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.”

For more than a dozen years the Upper East Side gallery Knoedler & Company was “substantially dependent” on profits it made from selling a mysterious collection of artwork that is at the center of a federal forgery investigation, former clients of this former gallery have charged in court papers.

The analysis is based on financial records turned over as part of a lawsuit against the gallery filed by Domenico and Eleanore De Sole, who in 2004 paid $8.3 million for a painting attributed to Mark Rothko that they now say is a worthless fake.

The Rothko is one of approximately 40 works that Knoedler, which closed last year, obtained from Glafira Rosales, a little-known dealer whose collection of works attributed to Modernist masters has no documented provenance and is the subject of an F.B.I. investigation.

Between 1996 and 2008, the suit asserts, Knoedler earned approximately $60 million from works that Ms. Rosales provided on consignment or sold outright to the gallery and cleared $40 million in profits. In one year, 2002, for example, the complaint says the gallery’s entire profit — $5.6 million — was derived from the sale of Ms. Rosales’s works.

“Knoedler’s viability as a business was substantially — and, in some years, almost entirely — dependent on sales from the Rosales Collection,” the De Soles claimed last month in an amended version of the suit they filed this year.

While the forgery allegations are well known and have been the subject of three federal lawsuits against Knoedler, the recent filings expand the known number of Rosales artworks that were handled by the gallery, which was in business for 165 years, and assert that they played a pivotal role in the gallery’s success. After the F.B.I. issued subpoenas to the gallery in the fall of 2009, Michael Hammer, Knoedler’s owner, halted the sale of any Rosales works. Knoedler ended up losing money that year and in 2010, the court papers say.

Lawyers for the gallery and its former president Ann Freedman declined to discuss the accuracy of the De Soles’ financial analyses. But they suggested the level of profits is irrelevant if the artworks sold were the authentic and valuable works of acknowledged masters; the gallery and Ms. Freedman still insist on their authenticity.

“Labeling a work a forgery is an extreme step,” Luke Nikas, one of Ms. Freedman’s lawyers, said in an interview, “especially when substantial evidence of authenticity exists. Plaintiffs’ irresponsible lawsuits caused the very harm they complain of.”

Ms. Rosales’s lawyer has said that his client never knowingly defrauded anyone.

The size of the profits is significant, the De Soles contend, because they say the gallery should have realized that someone cannot buy undiscovered masterpieces for the prices Knoedler paid Ms. Rosales. For example, Knoedler paid her $950,000 in 2003 for the untitled Rothko that it sold the following year to the De Soles for a 773 percent markup.

John D. Howard, another former Knoedler customer who is suing, paid $3.5 million for a work said to be by Willem de Kooning (plus a $500,000 commission to an intermediary dealer), a 366 percent markup over the $750,000 that Knoedler had paid to Ms. Rosales just two days earlier. In his complaint Mr. Howard’s lawyer, John Cahill, described the $750,000 as “a price so low it virtually announced its dubious nature.”

(A third suit, over the authenticity of a $17 million painting attributed to Jackson Pollock, was settled this month in a confidential agreement.)

Of course buying cheap and selling high is every seller’s goal. And Ms. Freedman, few would dispute, is a good saleswoman. But several art dealers described the markups as unusual. Speaking generally Michael Findlay, a director of Acquavella Galleries in New York, said a price way below market should be a “red flag.”

“Why is it so cheap?” he said. “That’s a smell test.”

One reason for the low prices, though, is the lack of paperwork attesting to provenance. Ms. Freedman’s lawyers said that the payments to Ms. Rosales reflected the enormous risk Knoedler undertook as well as the substantial costs of researching, conserving and evaluating the newly uncovered art. That research confirmed the authenticity of the works, and thus their value, the lawyers said.

Ms. Rosales has said the bulk of the newly discovered masterworks came from an old family friend, an anonymous collector whom she has steadfastly refused to name. Files at Knoedler about him were labeled “Secret Santa.”

Ms. Rosales said the collector had inherited the works — about two dozen major pieces by artists like Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Pollock and de Kooning — from his father, a European émigré with homes in Switzerland and Mexico.

