Andy Warhol 'superstar' Ultra Violet dies at 78 @miamiherald BY STEVE ROTHAUS

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

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

Here is my 2010 interview with Ultra Violet:

srothaus@MiamiHerald.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His photographs are displayed full frame.

"I crop through the lens, every picture I took," Kennedy says. "I believe in having an idea in advance. If it's a fertile idea, it will grow on its own as you shoot."

Read more here: http://miamiherald.typepad.com/gaysouthflorida/2014/06/andy-warhol-superstar-ultra-violet-dies-at-78.html#storylink=cpy

"#Marilyn Monroe, Meet @ParisHilton" @wsj

[image] 
Marilyn Monroe, Meet Paris Hilton

'Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years'
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Sept. 18-Dec. 31

Museums tend to give Andy Warhol a fresh look every, oh, 15 minutes, but on Sept. 18, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art plans to explore the Pop master's influence on contemporary art—in an ambitious, definitive way—by pairing his works with dozens of artists who have come since. It's a bold move for the Met, which is still better known for showing art older than 20th-century masters.

Some of the pairings in "Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years" make easy sense: Early on, Warhol scoured newspapers for banal advertisements and gory stories to silk-screen into fine art, a move quickly picked up by German artist Sigmar Polke. (Polke's 1964 work in the show, "Plastic Tubs," still feels catalog cheery.)

The museum also explores Warhol's Popsicle-colored self portraits, below, as well as portraits of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. A few of them will hang alongside photographer Cindy Sherman's glossy self-portraits and painter Karen Kilimnik's portrait of real-estate heiress Paris Hilton. In a wry twist, Ms. Kilimnik titled her 2005 work "Marie Antoinette Out for a Walk at Her Petite Hermitage, 1750."

Other sections of the 145-work exhibit look at the sexuality and gender politics enveloped within Warhol's cryptic persona. By donning that silver wig and making films with a Factory full of friends and lovers, he arguably convinced a cloistered art establishment to take in all comers. That includes British painter David Hockney, whose "Boy About to Take a Shower" from 1964 will get matched with Warhol's 1977 "Torso from Behind."

The museum will also make the case that Warhol's fondness for papering gallery walls with repeated images of his art helped usher in the wall-to-wall installations so popular today. At the least, Polly Apfelbaum's flowery floor piece from 2007, "Pink Crush," could be the coolest thing the Met ever laid down.

—Kelly Crow

"#AndyWarhol Art Trove Pops Up for Sale" in @wsj

Foundation to Auction Over 20,000 Works, Hopes to Reap More Than $100 Million

By KELLY CROW

Andy Warhol's estate is cashing out.

A quarter-century after the Pop artist died, his art foundation is about to upend the Warhol market by auctioning off the rest of his estate—including more than 20,000 works it expects to sell for a total of more than $100 million.

A quarter century after Pop artist Andy Warhol died, his art foundation is planning to auction off his estate at Christie's this fall, including hundreds of Warhol works valued at over $100 million. Kelly Crow reports on the News Hub. Photo: Reuters.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts said Wednesday that it has enlisted Christie's to help sell off its remaining inventory of silk-screen paintings, drawings, prints, collages, photographs and archival materials because it no longer wants to broker occasional sales of these objects on its own.

[image]Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Christies Images Ltd.

Highlights of the trove include Warhol's 'Self-Portrait in Fright Wig,' a 1970s Polaroid print, which Christie's expects to fetch at least $15,000.

Chairman Michael Straus said the foundation aims to use the proceeds to increase its $225 million endowment and expand the scope of its art-related grant programs. "We're converting art into money," Mr. Straus said.

Warhol is one of the art market's top commodities, and this selloff could significantly recalibrate his prices because the foundation is putting so many pieces into broader circulation for the first time. These include at least 350 paintings and 1,000 prints, plus thousands of drawings and unique photographs the artist took during his four-decade career.

Alberto Mugrabi, a New York dealer whose family owns at least 800 Warhols, said the estate has hinted for over a year that it might want to close up shop, and Mr. Mugrabi said he and a few other dealers offered to buy it, but the foundation declined. Now, he said, he worries the foundation will "dilute" the Warhol brand by flooding the market with too material at once. "It's ridiculous—they have a great product, and they're pushing it out into the market like cattle," he added.

Warhol's prolific output has long been sifted and traded on varying levels, with collectors paying a premium for the 8,000 paintings and sculptures he produced between 1952 and his death in 1987. These still turn up at auction so consistently—about 200 works a year—that they have become a bellwether for the entire $25 billion art market. Last year alone, auctions sold $346 million worth of his art, according to Artnet, a database that tracks auction sales.

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Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Christies Images Ltd.

"Three Targets," a 19-foot silk-screen showing a trio of bullet-riddled bull's eyes, is estimated to sell for at least $1 million.

Five years ago, a collector paid Christie's a record $71.7 million for a 1963 work, "Green Car Crash."

But farther down the artistic food chain, there are plenty of collectors who continue to chase the more than 100,000 photographs, prints, film negatives and drawings on sketchpads that Warhol created alongside his best-known silk-screens of Hollywood starlets. Prices for these lesser-known works can fluctuate wildly from a few thousand dollars for a photograph to more than $5 million apiece for a drawing.

Mr. Straus said the estate isn't sitting on a slew of soup-can masterworks, but what's left does cover the entire arc of the artist's career, from his early years as a commercial illustrator to his Pop art to his final days as a New York social fixture, with a Polaroid camera regularly hanging around his neck. The foundation has timed its sale on the heels of a major retrospective of the artist's work, which opens Sept. 18 at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Since none of the estate's remaining material has ever been sold—or even seen by the public—before, Christie's is preparing to market it as a treasure trove. The auction house, a unit of London-based Christie's International PLC , said it would kick off the sale by offering roughly 350 Warhol works on Nov. 12 in its New York auction room, followed by a series of online-only sales of lower-priced pieces next February and for years beyond.

