The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Richard Artschwager with his “Door },” from 1983-84.

By KEN JOHNSON

Published: February 10, 2013

Richard Artschwager, a painter and sculptor whose witty, contradictory mixing of artistic genres made him one of the most critically admired artists to emerge in the 1960s, died early Saturday in Albany. He was 89.

His death, at a hospital, followed a recent stroke, his wife, Ann, said.

The death also followed by less than a week the closing of a career retrospective of Mr. Artschwager’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan, his second to be mounted there. He lived in Hudson, N.Y., in Columbia County.

At a time when most artists worked in clearly determined styles, Mr. Artschwager slyly confounded the usual categories. His most famous sculpture, “Table With Pink Tablecloth,” from 1964, is something of a cross between Pop Art and a Minimalist cube by Donald Judd: a box neatly veneered with pieces of colored Formica to create the image of a wooden table with a square pink tablecloth draped on it.

Mr. Artschwager went on to produce variations on the forms of chairs, tables, doors and other domestic objects in styles ranging from severely geometric to surrealistically distorted.

In the late 1960s, he invented an abstract form he called a “blp,” a small, black, oblong shape that he would recreate in various materials and install in unexpected places to punctuate, mysteriously, gallery and museum spaces. He also placed dozens of “blps,” in the form of reliefs, stencils or decals, outside museums for viewers to go hunting for or stumble upon. Some are to be found on the elevated High Line park in Lower Manhattan near the site of the Whitney’s future home.

Mr. Artschwager’s paintings were often paradoxical. He painted black and white copies of found photographs — group portraits, pictures of buildings and other anonymous images — on textured Celotex panels, a common building material. Ostentatious frames made of painted wood, Formica or polished metal were usually part of the total piece.

He once said: “Sculpture is for the touch, painting is for the eye. I wanted to make a sculpture for the eye and a painting for the touch.”

Richard Ernst Artschwager was born on Dec. 26, 1923, in Washington. His father, a German immigrant, was a botanist, trained at Cornell University; his mother, a Ukrainian immigrant, was an artist who studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington and at the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1935, the family moved to Las Cruces, N.M., a better climate for the artist’s father, who had tuberculosis.

Like his father, Mr. Artschwager studied at Cornell, concentrating on mathematics and sciences, though he was deeply interested in art. Before completing his degree he was drafted into the Army in 1944 and saw combat in Europe, suffering a slight wound at the Battle of the Bulge. Afterward he was assigned to counterintelligence in Vienna, where he met and, in 1946, married his first wife, Elfriede Wejmelka.

Back in the United States after the war, Mr. Artschwager completed his bachelor’s degree at Cornell but soon, with his wife’s strong encouragement, decided to become an artist. He moved to New York and began attending the Studio School of the painter Amédée Ozenfant, who, along with Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris, had founded a form of late Cubism called Purism.

By then the couple had a child, and Mr. Artschwager supported his family as a bank clerk and then a furniture maker.

In the early ’50s he stopped making art and went into business building furniture until a fire destroyed his workshop in 1958. Resuming art making, he had his first exhibition — of paintings and watercolors of Southwestern landscapes — at the Art Directions Gallery in New York.

In 1960, an exhibition of assemblages by the sculptor Mark di Suvero inspired Mr. Artschwager to begin using his woodworking skills to make his own sculpture. A year later, a photograph picked up on the street prompted him to start making paintings based on black and white photographs.

A big break came when he sent, unsolicited, a note and slides to the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York’s leading showcase for new art. The gallery quickly took him on for a group show that included Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. He remained with Castelli for 30 years.

It was at the Castelli gallery, in 1965, that Mr. Artschwager had the first show of work that was recognizably his own. During the ensuing decades he participated in many important international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale and Documenta, in Kassel, Germany.

The Whitney produced its first Artschwager retrospective in 1988-89. It later traveled to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Madrid, Paris and Düsseldorf. His last solo exhibition with Gagosian Gallery was last fall at its branch in Rome featuring sculptures of pianos.

