the nation’s “mammies.” It was approved by the Senate but allowed to die in the House.

The sphinx is something like Ms. Walker’s realization of that dream, but as a racist’s nightmare: The figure may be wearing a mammie’s kerchief, but she’ll never be beaten into submission.

The sculpture, the artist’s first, may meet a challenge in her career: Ms. Walker has been courting the danger of repetition, with her works in different mediums tending to share a trademark look, cast of characters and emotional and political tone. One set of silhouettes is easy to confuse with another, whereas the “Marvelous Sugar Baby” is unlike any of them. What is unclear is whether the Domino piece, for all its size, has sacrificed some of the gravitas of the earlier, crueler work.

 

Ms. Walker was born in 1969 in Stockton, Calif., where her father, Larry Walker, was the chairman of the art department at the University of the Pacific. She would paint and draw in his studio, “and I’d be so fascinated by what she was doing that I’d just stop and watch,” he recalled, speaking from his home in Lithonia, Ga.

The family moved to Mr. Walker’s native Georgia in 1983. Ms. Walker remembers her school in California as having included a rainbow of races, whereas in Atlanta there seemed to be African-Americans, whites and a vast gulf in between. “It became a black-and-white world for her,” her father said.

 

During an interview, Ms. Walker dredged up a long-lost memory of reading Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” under her desk in high school. That novel prefigures the surreal violence and sex in Kara Walker’s mature work, but it’s hard to find the book’s hints of redemption in her art. (The poster for the 1985 film version of the book, which came out when Ms. Walker was 16, featured a silhouette surprisingly close to those of her later work.)

She studied painting in Atlanta, then got a master of fine arts degree at the Rhode Island School of Design, while telling herself, she said: “You have to stop painting. You cannot paint.”

In the 1990s the notion that the medium had long been owned by white males was too strong to be ignored. So she came up with her cut-paper technique.

She describes a teacher, Michael Young, as crucial to her transformation. Speaking by phone from Austin, Tex., Mr. Young said his contribution was to convince her to play down her bookish side, advising her to be “as operatic as you can be about it — you’re not a conceptual artist.” He said that shyness had once left her close to silent.

Spend a few hours with Ms. Walker today, and you get an acute sense of shyness overcome. She talks plenty, showing a brassy surface that seems meant to hide a softer core.

Ms. Walker married a professor of jewelry in Rhode Island (they have since divorced) and later left for New York. She has taught art at Columbia University since 2002 and until quite recently lived in modest faculty housing, her longtime dealer, Brent Sikkema, pointed out. Like other friends of Ms. Walker, Mr. Sikkema emphasized that the aggression in her work does not prepare you for her wicked sense of humor, although the humor in her work is so dark it’s easy to miss.

Mr. Vergne, the curator of the 2007 survey, points to the mix of over-the-top gore and seriousness in her art. He described the silhouettes as straddling “Django Unchained,” — a “vaudeville parody” — and “Twelve Years a Slave,” a historical drama. “She bounces between both,” he said.

I accompanied Ms. Walker and her team to the current Domino factory in Yonkers, where we got an introduction to pest control and bagging and “green” processes. (Domino donated 160,000 pounds of sugar for the sphinx, but its core is carved polystyrene.) We were told that it now only takes seven people to run the refinery process, whereas in Williamsburg it once took dozens.

In some ways, then, her piece is about the passing of blue-collar America. The Domino building on the East River now belongs to the art-friendly developer Jed Walentas, who has lent the space to Creative Time while he prepares to level most of the the structure and put up apartments for Williamsburg’s new elite (with some set aside for the less privileged).

Ms. Walker has written: “Sugar crystallizes something in our American Soul. It is emblematic of all Industrial Processes. And of the idea of becoming white. White Being equated with pure and ‘true’ it takes a lot of energy to turn brown things into white things. A lot of pressure.”

There was an early moment, she recalled, when her research “led me to this place where I could only think about death and destruction, and more death.” Seeking something to counter that — “a gift, something that was promising” — the sphinx idea came to her and took hold.

Of course, in its origins in the ancient world, the sphinx could be a riddler as well as a protector. Ms. Walker’s may well stand for the scale of the questions she is asking, and for her refusal to give easy answers.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "The Industrial Art of Those Talented Bugattis" @nytimes by JOHN LAMM

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "The Industrial Art of Those Talented Bugattis" @nytimes by JOHN LAMM

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An Eye for Design

OXNARD, CALIF. — Aficionados have argued for ages over which individual has had the greatest influence on the automobile.

Enzo Ferrari is a favorite. Traditionalists may side with Ettore Bugatti. Henry Ford gets the American vote, while Soichiro Honda rates high for innovation. Modernists might include the current chairman of the Volkswagen Group’s supervisory board, Ferdinand Piëch.

Each of those geniuses deserves a major show of his creations, but the Mullin Automotive Museum here, about 60 miles west of Los Angeles, takes a broader view in its exhibition, “The Art of Bugatti.” The show, which opened last month, honors not just Ettore Bugatti, whose grand machines remain landmarks of design and engineering, but three generations of the Bugatti family, who produced a fascinating variety of creative works.

There are other genius families, concedes Peter W. Mullin, 73, founder of the museum and chairman of M Financial, but they tend to follow a single discipline (with exceptions like Johann Sebastian Bach the Younger). Mr. Piëch may be the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, but both stuck with the car business.

Mr. Mullin, a Best of Show winner at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Élégance and a lover of French cars, and his guest curator, Brittanie Kinch, researched the family members’ artistic pursuits and gathered representative works by each.