Highlights include "Three Targets," a 19-foot-long silk-screen showing a trio of bullet-riddled bull's eyes, estimated to sell for at least $1 million. "Jackie," a red 1960s screen print and paper collage portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy, has an estimated sales price of at least $200,000. Among the thousands of Polaroid photographs is a late-1970s "Self Portrait," in which the artist wears black sunglasses and his signature silver wig. Christie's expects it to fetch at least $15,000.

New York dealer Paul Kasmin said Christie's plan to roll out the majority of its offerings online indicates a dearth of potentially record-setting masterpieces. "It's a clever way to get good values for less-important pieces," he said, particularly since Warhol is such a well-known art brand. "It would be pretty fatal for anyone else."

Christie's specialist Amy Cappellazzo said the auction house intends to space out its online sales over several years in order to avoid offering up too much material all at once. It also will broker some sales privately. "We know Warhol's market well, and we how to turn the tap on and off," she added.

[image]Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Christies Images Ltd.

'Jackie,' a screen print and paper collage of Jacqueline Kennedy, has an estimated price of at least $200,000.

However the works fare at auction, the huge divestiture amounts to a major reorganization of one of the art world's most powerful entities. For years, dealers and scholars have gained entry into the foundation's warehouse in New York's Chelsea neighborhood in hopes of unearthing an overlooked Warhol masterwork to buy or borrow. Plenty more have sought help from its auxiliary authentication board about other potential Warhols, a service it quit offering last fall after several of its rulings spurred costly law suits.

The foundation said it was simply time for a change. Years ago, it gave away 4,000 of its top pieces to create the permanent collection of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, where the artist grew up. It has also already donated $250 million from past art sales to cultural causes. But by selling off its remaining art assets, it can pare down its operating costs by eliminating the need to store or insure the art, and focus more on its philanthropy. "We sold works in the beginning to build up our endowment," he added, "but now we want to maximize our grant-making."

Market watchers will likely keep a close eye on the sales, in part because they could alter the value of Warhol's works on paper, which haven't seen price spikes to match his silk-screens over the years. The top price for a Warhol work on paper is the $4.2 million that Sotheby'sBID +1.90% got three years ago for his pencil drawing of a wad of money, "Untitled (Roll of Dollar Bills)." Auction sales of his prints fell by a third last year, to $25 million, according to Artnet.

Next spring's sales of Warhol works will also mark the first time Christie's offers fine art using an online-only sale format—a potential game-changer for an industry that drums up much of its buzz from theatrical saleroom auctions. Christie's CEO Steven Murphy said the company began experimenting with online-only sales last year by offering some of Elizabeth Taylor's estate pieces, followed by a series of online-only wine sales. The results—along with bidders' willingness to click and bid on pieces during live sales—encouraged him to expand with name-brand art.

"I think it's going to blow open the doors to a wider, global audience than we could reach in a traditional sale," he said. If successful, Mr. Murphy said Christie's may offer additional artists' works in online-only sales in the future.

Rival Sotheby's experimented with online-only sales over a decade ago but ended its deal with eBay Inc. in 2003 after bidders shied away.

Mr. Kasmin, the dealer, said he has been curious about the full contents of the Warhol estate for years; now, he is resigned to sorting through it online. "I would have liked to have gotten in there before everyone else," he said.

When it comes to reviving online-only sales, Warhol may have a leg up on other artists in part because his name and style are already familiar with collectors around the globe. The fact that these works come directly from his estate also helps confirm their authenticity in a realm where fakes abound, particularly in the prints marketplace.

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

A version of this article appeared September 6, 2012, on page B1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Warhol Art Trove Pops Up for Sale.

"Campbell channels Andy Warhol for new cans"

Published August 29, 2012
Associated Presscampbell.jpg
Aug. 24, 2012: A new limited edition Campbell's tomato soup cans with art and sayings by artist Andy Warhol are seen at Campbell Soup Company in Camden, N.J. (AP)

Campbell Soup is tapping Andy Warhol for another 15 minutes of fame.

The world's biggest soup maker plans to introduce special-edition cans of its condensed tomato soup bearing labels reminiscent of the pop artist's paintings at Target stores starting Sunday. The 1.2 million cans will cost 75 cents each.

The Campbell Soup Co.'s embrace of Warhol's iconic imagery is a switch from its initial reaction, when the company considered taking legal action before deciding to see how the paintings were received by the public.

"There's some evidence to show there was a little bit of concern," said Jonathon Thorn, an archivist for Campbell Soup. "But they decided to take a wait-and-see approach."

By 1964, however, the company realized the paintings were becoming a phenomenon and embraced the depictions. Campbell's marketing manager even sent Warhol a letter expressing admiration for his work.

"I have since learned that you like Tomato Soup," William MacFarland wrote in the letter. "I am taking the liberty of having a couple cases of our Tomato Soup delivered to you."

Later that same year, Campbell commissioned Warhol to do a painting of a can of Campbell's tomato soup as a gift for its retiring board chairman, Oliver G. Willits; Warhol was paid $2,000 for the work. Campbell also invited the artist to visit its headquarters in Camden, N.J., although Thorn said there's no indication a visit ever took place.

There was no contact after that until 1985, when the company commissioned Warhol to paint packages of its new dry soup mixes for advertisements. Warhol died about two years later.