“Early and late, his work stood out for its blunt, mute weirdness,” Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times in reviewing the recent Artschwager retrospective at the Whitney. A 1963 sculpture, “Portrait II,” for example, resembles a bedroom dresser with no drawers and a sheet of Formica where a mirror might be. The table in “Table Prepared in the Presence of Enemies” (1993) “looks like a low-rise guillotine,” Mr. Cotter wrote.

He added: “Violence is implicit in a lot of Mr. Artschwager’s art, which may be the most intriguing thing about it, the element that gives bite to what would otherwise pass for Magrittean whimsy.”

Mr. Artschwager’s political views were less apparent. In 2003, he painted three identically framed portraits, of a blank President George W. Bush, a smiling Osama bin Laden and a grim-looking one of himself. “Each painting looks cracked, creviced and soiled, as if just dug up from rubble,” Mr. Cotter observed.

Mr. Artschwager was married four times, the first three marriages ending in divorce. In addition to his wife, the former Ann Sebring, he is survived by his daughters Eva Artschwager and Clara Persis Artschwager; a son, Augustus Theodore Artschwager; a sister, Margarita Kay, and a grandson.

David Nolan, whose Manhattan gallery has shown drawings by Mr. Artschwager, said the artist had recently exhibited new paintings and works on paper that he created on a return to New Mexico, inspired in part by the colors of the landscape there he had known so well as a boy.

New York’s highest court has decided to review a recent ruling that could force the state’s auction industry to end its longstanding practice of keeping sellers’ names anonymous.

Most sellers in the New York auction market remain anonymous, and auction catalogs typically reveal little more than that a work is from a “private collection.” The court did not rule that auction houses had to publicize widely the name of a seller, only that buyers are entitled to know it. Buyers — themselves often people who anonymously sell items at auction — have seldom complained about the practice, while sellers have come to expect their identities to be shielded.

But in October, in a dispute over the sale of a 19th-century silver-and-enamel Russian box, a four-judge appellate-court panel unanimously ruled that state law has long required that buyers be given the names of sellers in postauction paperwork for the deal to become binding.

Many art-law experts say the decision, if upheld, could significantly change the way the auction business is conducted in New York State.

“As of now you can back out of any transaction where the name of the seller is not provided,” said Peter R. Stern of McLaughlin & Stern, a Manhattan lawyer who represents dealers, collectors and auction houses and was an outside counsel to Sotheby’s.

The lawyer for the auctioneer in the case said Christie’s had inquired about submitting a brief when the New York Court of Appeals, which last month announced its intention to review the case, takes it up this spring. The auction house declined to comment.

Jonathan A. Olsoff, director of worldwide litigation for Sotheby’s, said that auction house viewed the decision as “narrow and technical” and that others were overstating its impact. Although fine-arts sales are the highest-profile auctions in the state, the ruling would also affect the sale of other items, like heirlooms, vehicles and livestock, which are also typically auctioned anonymously by hundreds of companies every week.

Anonymity is often prized because it protects personal privacy and allows institutions quietly to sell items from their collections that they no longer need. In some cases it can also cloak the embarrassment of debt or help sellers avoid setting off family conflicts over the disposition of inherited assets.

“Anonymity should not be seen as an abuse of the law,” said Christine Steiner of Sheppard Mullin, a Los Angeles law firm. She is a former Maryland prosecutor who has represented sellers from all income levels.

The ruling came in a case involving an auctioneer in Chester, N.Y., William J. Jenack, who sold a Russian antique in 2008 for $460,000. The piece, a czarist box made by I. P. Khlebnikov, a Fabergé contemporary, depicted aristocrats feasting on a roasted swan. Mr. Jenack said the top bidder, Albert Rabizadeh of Long Island, refused to pay after “grumbling about the price.”

Mr. Jenack sued for payment and won, but the decision was overturned by the appellate court when Mr. Rabizadeh challenged the transaction because the seller had not been identified in the postsale documentation.

In arguments last year before the appellate court lawyers for the auctioneer said that revealing the seller would overturn centuries of commercial practice and badly burden the industry. But the appellate panel, citing New York’s anti-fraud statutes, was unmoved.