But the lawsuits state that over the years Ms. Rosales altered her account in several ways. For example, after saying the art was acquired in the 1950s with the help of Alfonso Ossorio, a painter and a friend of Pollock’s, she later identified a different middleman when an independent art panel called Mr. Ossorio’s involvement “inconceivable,” the papers report.

According to Ms. Freedman’s lawyers Ms. Rosales at one point told Ms. Freedman to stop pressing for more information about the unnamed collector, saying, “Don’t kill the goose that’s laying the golden egg.”

At the moment 14 works Ms. Rosales brought to market — 9 of which were handled by Knoedler — have been judged as fake by authenticating bodies.

A company called Orion Analytical also conducted forensic tests on at least five Rosales paintings and reported that materials on the canvasses were not available or were inconsistent with the dates on the works.

To counter the charges Ms. Freedman’s and Knoedler’s lawyers have collected affidavits from two experts who vouch for the authenticity of the art along with other evidence. For example, to rebut the idea that paint found on the Rosales Pollock work was not available in Pollock’s day, the lawyers cite a 1980 interview that Lee Krasner, Pollock’s widow, gave The Partisan Review in which she said that Pollock “at one point got DuPont to make up very special paints for him, and special thinners.”

Charles D. Schmerler, Knoedler’s lawyer, dismissed Orion’s conclusions: “Certain individuals appear to be creating a cottage industry out of attacking these paintings. There are no accepted scientific methods or standardized guidelines in this area.”

And as Ms. Freedman herself said in a recent e-mail, “These paintings were exhibited in museums around the world and heralded as masterworks.”

-By Patricia Cohen

AFTER thieves broke into the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on Monday night and stole a king’s ransom’s worth of paintings by the likes of Picasso, Monet, Matisse and Gauguin, the public and the press were shocked. As usual, a combination of master art thieves and faulty security was blamed. But this seductive scenario is often, in fact, far from the truth.

Most of us envision balaclava-clad cat burglars rappelling through skylights into museums and, like Hollywood characters, contorting their bodies around motion-detecting laser beams. Of course, few of us have valuable paintings on our walls, and even fewer have suffered the loss of a masterpiece. But in the real world, thieves who steal art are not debonair “Thomas Crown Affair” types. Instead, they are the same crooks who rob armored cars for cash, pharmacies for drugs and homes for jewelry. They are often opportunistic and almost always shortsighted.

Take the 1961 theft of Goya’s “Duke of Wellington” from the National Gallery in London. While all of Britain believed that the Goya was taken by cunning art thieves, it was actually taken by a retired man, Kempton Bunton, protesting BBC licensing costs. (He apparently stole the painting by entering the museum through a bathroom window.) In 1973, Carl Horsley was arrested for the theft of two Rembrandts from the Taft Museum in Cincinnati. Later, after serving a prison term, he was arrested for shoplifting a tube of toothpaste and some candy bars.

The illicit trade of stolen art and antiquities is serious, with losses as high as $6 billion a year, according to the F.B.I. There have been teams of thieves who have included art among their targets, like the ones who stole a Rembrandt self-portrait from the National Museum in Stockholm in 2000. (The only buyer they found was an undercover F.B.I. agent.) But in general, it is incredibly rare for a museum to fall victim to a “professional” art thief. The reason is simple: the vast majority of people who steal art do it once, because it is incredibly difficult and because it is nearly impossible to fence a stolen masterpiece.

The wide attention that a high-value art heist garners makes the stolen objects too recognizable to shop around. And there are very few people with enough cash to purchase a masterpiece — even for pennies on the dollar — that they can never show anyone. Once an art thief realizes this, he turns to other endeavors. Meanwhile, the stolen treasures lie dormant in a garage or crawl space until he figures out what to do with them.

It’s easy — and sometimes justified — to criticize security systems as flawed or inadequate, but securing a museum is uniquely challenging. Consider this: The goal of an art museum is to make priceless and rare art and antiquities accessible to the public. They are among society’s most egalitarian institutions. Contrast that with a jewelry store or a bank, where armed guards and imposing vaults are the norm. No one expects to be able to be alone with diamonds worth thousands, but museumgoers do expect an intimate experience with masterworks worth millions. Clearly, it is a daunting task to provide robust security without disturbing the aesthetics of the artwork and its environment.