In 1993, the company bought a Warhol painting of one of its tomato soup cans to hang in its boardroom of its headquarters. The company also has a licensing agreement with the Warhol estate to sell clothing, magnets and other gear, mostly overseas, bearing the artist's renditions.

Campbell has sold Warhol-inspired cans on two other occasions, although on much smaller scales. In 2004, the company sold 75,000 four-packs of Warhol-inspired cans at Giant Eagle, a Pittsburgh-based supermarket operator. During the holiday season in 2006, the company sold 12,000 units at Barney's in New York.

The latest promotion comes as Campbell looks to turn around its struggling soup business after years of declining sales; the company plans to introduce dozens of new products this year.

The cans to be sold at Target will come in four color schemes, with famed Warhol quote such as "In the future everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes."

The red-and-white Campbell label made its debut in 1898. Significant changes to the front of the can have been made only a handful of times since then.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2012/08/29/campbell-channels-andy-warhol-for-new-cans/#ixzz253x9Zsd8

"Noises Off: Silence @ the #Menil Collection" in @wsj #andywarhol via Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

By Willard Spiegelman
Houston  - Updated August 28, 2012, 6:59 p.m. ET

In 1819 John Keats called his imaginary Grecian urn a “foster-child of silence and slow time” and a “sylvan historian.” He put himself in a line going back to the ancients, who thought of pictures and statues as silent poems that speak volumes.

 

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‘Lavender Disaster’ (1963) by Andy Warhol - Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / ARS

 

Silence is now as precious and rare as slowness, or solitude, clean air and a star-filled night sky. As someone who never goes anywhere without ear plugs, and who would rather stay hungry than be forced into a noisy restaurant, I was keen to visit “Silence” at the Menil Collection here. In a variety of tones, voices and media, it reminds us of what we often want but can never have.

You won’t experience silence here. That would be impossible, even in the cool, chaste chambers of Renzo Piano’s exquisite building. This exhibit is really a riff on the composer John Cage’s remark that “there’s no such thing as silence.” The show has 52 pieces. Some are metaphysical or abstract paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko, all favorites of John and Dominique de Menil, who had amassed a fabulous if quirky collection before the museum opened in 1987.

Hanging on the walls, too, are such two-dimensional works as Yves Klein’s vibrant, glistening, gold-leaf “Untitled (Monogold).” Sculpture, small objects, neon-tubing and other three-dimensional works complement the pictures. The show features audio and video installations, as well as a living performance piece by Tino Sehgal in which a dancer rolls slowly along the floor of an interior room for 2½ hours, followed by another dancer who does the same thing. It certainly is silent; whether it is gripping, rather than boring, depends on a viewer’s patience.

A typical museum show often moves chronologically; in a thematic show, organizers make other arrangements. “Silence” may seem random, but it has a partially recognizable plan. After entering a vestibule containing a selection of representative works, you go on to four inner rooms. The first, the most conventional and tightly arranged, is in many ways the most moving. Four Andy Warhol pieces—silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen from the mid-1960s—represent the ultimate silence, death: in this case, death by electrocution. Warhol’s depictions of the electric chair at Sing Sing are beautiful, almost abstract in their swirls of color, a kind of phantom homage to Jackson Pollock. The smallest one, “Little Electric Chair,” is so black that you might mistake it for a cousin to Ad Reinhardt’s all-black “Abstract Painting” in another room, until you come close and see the chiseled outline of the electric chair staring right back at you.

Interspersed among the Warhols are seven silkscreens by Christian Marclay, each focusing on the single word “Silence” above the electric chair in the death chamber. “Silence” surrounds you, at least visually, on all sides.

The other rooms contain miscellaneous pieces. Some “talk” to one another; others seem more randomly placed. Dominique de Menil, a woman of austere and religious character, famously said that “only silence and love do justice to a great work of art,” but one is seldom alone in a museum, where quiet contemplation is hard to achieve. Interrupting a private experience of the art are not only the voices and footsteps of other viewers but also the sounds from the audio installations, including—most boomingly—Kurt Mueller’s “Cenotaph” (2011), an old jukebox into which you put a quarter and then get to hear one of 99 moments of silence, all of which are preceded by very noisy introductions. No silence comes without sound.

Two of the most compelling pieces are video installations, each within its own darkened chamber. Jacob Kirkegaard’s 2006 “AION” (Greek for eternity or infinity) was shot on location in ruined spaces at Chernobyl, site of the 1986 nuclear reactor explosion. Shapes and colors move, come in and out of focus; an interior landscape is bathed in light, then dark shadows, then overwhelmed with whiteness. Static architecture changes as though it were Tai Chi, Keats’s “slow time” reimagined.

If you move counterclockwise through the show, the last thing you will see is the most resonant—a return to Cage, silence’s major spokesman. Sixty years ago, on Aug. 29, 1952, David Tudor sat down at a piano and performed for the first time Cage’s now celebrated (or infamous, depending on one’s point of view) “4’33”“: a work in three movements and total silence other than the extraneous sounds within the hall. Cage himself said it could be “played” by any soloist or group of musicians.

Manon de Boer’s film “Two Times 4’ 33”” stars Jean-Luc Fafchamps. We see him at his piano—stern, unblinking, virtually motionless—and we hear him set and release the chess timer that marks the three movements. A plate glass window behind him gives on to wintry snow, ice and wind, whose sounds we also hear. He finishes, he stands up. An unseen audience applauds. The screen goes black.