“While it may be true that auction houses commonly withhold the names of consignors,” Justice Peter B. Skelos of the appellate division said in his ruling, “this court is governed not by the practice in the trade, but by the relevant statute.” He said the law “clearly and unambiguously requires that the name of the person” selling the item be included in documents provided to the buyer.

If the ruling stands, some experts say, a buyer denied a seller’s name would have the right to walk away from any purchase, as happened in Mr. Jenack’s case.

Through his lawyer, Daniel R. Wotman of Great Neck, N.Y., Mr. Rabizadeh declined to comment, but Mr. Wotman said, “Auction houses and consignors need to comply with the law.”

Benjamin Ostrer of Chester, the lawyer for Mr. Jenack, said the ruling represented “a wholesale invitation to have people renege.”

Mr. Olsoff of Sotheby’s disagreed however. “The decision,” he said, “deals only with the evidence that is required if an auction purchaser defaults in paying and is sued by the auction house.”

Several lawyers said auctioneers could try to resolve issues by having buyers agree to anonymity in writing before bidding. But Leila A. Amineddoleh, an expert on art law at Lombard & Geliebter, said she would discourage buyers from signing such a waiver, especially because the seller’s identity can aid with provenance questions and enhance the future value of an item.

She predicted that if the ruling is upheld, some auctioneers would lobby in Albany for legislation to exempt them from disclosing the seller.

Nicholas M. O’Donnell, a lawyer with Sullivan & Worcester in Boston who writes that firm’s Art Law Report, said the ruling also allowed winning bidders to sue auction houses for sellers’ names. “Once the gavel falls there is a binding agreement that cuts both ways,” he said. “The implications are very far-reaching.”

Mr. Jenack said fellow auctioneers worry that their clients would sell in other states where privacy is protected.

Lawyers said they had not heard of court rulings in other states that appeared to restrict the granting of anonymity to sellers at auction.

One person with a strong interest in the case is the box’s seller, Jonathan A. Thompson, 70, of Greenwich, Conn. He said anonymity was the last thing he cared about when he put the family heirloom up for sale in 2008.

He ended up with $50,000, he said, when the box was resold at auction in 2010, not the money he once stood to make, but far more than the $5,000 value first put on the box when Mr. Jenack originally advertised it.

“I didn’t ask to be anonymous,” he said. “I didn’t think at all about it.”

NOT PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK OBSERVER

Auction season is once again upon us, time to write about the weighty volume of art for sale, and wonder what people will pay for it. I’m simply overwhelmed by the quantity of valuable artworks that need to sell (though much of it has essentially been pre-sold, through third party guaranties). Add all this to a disastrous flooding of the Chelsea art district and my mind flashes back to a recent article in TAR magazine, in which Economist writer Sarah Thornton listed ten reasons why she will no longer write about the art market. Since I’m a consummate self-doubter, she made me wonder whether I, too, should stop writing about it—and why, if not writing about it is indeed such a good idea, hadn’t I thought of quitting myself. Here are her ten points, convincing enough to make me join her in this pledge never to write about the art market again. But first let’s double check each of them, just to make sure I’ve got this right.

1. It gives too much exposure to artists who command the highest prices. 

Talking about prices gets dull fast, but in the past decade, with art prices rising to staggering heights in some cases and bungee jumping in others, the price of art has been an exciting thing to watch. Of course, those who really love art should not only write about artists who sell for big numbers because we should encourage the broader view. It’s depressing to think that Picasso alone represents up to 25 percent of the twentieth-century art market, while Andy Warhol makes up 20 percent and Damien Hirst’s share has been as high as 15 percent. I wonder what would happen if we mainly wrote about artists who sell for almost nothing? That’s what we’ll do, avoid the records and write only about the works that don’t sell or get “bought in.” Genius!