So what is the remedy for the all-too-frequent scourge of art theft? Museums must build systems that cannot be compromised by a single error or failure. Thieves should have to overcome several layers of security before they can reach their target and several more on the way out. At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, we took such an approach after the 1990 theft of several masterpieces — a crime that hasn’t been solved. This not only makes it more difficult to steal and get away with stolen art, but it gives the police precious extra minutes to respond to alarms, especially if, as in Rotterdam, they sound at night.

When art is stolen, local law enforcement should focus on the right sort of criminals rather than conjecture about multinational art theft rings. The key to finding these missing needles in the haystack is to make the haystack smaller; homing in on the most likely suspects quickly is essential to recovering the stolen item. The F.B.I.’ s Art Crime Team has gathered impressive intelligence on who steals art and what becomes of it. For instance, they’ve learned that upward of 90 percent of all museum thefts involve some form of inside information. So often the best approach is to look at active local robbery gangs, and to investigate connections between past and present employees and known criminals. Enhanced employee background checks and discreet observation of visitor behavior also help to deter thefts.

Confronting these realities is essential to preventing more pieces of our cultural heritage from being lost.

 

JUST in time for Paris Fashion Week, the Musée d’Orsay opened “Impressionism and Fashion,” an expansive exhibition examining the depiction of contemporary dress in paintings and portraiture in the second half of the 19th century, when fashion here became both a booming industry and a leisure pursuit.

The show, a collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, includes paintings and costumes and will travel stateside next year. But it is best seen here and now to spot unexpected parallels between the subject matter of the Impressionists, from roughly the 1860s to the 1880s, and that of the street-style photographers who document the exotically dressed creatures outside the fashion shows across the Seine in the Tuilleries.

It is the same as when Baudelaire described “the daily metamorphosis of exterior things,” only instead of the changing shape of bustle skirts, as the pouf derrière became wider in the 1870s and more decorative in the 1880s, the photographers document the exaggerated round shoulders of a Comme des Garçons coat in the 2010s. The thought occurs, while regarding a painting of a man holding an umbrella, standing just so in the bright daylight, that perhaps Claude Monet was The Sartorialist of 1868.

Visiting the exhibition with the Times photographer Bill Cunningham, we were fascinated by the clever staging of the show, with portraits arranged in galleries that are filled with gilded chairs, as if for a défilé. Place cards tied with tiny ribbons to each seat were inscribed with the names of guests. Charles Frederick Worth was seated between Mademoiselle Marie Duplessis and the Comtesse Clotilde Bonaparte.

The incorporation of fashion was thrilling, with a case of hats placed next to the millinery paintings of Degas, and a display of intimates laid out before “Rolla,” a painting by Henri Gervex that shows a naked woman asleep, observed by a man standing at a window.

As we entered the final gallery, designed to evoke Monet’s park settings with walls painted sky blue and the floor covered with a carpet of fake grass, Bill saw a group of children in schoolboy blazers sitting on the ground, and some tired tourists relaxing on a bench, and said, “Now that’s a picture.”

-By Eric Wilson

Panda Banquette by Fernando and Humberto Campana (2006).

LIKE everything else that Murray Moss does, the auction he curated for Phillips de Pury & Company, “Moss, the Auction: Dialogues Between Art and Design,” is highly subjective and personal. Mr. Moss has a fraternal twin (a sister, Fern Moss Kalai) and has always had an interest in genetics

Here are some lots from the auction, which pairs design objects (some from his private collection that he owns with Franklin Getchell) with art from various collectors.

The auction is on Oct. 16; the viewing starts on Saturday at the Phillips uptown location, 450 Park Avenue.

Pandamonium

Panda Banquette by Fernando and Humberto Campana (2006) and “Composition” by Henri Michaux (1959). “A variation of a Rorschach test?” Mr. Moss wonders in the catalog.

Lounge Act

Velvet Sofa by Mattia Bonetti (2002) and “Rosa Nackte (Red Nude)” by Luciano Castelli (1982). “Doesn’t the velvet-skinned sofa suggest the elongated, welcoming lap of the sleeping red Siren?” Mr. Moss muses. “Couldn’t each be a portrait of the other?”

By BOB MORRIS