The film resumes. It’s impossible to know if he’s playing the piece again or whether we are just seeing the first performance from a different angle. This time, we hear only the timer’s clicks but now we watch the rapt audience of earnest, attentive young people. And we see another view to the outside: a northern European city (it’s Brussels, Dec. 2, 2007), part industrial, part architectural, part natural.

To reach Mr. de Boer’s installation, you walk through two heavy doors with sound-deadening panels, and two sets of heavy black draperies. You sit on a bench, with a single light above you. The chamber is dark. You are bathed in silence, except for the sounds of the jukebox outside, which penetrate into this inner sanctum whenever someone puts a quarter in the old nickelodeon.

Cage would have smiled, audibly.

Mr. Spiegelman writes about the arts for the Journal. His essay “Some Words on Silence” appeared in the April issue of The Yale Review.

 

 

"Robert Hughes, Art Critic Whose Writing Was Elegant and Contentious, Dies at 74" in @nytimes

Robert Hughes, the eloquent, combative art critic and historian who lived with operatic flair and wrote with a sense of authority that owed more to Zola or Ruskin than to his own century, died on Monday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 74 and had lived for many years in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.


Tim Robinson/WNET13
Robert Hughes’s “Shock of the New” documentary was originally seen by 25 million viewers.

He died after a long illness, said his wife, Doris Downes.

With a Hemingwayesque build and the distinctively rounded vowels of his native Australia, Mr. Hughes became as familiar a presence on television as he was in print, over three decades for Time magazine, where he was chief art critic and often a traditionalist scourge during an era when art movements fractured into unrecognizability.

“The Shock of the New,” his eight-part documentary about the development of modernism from the Impressionists through Warhol, was seen by more than 25 million viewers when it ran first on BBC and then on PBS, and the book that Mr. Hughes spun off from it, described as a “stunning critical performance” by Louis Menand of The New Yorker, was hugely popular. In 1997, the writer Robert S. Boynton described him as “the most famous art critic in the world.”

It was decidedly not Mr. Hughes’s method to take prisoners. He was as damning about artists who fell short of his expectations as he was ecstatic about those who met them, and his prose seemed to reach only loftier heights when he was angry. As early as 1993, he described the work of Jeff Koons as “so overexposed that it loses nothing in reproduction and gains nothing in the original.”

“Koons is the baby to Andy Warhol’s Rosemary,” he summarized, adding: “He has done for narcissism what Michael Milken did for the junk bond.”

Of Warhol himself, the most influential artist of the last 40 years, he was not wholly dismissive — he once referred to him as “Genet in paint” — and he softened in his judgment over time. But he argued that Warhol had only a handful of good years and that his corrosive shadow over contemporary art ultimately did more harm than good. “The alienation of the artist, of which one heard so much talk a few years ago,” he wrote in 1975, “no longer exists for Warhol: his ideal society has crystallized round him and learned to love his entropy.”

About artists he admired, like Lucian Freud, he cast the stakes in nothing less than heroic terms. “Every inch of the surface has to be won,” he wrote of Freud’s canvases in The Guardian in 2004, “must be argued through, bears the traces of curiosity and inquisition — above all, takes nothing for granted and demands active engagement from the viewer as its right.”

“Nothing of this kind happens with Warhol, or Gilbert and George, or any of the other image-scavengers and recyclers who infest the wretchedly stylish woods of an already decayed, pulped-out postmodernism.”

“The Fatal Shore,” Mr. Hughes’s epic 1987 history of his homeland, Australia — which he left in 1964 and where his reputation seemed to seesaw between hero and traitor — became an international best seller.

And he continued to write prolifically and with ambitious range, on beloved subjects like Goya, Lucian Freud, fishing, the history of American art, the city of Barcelona — and himself — even after a near-fatal car crash in Australia in 1999 left him with numerous health problems. “Things I Didn’t Know,” a memoir, was published in 2006 and “Rome,” his highly personal history of the city he called “an enormous concretion of human glory and human error,” was published last year. In the memoir, Mr. Hughes was as poetically descriptive about his brush with death as he was about the art he loved: “At one point I saw Death. He was sitting at a desk, like a banker. He made no gesture, but he opened his mouth and I looked right down his throat, which distended to become a tunnel: the bocca d’inferno of old Christian art.”

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes was born July 28, 1938, in Sydney, into a family of successful lawyers. His father, Geoffrey Forrest Hughes, was a flying ace during World War I, who died when Robert was 12.

Mr. Hughes studied art and architecture at the University of Sydney and was associated with a group of leftist artists and writers that included Germaine Greer and Clive James, who described Mr. Hughes during those years as “the golden boy.” He pursued criticism mostly as a sideline while painting, writing poetry and serving as a cartoonist for the weekly intellectual journal The Observer.

After leaving Australia, he spent formative time in Italy before settling mostly in London. There, he quickly became a well-known critical voice, writing for several newspapers and diving into the glamorous hedonism of the ’60s London, an experience that confirmed him in a kind of counter-counterculturalism — not that he didn’t indulge himself during those years. As he related in his memoir, he was so under the influence of drugs when Time magazine called to offer him a job that he thought that it might be a trick by the C.I.A. (He wrote that he contracted gonorrhea from his first wife, Danne Patricia Emerson, who, he believed, had contracted it from Jimi Hendrix.)

With Ms. Emerson, who died in 2003, Mr. Hughes had a son, Danton, from whom he was estranged after he and Ms. Emerson divorced in 1981. Danton, a sculptor who lived outside of Sydney, killed himself in 2002, at the age of 34.