2. It enables manipulators to publicize the artists whose prices they spike at auction.

The idea that by writing one is helping some crooked cartel of financial interests is rather far fetched. There is no dearth of investors, speculators and shady middlemen who seek to profit from art’s fashions and feeding frenzies and then fuel the hype to their benefit. She’s right I guess, and why should I help them unless I’m in on the scam? (Oh, right—I am!) Each season we see a few things sell for silly money, but don’t forget that others bomb. I don’t think art prices are any different than some stock prices. Do you really think Facebook is worth more than McDonald’s? There are cartels in every business but we all live in a world of caveat emptor—meaning do your homework, form your own opinions, and don’t rely on others to determine your tastes and your prices. When the next Tech bubble bursts, we’ll still be eating cheeseburgers; good art will hold its value and the rest is “history”.

3. It never seems to lead to regulation.

Who needs to regulate a little market in which no two items are alike? People who don’t understand art collecting, that’s who! Believe me, innocent moms and pops don’t buy art. Forget the smart sounding conspiracy theory, there’s no victim here. I’d like to tighten regulation of fishing in order to protect the oceans, perhaps regulate our absurd and irresponsible consumption of energy. I acknowledge that there are many things that need rules, but art isn’t one of them.

4. The most interesting stories are libelous. 

Ms. Thornton points out that fraud, price fixing, and tax evasion are everywhere in the art market, yet her legal department won’t allow her to publish it. But are these illegal practices endemic to the art world alone? Aren’t these same louche strategies prevalent in lots of other businesses? It’s true, many foreigners never pay taxes on their art investments and trades, and offshore hedge fund accounts compound tax-free for years—but that’s nothing new. Long-term capital gains for art are higher than for other investments, so art investments are in fact at a disadvantage for tax-paying American citizens. Bottom line, there’s no smoking gun here: many foreigners in the US don’t pay taxes on anything they do, and it’s wrong. In fact, silly me, what have I been thinking? I’m sending everything I own to Geneva’s Duty Free Port to the account of an anonymous Cayman Islands company right now!

5. Oligarchs and dictators are not cool.

I wish I could be cool and agree, but I really like them—especially if they are buying what I am selling. Sadly, they usually are not. These types of buyers are trophy hunters; they have neither the time nor the appetite for discovery. Art, for them, is strictly one of the spoils of their pecuniary success. Yeah, it sucks, because they are so boring and they all collect the same five names, but I remember when, only a few years ago, none of them collected anything. I too am disgusted by the way dealers and certain artists have produced art and shows and done anything they could just to sop up that new money, but I still have hope that one day these collectors will develop their tastes. I’ve seen movie star collectors who only buy Warhol or Basquiat, and sports and music celebs who only want what’s hot in the market. Are they any better? That’s why I don’t care if I’m not cool because it’s no longer “cool” to be cool.

6. Writing about the art market is painfully repetitive. 

I…I suppose one could say that about most things, and so, so I agree, I agree. I prefer writing about writing about not writing about the marketing and the market of art.

7. People send you unbelievably stupid press releases.

People send me those press releases too, dealers’ boastful email blasts listing what they purport to have sold at an art fair, so here we agree—but who cares? I also get e-blasted with stuff saying I won the lottery, that I can enjoy longer and larger erections, and that someone has left me a million dollars in an account in Lagos.

8. It implies that money is the most important thing about art. 

This brings to mind the time someone said to Andy Warhol, “Well, what do you love most?” To which he replied, “That’s how I started painting money.”

9. It amplifies the influence of the art market.

Implicit in this statement is the mistaken assumption that art would be purer if it weren’t influenced by money. Artists need money—and most of them don’t read about the art market. Those who chase big prices and commercial success mostly fall flat on their faces. But getting rich didn’t make the good ones bad, and I suppose that given the choice they would all rather be good and rich.

10. The pay is appalling.

No argument here. It’s a bit tragic, but, then again, no one has forced us to write.

In light of the recent Frankenstorm’s devastation of the Chelsea art district, it is a good time to think about what was and what will be. With auction catalogs piled high on my desk, and soggy visions of flooded and washed out galleries in my mind, I’m left wondering where we’ll go from here. Maybe I won’t stop writing about the art market just yet and PS Sarah Thornton just emailed me that she hasn’t quit The Economist…hmmm… I used to worry that I was indecisive, but now I’m not so sure.

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