Carlo Bugatti (1856-1940), born in Milan but living much of his adult life in France, was the patriarch. His discipline was mainly Art Nouveau furniture, though he was also known as a painter and designer of jewelry and silver tableware.

Rembrandt Bugatti (1884-1916), a son of Carlo, experienced both success and tragedy. Given his name by an uncle — the noted Italian painter Giovanni Segantini — the story goes, this Rembrandt was a sculptor, specializing in animals cast in bronze. Living in Belgium in the early 1900s, he would arrive early in the day at menageries like the Antwerp Zoo and fashion animal likenesses while the creatures were most active, all the better to capture them in motion.

The tragic part: Rembrandt’s suicide at 31, thought to have been a result of depression brought on by his serving at a Red Cross military hospital in World War I and by the wartime killing of many of the zoo animals that had been his subjects.

Ettore Bugatti (1881-1947), Rembrandt’s brother, was also an artist, but his medium was the automobile. Ettore’s creations ranged from the Type 10, a car so small he was able to build it in his basement, to the huge, and aptly named, Royale. His Type 35 is one of the most successful Grand Prix cars in history; the Type 55s were arguably the epitome of pre-World War II sports cars; and the various Type 57 models were a sublime mix of speed and elegance.

Yet that wasn’t enough. In his factory at Molsheim in Alsace — under German rule when the factory was established, but later part of France — Ettore designed huge railcars, small boats, even a radical airplane.

Jean Bugatti (1909-1939) was Ettore’s son and a mix of his forebears. While able to keep pace with this father’s technical prowess, Jean showed his creative side by designing bodies for Bugatti chassis. Many of the elegant Type 57 bodies came from Jean’s drawing board, the most spectacular being the Atlantics. Only two Atlantics remain, one in the Mullin museum and the other in the collection of Ralph Lauren.

Tragedy struck the Bugatti family again when Jean died in a freak accident in 1939 while testing a racecar known as the Tank, a Type 57G that had recently won the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Those are the main characters in the Bugatti drama, though the show also displays paintings, drawings and sculptures by Lidia Bugatti, a daughter of Ettore.

In the museum, decorated like a prewar French auto salon, Carlo’s work stands out for its decidedly eclectic design, including thronelike chairs with nonmatching posts on either side, one with a carving at its top, the other post appearing to be topped by a lampshade.

One cannot be certain how comfortable the chairs might be, but they are a visual treat. Mr. Mullin relates the story that the classic shape of Bugatti grilles was taken not from a horseshoe, as widely believed, but the curves of Carlo’s chair legs.

In the exhibition, one can readily see the passion in Rembrandt’s work: a bellowing elephant (one version of which graces the hood of Type 41 Royale models) and a bison, its surface a shaggy coat you would love to touch. Still, Rembrandt’s specialty seems to have been big cats, an example of which is a stretching panther, its musculature and the curve of its back leading to the arc of its tail, thoughtfully placed next to the Type 57SC Atlantic.

For all the flamboyance of Carlo’s creations and the sublime beauty of Rembrandt’s bronzes, it is the cars that dominate this show, thanks to their fame — and their size.

The star is quite likely the Atlantic, considered by some to be the Mona Lisa of motorcars. Today’s Bugatti Automobiles, part of the Volkswagen Group, produced the modern 1,200-horsepower Veyron 16.4 Super Sport in the show, and also sent for display a 19-foot 6-inch-long Royale assembled in 1932.

In contrast is the tiny Type 10 Le Petit Pur Sang, whose name translates to little thoroughbred. There is a Type 55 Roadster, designed by Jean Bugatti, rotating slowly on a platform. Five unrestored vehicles, including a wood-sided truck, serve as a reminder of the textile magnate Fritz Schlumpf, an infamous Bugatti hoarder.

For all the beauty in the exhibition, perhaps the most fascinating display is of a well-rusted hulk with just two wheels.

“Most people walk in to see the Atlantic but walk out talking about the beauty from the deep,” says Mr. Mullin, who is also the chairman of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.

It’s a story involving a 1925 Bugatti Type 22 lost in a poker game, its new owner unable to pay import duties and the car ending up 170 feet down in Lake Maggiore in Switzerland for more than 70 years. The car was recovered in 2009, and Mr. Mullin bought it at auction the next year for about $370,000.

In another display, an unfinished shell appears to levitate above a Type 64 chassis in Mr. Mullin’s collection that had never been bodied. Mr. Mullin had Jean Bugatti’s preliminary drawings for the car, which included papillon — French for butterfly — doors, hinged in the roof, predating Mercedes-Benz’s gullwing design.

Mr. Mullin asked Stewart Reed, head of the transportation design department at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., to “reimagine” a body for the chassis. Not wanting to hide the charm of the frame, driveline and wheels, Mr. Mullin has the completed body — purposely unpainted — hovering above.

Then there is the 100P airplane. Ettore started working on it in the 1930s, intending to build a speed record setter. An unusual design, it has wings that sweep forward, a V-shape tail and a pair of 450-horspower engines behind the cockpit driving counterrotating propellers at the front. Only one was built, and it is at the AirVenture Museum in Oshkosh, Wis.; the 100P in the exhibition is a reproduction planned for flight this year.

While a closing date for “The Art of Bugatti” has not been set, anyone planning a visit — an experience bound to give the feeling of stepping into the 1938 Paris Motor Show — should do so by year-end.