Besides his wife, a painter, Mr. Hughes is survived by two stepsons, Freeborn Garrettson Jewett IV and Fielder Douglas Jewett. He is also survived by his brothers, Thomas Hughes, a former attorney general of Australia, and Geoffrey Hughes, and by a sister, Constance Crisp, all of Sydney. His niece, Lucy Hughes Turnbull, was a former lord mayor of Sydney, and her husband, Malcolm Turnbull, is a member of the Australian House of Representatives.

Mr. Hughes lived for many years in New York in a loft in SoHo, whose blossoming art scene he often lampooned. In 1978 he was recruited to anchor the new ABC News magazine “20/20,” but the reviews of his first broadcast were so disastrous that he was quickly replaced by Hugh Downs.

In 1999, while in Australia working on a documentary about the country, he was driving on the wrong side of the road after a day of fishing and crashed head-on with another car carrying three men, one of whom was seriously injured.

Mr. Hughes was critically injured, spending weeks in a coma. He fought a charge of dangerous driving, and after a bitter and highly public legal battle, he described the men in the other car as “lowlife scum.” (He was fined and banned from driving in Australia for three years; his anger about it led to his saying in the hearing of a reporter that it would not matter to him if Australia were towed out to sea and sunk.)

The accident slowed him greatly and required him to walk with a cane, a harsh blow for the kind of writer who almost always seemed happier aboard a motorcycle or a fishing boat than behind a desk. But he continued to travel, to study deeply, to appear on television speaking in impromptu sentences almost as accomplished as those he wrote, and to write.

“No critic could have asked for a better run,” Christopher Hitchens wrote in a review of Mr. Hughes’s memoir.

Mr. Hughes’s essential motivating drive may have been expressed best in his own words about Goya, who he said haunted him in the months when he was recovering from the crash. He was an artist, he wrote, whose genius lay in his “vast breadth of curiosity about the human animal and the depth of his appalled sympathy for it.”

 

"A Catch-22 of Art and Taxes, Starring a Stuffed Eagle" in @nytimes

What is the fair market value of an object that cannot be sold?

The question may sound like a Zen koan, but it is one that lawyers for the heirs of the New York art dealer Ileana Sonnabend and the Internal Revenue Service are set to debate when they meet in Washington next month.

The object under discussion is “Canyon,” a masterwork of 20th-century art created by Robert Rauschenberg that Mrs. Sonnabend’s children inherited when she died in 2007.

Because the work, a sculptural combine, includes a stuffed bald eagle, a bird under federal protection, the heirs would be committing a felony if they ever tried to sell it. So their appraisers have valued the work at zero.

 But the Internal Revenue Service takes a different view. It has appraised “Canyon” at $65 million and is demanding that the owners pay $29.2 million in taxes.

“It’s hard for me to see how this could be valued this way because it’s illegal to sell it,” said Patti S. Spencer, a lawyer who specializes in trusts and estates but has no role in the case.

The family is now challenging the judgment in tax court and its lawyers are negotiating with the I.R.S. in the hope of finding a resolution.

Heirs to important art collections are often subject to large tax bills. In this case, the beneficiaries, Nina Sundell and Antonio Homem, have paid $471 million in federal and state estate taxes related to Mrs. Sonnabend’s roughly $1 billion art collection, which included works by Modern masters from Jasper Johns to Andy Warhol. The children have already sold off a large part of it, approximately $600 million worth, to pay the taxes they owed, according to their lawyer, Ralph E. Lerner.

But they drew the line at “Canyon,” a landmark of postwar Modernism made in 1959 that three appraisers they hired, including the auction house Christie’s, had valued at zero. Should they lose their fight, the heirs, who were unavailable for comment, will owe the taxes plus $11.7 million in penalties.

Inheritances are generally taxed at graduated rates depending on their value. In this case, the $29.2 million assessment for “Canyon” was based on a special penalty rate because the I.R.S. contends the heirs inaccurately stated its value.

While art lovers may appreciate the I.R.S.’s aesthetic sensibilities, some estate planners, tax lawyers and collectors are alarmed at the agency’s position, arguing that the case could upend the standard practice of valuing assets according to their sale in a normal market. I.R.S. guidelines say that in figuring an item’s fair market value, taxpayers should “include any restrictions, understandings, or covenants limiting the use or disposition of the property.”

In this instance, the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act make it a crime to possess, sell, purchase, barter, transport, import or export any bald eagle — alive or dead. Indeed, the only reason Mrs. Sonnabend was able to hold onto “Canyon,” Mr. Lerner said, was due to an informal nod from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 1981.

Even then, the government revisited the issue in 1998. Rauschenberg himself had to send a notarized statement attesting that the eagle had been killed and stuffed by one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders long before the 1940 law went into effect. Mrs. Sonnabend was then able to retain ownership as long as the work continued to be exhibited at a public museum. The piece is on a long-term loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which Mr. Lerner said insures it, but the policy details are confidential.

Mr. Lerner said that the I.R.S.’s handling of the work has been confusing. Last fall, the agency sent the family an unsigned draft report that it was valuing “Canyon” at $15 million. After Mr. Lerner replied that the children were refusing to pay, the I.R.S. then sent a formal Notice of Deficiency in October saying it had increased the valuation to $65 million.

That figure came from the agency’s Art Advisory Panel, which is made up of experts and dealers and meets a few times a year to advise the I.R.S.’s Art Appraisal Services unit. One of its members is Stephanie Barron, the senior curator of 20th-century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where “Canyon” was exhibited for two years. She said that the group evaluated “Canyon” solely on its artistic value, without reference to any accompanying restrictions or laws.

“The ruling about the eagle is not something the Art Advisory Panel considered,” Ms. Barron said, adding that the work’s value is defined by its artistic worth. “It’s a stunning work of art and we all just cringed at the idea of saying that this had zero value. It just didn’t make any sense.”

Rauschenberg’s combines, which inventively slapped together everyday objects he found on the street, helped propel American art in a new direction.

Though the I.R.S. usually accepts the advisory panel’s recommendations, it is not required to; last year it did not follow the group’s opinion in 7 percent of the cases, according to panel’s annual 2011 report.

So how did the panel arrive at the $65 million figure? Ms. Barron said, “When you come up with a valuation you look at comparable works and what they have sold for at public or private sales.”

The I.R.S. declined to comment.

Mr. Lerner told Forbes magazine, which reported the dispute in February, that Joseph Bothwell, a former director of the agency’s Art Appraisal Services unit, had told him “there could be a market for the work, for example, a recluse billionaire in China might want to buy it and hide it.” Mr. Bothwell has since retired from the I.R.S. Ms. Barron said she did not consider any hypothetical black-market buyer.

Still, the notion that the I.R.S. might use the black market in this way to determine a fair market value has surprised some tax experts. James Joseph, a tax lawyer with Arnold & Porter in Washington, noted that the I.R.S. has taxed illegal contraband at its market value, but added: “I don’t know of any instance where the I.R.S. has assumed taxpayers will engage in an illegal activity in order to value their assets at a higher amount. Al Capone went to jail for not paying income taxes on his illegal income, but this is very different than that.”

At the moment, tax experts note that the I.R.S.’s stance puts the heirs in a bind: If they don’t pay, they would be guilty of violating federal tax laws, but if they try to sell “Canyon” to zero-out their bill, they could go to jail for violating eagle protection laws.

Mr. Lerner said that since the children assert the Rauschenberg has no dollar value for estate purposes, they could not claim a charitable deduction by donating “Canyon” to a museum. If the I.R.S. were to prevail in its $65 million valuation, he said the heirs would still have to pay the $40.9 million in taxes and penalties regardless of a donation.

Then, given their income and the limits on deductions, he said, they would be able to deduct only a small part of the work’s value each year. Mr. Lerner estimated that it would take about 75 years for them to absorb the deduction.

“So my clients would have to live to 140 or so,” he said.

 

 

"Sure Bets Won't Go Cheap: Munch, Picasso, Cézanne and Rothko Go on the Block" in @nytimes

By 

ODDS are 3-to-1 that when Edvard Munch’s “Scream” comes up for sale at Sotheby’s on Wednesday night, it will fetch $150 million to $200 million. And there’s a 3-to-2 chance that pastel will become the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, breaking the current record of $106.5 million set two years ago at Christie’s for Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust.” As for who will buy “The Scream,” bets are 5-to-2 that it will be a Russian, 3-to-1 an Asian or European and 4-to-1 an American. That’s the thinking, anyway, from Ladbrokes, the British bookmaking chain, which has been analyzing the fate of what Sotheby’s is billing as the most recognizable image in art history after the “Mona Lisa.”

Art isn’t generally Ladbrokes’s métier, but laying odds on just how much this work will get has even captured the attention of gamblers used to putting their money on horse races or boxing. Jessica Bridge, a spokeswoman for the company, said that the bookmakers “apply the same math and algorithms we do for football or hockey.”

While it is certain to be the big draw, “The Scream” is not the only highly recognizable work up for sale at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury over the next two weeks. Other highlights include a classic red abstract Rothko canvas; a Warhol image of Elvis Presley; a Picasso portrait of Dora Maar, the artist who was his lover and muse; and a watercolor of one of Cézanne’s famed Card Players.

What’s bringing these paintings, drawings and sculptures to auction now? One reason is sheer serendipity, as several estates from seasoned collectors have come up for grabs this spring. The second is more opportunistic. Owners are hoping to cash in on the penchant of new, extraordinarily wealthy collectors from Russia, Asia and the Middle East for paying record prices for whatever strikes their fancy. “There are two markets, the regular market for the average collector and the super-market for global icons” that is fueled by the new rich, said Tobias Meyer, who runs Sotheby’s contemporary art department worldwide. “This last group is smart and gravitates toward the very top.”

Brett Gorvy, Mr. Meyer’s counterpart at Christie’s, says these buyers’ “tastes are conservative but they want quality, technical virtuosity, beauty and color.”

Estimates are high for some of the best works this season, although Sotheby’s figure of $80 million for “The Scream” is conservative by Ladbrokes’s standards. After that are several paintings estimated to fall in the $30 million to $50 million range: a Roy Lichtenstein comic book image and a 1976 painting by Francis Bacon, as well as the red Rothko and the Warhol “Elvis.”

Back on the block are also several works, including “Circles and Angles,” a stainless-steel sculpture by David Smith that failed to sell at Christie’s when the market collapsed during the financial crisis of 2008. Now they have considerably lower estimates. If there are any striking differences between the offerings this month, it is the selection of postwar and contemporary art at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Christie’s won a group of works collected by David Pincus, a clothing manufacturer from Philadelphia who died in December, and his wife, Geraldine. Their collection includes a large number of Abstract Expressionist paintings. Sotheby’s sale, on the other hand, features more classic Pop art.

Some art historians, who declined to be named for fear of offending Sotheby’s, laughed at the astronomical price predictions for “The Scream,” even the seemingly lowball house estimate, calling the work too ugly to live with, depressing or mere kitsch. Whoever buys it will have a hefty insurance bill, not to mention round-the-clock security, to worry about. But were any new museum to add “The Scream” to its collection, that institution would become an immediate destination.

The image of “The Scream” is so embedded in popular culture that it adorns products like mugs, mouse pads and inflatable dolls, even navel rings. Munch produced four versions of the composition. Three are in Norwegian museums and this one — a pastel on board from 1895 — is the only “Scream” left in private hands. It is being sold by Petter Olsen, a Norwegian businessman whose father, Thomas, was a friend and patron of the artist.

The painting’s fame is almost as much a liability for Sotheby’s as it is an asset. Versions of it have been stolen twice, first in 1994, when two thieves entered the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo and fled with an 1893 “Scream,” and then in 2004, when gunmen stole the 1910 version from the Munch Museum, also in Oslo. (In both cases the paintings were recovered.) This month Londoners had to go through metal detectors before entering the Sotheby’s gallery where it was on view. The crowds were so great that auction house officials have decided not to open the presale viewing in New York to the public, as they usually do. Instead, only Sotheby’s clients will have a chance to see the painting.

Among those who saw “The Scream” in London the betting game has already begun. As for the rest of the art for sale, just where today’s big money goes will be as much of a gamble as the fate of “The Scream.” It is the unknown, after all, that has always been the allure of auctions.

“The mystery is in the moment,” Mr. Meyer said. “Either people are in the mood to bid, or they’re not.”

via nytimes.com

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via Sotheby’s

Artist Andy Warhol
Title 'Double Elvis'
Auction House Sotheby's
Estimate $30 million to $50 million

Multimedia
The Munch Museum/Munch-Ellingsen Group, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via Sotheby’s

Artist Edvard Munch
Title 'The Scream'
Auction House Sotheby's
Estimate $80 million More Photos »

Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via Christie's

Artist Mark Rothko
Title 'Orange, Red, Yellow'
Auction House Christie's
Estimate $35 million to $45 millionMore Photos »


Adam's Observer Article - "Who Is Alex Israel, and Why Should I Care?"

By Adam Lindemann
April 25, 2012

Alex Israel is a youngish L.A. artist whose pastel-color panel paintings look like the sets of ’80s porn flicks; they’ve been selling like hotcakes at chic galleries in Paris and Berlin. I tried to see his recent one-man show at the übercool and cutting-edge Lower East Side gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art, but the gallery is so übercool and cutting edge that, on the Friday afternoon I chose for my visit, it wasn’t even open. In fact, the two times I have ventured to this gallery in an attempt to see an exhibition, during regular gallery hours, they have managed to have the doors locked and the lights turned off. I’d given up on writing about Mr. Israel’s work, when I realized that I could simply review his new TV show, As It LAys, the one he’s recently uploaded to You Tube and for which he created a website: www.asitlays.com. This interview show, with Mr. Israel as host, reminds me of Andy Warhol’s famous “Screen Tests”: both projects are, in superficially different but actually very similar ways, forms of video portraiture.

 

The so-called “Screen Tests” that Warhol made in the early ’60s weren’t really screen tests at all. Warhol shoved his camera in his subject’s face and did a two-and-a-half-minute film. Whether it was a factory regular like Edie Sedgwick or Lou Reed, or some celebrity like Bob Dylan or Salvador Dalí, didn’t really matter, because in the end all the subjects were just meat to grind in Warhol’s lens, reminders that youth, beauty, sex, fame and fortune exist only in the moment.

 

Before As It LAys, Mr. Israel’s claim to fame was that he was once an assistant to the late L.A. artist Jason Rhoades and served as the doorman for Rhoades’s infamous “Black Pussy Soirée Cabaret Macramé” parties. Now Mr. Israel has succeeded in taking the Warhol screen test to a whole new level by doing interviews with celebrities and quasi-celebrities in which he reads a series of bizarre and awkward questions—to Rachel Zoe, “If you were to create the perfect salad, what would be the key ingredients?”—from a set of index cards he shuffles in his hands. His subjects are left trying to tell a personal story without help or support from their interlocutor. Mr. Israel’s portraits, which seem to both emerge from and comment on the current Facebook/Twitter sound bite zeitgeist, are painful in the way Warhol’s once were: they exist in an existential space devoid of human emotion or sympathy.

 

Unlike Warhol’s project, for the most part, Mr. Israel’s guests are older, passé. They are walking, talking pieces of L.A.’s cultural history. Taken together, they represent a sampling of L.A. personalities who were once at the center of the scene but now have one foot—or, in some cases, both feet—out the door.

 

A TV-style interview where the questions are read right off note cards in a harsh and empty environment is a strange thing to watch. But only a few of Mr. Israel’s victims realize they are being set up; most of them just writhe and sweat in their seats. I feel their pain. In the end I was left wondering: what is it like to have once been famous and important in L.A.? What comes after that?

 

His questions run the gamut from banal to bizarre. Adrienne Maloof, a reality-TV “housewife of Beverly Hills,” is asked, “Did you ever cheat on a test?” She answers without hesitation, “No, I helped others, the whole football team.” Yet she never seems to reflect on what she just revealed to us, namely her relations with the “whole football team.” Restaurateur Mr. Chow is asked, “In the battle between people and robots who wins?” His answer should have been “Get lost,” but instead he responds, “Nature is more precise than a machine, every leaf is unique, just like every thumbprint … a robot is a machine and therefore has limitations.” And it’s funny! It gets worse when 71-year-old singer-songwriter Paul Anka is asked, “Chocolate or vanilla?” and gives a three-minute monologue. Or when Jon Peters, the once-famous film producer and head of Sony pictures (and ex-Barbra Streisand hairdresser) gets caught in a trap when he’s asked, “Are you a good storyteller?” and answers, with candor, “When I was a kid I was more of a liar, but when I grew up I made those lies into a fantasy.”

 

Their moment in the spotlight may be over, but all of these guests are still dead set on proving their relevance, so much so that they are willing to talk at length to this unknown artist/interviewer. Most of them end up, tragically, revealing their hollow “screen test” side. L.A. is a city obsessed with youth and power; it must not be very pleasant to feel marginalized in a place where you were once the center of attention.

 

That said, it’s not all tragedy. At 95, Phyllis Diller gets credit, in my book, just for showing up. When asked, “Are you reading anything?” she supplies the riposte, “I cannot read. I am losing my eyesight.” Other interviewees didn’t have such an easy out, and that makes for moments that are strangely poignant. Asked, “What do you want the world to know about you?” the seven-time NBA All-Star James Worthy replies, uncomfortably, “Basketball is what I did for a living but it’s not who I am as a person.”

 

There are some deliciously awkward moments. Cheryl Tiegs, the ravishing beauty who in 1975 graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, doesn’t fare very well; she reveals that her favorite karaoke song is “At Last” by Etta James. Quincy Jones is asked, “What is your favorite color?” Doesn’t he remember the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail when Sir Galahad is asked the very same question and answers: ”blue … uh, no … green” and gets tossed down a ravine for his “mistake”? Clearly he doesn’t, because he sheepishly answers, “Purple, um … and lime, black and uh … orange,” then gives the camera a pained smile. Perhaps the most cringe-worthy of the interviews is the one with JFK’s nephew Bobby Shriver, who is painfully politically correct. “Who would you most like to meet?” he is asked, and he implausibly replies, “I once opened the door to a room and there was Luciano Pavarotti … it was too much for me.” How absurd for this to come from the man who created the global RED charity with his friend the rock star Bono. Oh, Mr. Shriver. Are we now to believe you were never into rock and roll, that all along you had us fooled, and were actually an opera buff?

 

Three of Mr. Israel’s guests managed to turn the tables on their host—no mean feat. Producer Rick Rubin answers every questions with a single word: “Yes … sometimes … somewhat … no …” Even when asked the final “What do you want the world to know about you?” he refuses to humor Mr. Israel. “I can’t think of anything,” he deadpans. Novelist Bret Easton Ellis takes Mr. Israel to task. When asked, “What do you want the world to know about Bret Easton Ellis?” he replies, “Nothing. I don’t want them to know anything.” Androgynous rock star Marilyn Manson steals the show with a performance. The question ”Have you ever considered going vegan?” is answered, “I considered having sex with a vegan but then I wondered if she would say, ‘Oooh, what’s in your semen?’” When asked, “If you could change one thing about your physical appearance what would it be?” he answers, “Not having such a big dick … it’s troublesome sometimes.” Yes, Mr. Manson, this must be a serious problem for you indeed!

 

I interviewed Mr. Israel in L.A. last week and tested my theories on him. Weren’t the questions written to make a mockery of the interviewees? He denied that, claiming that he hadn’t even written them. “My intern wrote mild-mannered questions,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be a talk show with hot-button questions.” Hadn’t he deliberately selected individuals whose moment of relevance had passed, whose stars had faded? He took offense at that interpretation. “That’s such a cynical view,” he said. ”I selected people who made a major contribution to the L.A. landscape at a point in time … that’s our city’s cultural history and I chose to celebrate it.”

 

As part of the Facebook generation, Mr. Israel is perfectly comfortable giving a campy and nostalgic embrace to L.A.’s history, while feigning ignorance of the tragic implications of living in the past. Perhaps he is earnest; his project, complete with his intern’s “mild-mannered” questions, really isn’t, after all, a cynical satire of the talk-show format. Still, am I a throwback to another era because I was looking for deeper meaning, even where there is none?

 

Perhaps I’m equally unrealistic because in growing older I still hope to grow better, or wiser, or at least more comfortable with what, where and who I am. In As It LAys, success, fame and cultural relevance are not the recipe for happiness or even personal satisfaction. The project reveals several variations on the theme of self-deception; perhaps with age this is something we all fall prey to. In the words of the great 17th-century French thinker François de la Rochefoucauld, “One is never so easily fooled as when one thinks one is fooling others.”

 

The moral is go to more garage sales... "Andy Fields Buys Andy Warhol's Childhood Sketch At Garage Sale"

 

While the majority of garage sale treasures include old family photos, broken VCR's and stained baby clothes, don't give up hope! If you keep scouring you may just find yourself a bona fide sketch by none other than Andy Warhol.

Andy Fields, a businessman from Tiverton, England bought five sketches for a mere $5 at a Las Vegas garage sale. One of them was a depiction of 1930s singer Rudy Vallee, who is famous for the hits "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries" and "Lover Come Back To Me". According to the BBC, Fields purchased the sketches from a man who claimed they belonged to his aunt who used to watch over Warhol as a child. Fields didn't think much of it, being surrounded by implausible claims in Las Vegas, but later found Warhol's signature on the back when he reframed the picture.

The early sketch shows Warhol's style, pre-Pop Art, and could have been made when the precocious artist was only 10 or 11 years old. In the IBTIMES video above, Fields says, "I found out it did lead to about 1939 or possibly 1940, when Andy Warhol was in bed with cholera, that I realized to the full extent what we were sitting on." A valuer told Fields the work could fetch just over $2 million, but Fields says he does not want to sell just yet.

This story emerged only days after another lucky shopper found a Picasso print for $14 in a thrift store. So we recommend you keep filtering through all those old workout VHS tapes and fading paperbacks, because you may just find yourself a masterpiece.

Check out the full article with a slideshow of other famous finds below: