"A tearful funeral for Tasered Miami Beach street artist" @miamiherald - The George Lindemann Journal

Johnny Ohalloran spends a moment over the grave of 18-year-old graffiti artist Israel Hernandez Llach who died after being shocked by a police officers Taser during the youths funeral in Florida August 14 2013 Al DiazMiami HeraldMCT

Johnny Ohalloran spends a moment over the grave of 18-year-old graffiti artist Israel Hernandez Llach, who died after being shocked by a police officer's Taser, during the youth's funeral in Florida, August 14, 2013. (Al Diaz/Miami Herald/MCT)

A tearful funeral service Wednesday ended a week of mourning for the family of an 18-year-old artist who died after Miami Beach police shot him with a Taser.

But relatives and community leaders say they're still waiting for answers about Israel Hernandez-Llach's death.

More than a hundred people, including many teenagers, attended the service at Vista Memorial Gardens & Funeral Home in Miami Lakes. Some carried red roses and wore pins designed by the young man's friend, a fellow artist. His mother and sister linked arms and wailed along with others as they followed the casket to the grave site under the mid-day sun.

Only sobs broke the silence as the casket was lowered into the grave. Relatives of the Colombian-born young man took turns dropping earth onto the casket. Unusually, many in the crowd chose to stay as heavy equipment did the rest. The teen's mother stepped away, leaning on others for support.

"This is a very sad day, not only for the family but the whole Hispanic community," said Fabio Andrade, a family friend and president of the Americas Community Center. He broke down in tears when speaking of the young man and said community members are rallying to reform guidelines for the use of Tasers.

The family is still waiting for authorities to explain why their son died Aug. 6 after police caught him spray-painting graffiti on a building near 71st Street and Collins Avenue. They've received no official answers from police or the medical examiner, according to Andrade.

"There is no question after seeing Lito after seven days that there were really bad bruises on the body that shows that there was more than just a Taser," he said, using a term of endearment. "You could see it very clearly when we received the body." Police have said he was Tasered just once and no other force was used in making the arrest.

According to the police report, Hernandez-Llach "came crashing down hard" onto the hood of a car after launching himself over a fence to get away from police.

Miami Beach officer Jorge Mercado, who fired the Taser that struck the young man in the chest, was placed on administrative leave after the incident.

The service coincided with the release of the police radio recording that captured 14 minutes of conversations between officers, dispatchers and paramedics on the morning that Hernandez-Llach was Tasered.

The tape begins at 5:13 a.m. as a police officer, presumably Mercado, breathlessly reports to dispatchers that he is pursuing a suspect.

"Going into a building,'' the officer says, panting. He continues announcing his location, as he pursues the subject for several minutes, describing him as a 6-foot-1 male with a yellow or cream-colored, long-sleeved shirt and dreadlocks. Three minutes into the chase, another officer interrupts, asking why they were chasing the suspect. The dispatcher responds: graffiti. The dispatcher begins to re-deploy other units to the area.

One officer questions the wisdom of reassigning patrols to the call.

"This is a graffiti subject. We'll look in the area...but like I said, this is a misdemeanor. We're not going to bring the dogs out for this. We're gonna' be looking out till we find him, but he's probably hiding out somewhere.''

Seven minutes after the chase begins, an officer spies Hernandez-Llach hopping the fence, then announces that he is in custody. About 30 seconds later, an officer reports that the suspect appears to be having a "seizure,'' though the officer says he is breathing. There is no mention of a Taser being used.

Tasers result in death in only the rarest of cases. When deaths have occurred in the past, they are often the result of a pre-existing medical condition or a reaction to drugs in the system. The medical examiner hasn't ruled on the cause of death pending the result of toxicology tests.

The funeral service followed an all-night wake during which many stopped by to view the open casket. The funeral home donated the plot and services after hearing that the family was trying to raise money for the burial.

"This is the time for the authorities to change something," said Manuel Santander, a family friend. "Anything we do, it's going to be the same for Israel and the family, but at least the police department, the city and Miami-Dade County have to think about how this thing doesn't happen again."
 

By Katia Savchuk and Julie Brown

"Rewriting the History of Abstract Expressionism" @wsj - The George Lindemann Journal

ROSENBAUM

imageThe Pollock-Krasner Foundation/ARS

Jackson Pollock's 'Number 7, 1952.'

Water Mill, N.Y.
And Southampton, N.Y.

In accounts of the Abstract Expressionist era, painter and assemblage-maker Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990) is better known for throwing great parties and purchasing important works by major artists than for producing significant work of his own.

Attempting to rewrite that history is "Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet," the provocative show at the Parrish Art Museum near the Long Island communities where Ossorio, as well as Jackson Pollock, lived and worked. It positions the underrated oeuvre of the wealthy bon vivant on equal footing with works by Pollock and Jean Dubuffet, his two renowned friends, who held him in high regard as a professional colleague. What they all had in common was a penchant for experimenting with unconventional materials and techniques, and a predilection for rawness over refinement.

The Ossorio Foundation, Sally Vanasse and Nicole Vanasse/Lee Rosenbaum

Alfonso Ossorio's 'Head' (1951).

Angels, Demons, And Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet

Parrish Art Museum

Through Oct. 27

"Ossorio's patronage overshadowed what we know of him as an artist," observed Klaus Ottmann, curator-at-large of Washington's Phillips Collection, where a larger version of the show opened in February. Conventional wisdom pegged Ossorio as a dilettante and Sunday painter, and an early collector of masterpieces by Pollock, Dubuffet and Clyfford Still. Five works formerly in his collection are now on display at the Parrish. They had once been ensconced at the Creeks, Ossorio's grand East Hampton estate on Georgica Pond, which he bought on Pollock's recommendation. (It is now owned by the billionaire Ronald Perelman.)

Grappling with the question of why "his artistic career [was] so thoroughly marginalized," Phillips Collection director Dorothy Kosinski wrote in her catalog preface for the show (which she co-curated with Mr. Ottmann) that Ossorio "was perhaps too difficult to categorize" both personally (Philippines-born, naturalized American of mixed ethnic heritage, observant Catholic, gay) and professionally (diverse techniques, styles and media).

Pollock and Ossorio first met in 1949 through dealer Betty Parsons, who exhibited both. Pollock suggested that his new friend visit Dubuffet in France, which Ossorio did later that year and again in 1951. Although interested in each other's work, Pollock and Dubuffet never managed to meet.

The best evidence that Ossorio was no Sunday painter is his feverish burst of productivity in 1950, during a sojourn in the Philippines—his first time back since being sent away as a child to receive a British and U.S. education.

He had returned to design the interior of the chapel of St. John the Worker, being constructed for employees of his family's sugar factory, the source of his substantial wealth. While creating the chapel's monumental, fiery-hued mural depicting the Last Judgment, Ossorio also produced hundreds of his most riveting, idiosyncratic works—the so-called Victorias Drawings (actually, watercolors), named after a mill town on the island of Negros where the chapel was located. What is thought to be the first Victorias image is tellingly titled "The Child Returns."

These small, vibrant works on paper, swirling with lush reds, oranges and greens, are anomalous among the pieces in the show, including the other Ossorios. With their tropical palette and haunting treatment of religion and family, they convey the disturbing emotions unleashed by the artist's bittersweet homecoming. In the first page of his Philippines diary, he described his "lonely" childhood and sense of being "never at home in any conventional category."

Even the technique used to create these distinctive works was a departure for Ossorio. Inspired by the Surrealist Victor Brauner, he employed the wax-resist painting method in his Victorias works: With a candle or hot wax, he drew on a paper sheet that he first coated with watercolor. He then applied another layer of paint, which would not adhere to the waxed areas. Next, he drew with black ink over the waxed and painted surface, adding virtuosic, delicately rendered details to the layered image. On some of these works, he also cut or tore the paper support, creating shaped borders or lacy interiors.

The wall devoted to eight examples of this rarely seen "fracas of forms" (as Dubuffet described them in an admiring 1951 catalog essay, reproduced in the Parrish exhibition's catalog) is itself worth the visit to the museum. If, like me, you find yourself yearning for more, there's a plentiful stash in storage drawers at the nearby Southampton warehouse occupied by the Ossorio Foundation, which is still seeking homes for some 550 works remaining in his estate. It is open year-round to the public by emailed appointment.

Did Ossorio have any effect on his colleagues' work, beyond his financial patronage? Pollock's transition from his celebrated, mural-size poured paintings to more overtly figurative drawings in black industrial paint may have been inspired by Ossorio's works in his Manhattan studio, where Pollock resided while his friend was abroad.

One of those semifigurative Pollocks, "Number 7, 1952," lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a highlight of the Parrish show. With an elegance reminiscent of old-master drawings, this abstracted but recognizable head, delineated in black and enlivened by yellow splotches, hangs next to Ossorio's Abstract Expressionist-influenced "Head" (1951). Overworked and overwrought, the Ossorio suffers by comparison to Pollock's confident expressiveness.

The catalog suggests that Dubuffet's experimental collages (not in the show) that incorporated butterfly wings may be indebted to a butterfly-shaped Victorias drawing sent to him by Ossorio, who frequently depicted children with angellike wings. The juxtaposition of Ossorio's impenetrably scrawled and slathered "Martyrs and Spectators" (1951) with Dubuffet's mud-hued, grotesquely broad-bodied, tiny-headed woman—a 1950 work from his well-known "Corps de Dame" series—exemplifies the predilection of all three artists for dense compositions in which the deployment of materials is as much the subject as what they depict.

Notwithstanding his sophistication and erudition, Ossorio was at his best when creating works that come across as outsider art. Like the intimate Victorias Drawings, some of the monumental Congregations, from the 1960s, are irregularly shaped and refreshingly oddball. Although not in the Parrish show, which chiefly focuses on works from 1948-52, the Congregations can be seen by appointment at the Ossorio Foundation. Encrusted with jewellike baubles and punctuated by glaring glass eyes and phallic protrusions mounted on panel, they are both fanciful and menacing.

Finally given a bit of overdue attention in the Parrish's uneven but tantalizing sampling, Ossorio now deserves a comprehensive retrospective, to be appreciated on his own terms, not upstaged by marquee names. Perhaps this "huge talent," as Ms. Kosinski describes him, may at last win due art-historical recognition.

Ms. Rosenbaum writes on art and museums for the Journal and blogs as CultureGrrl.

"Fighting Chemistry of Decay " @wsj - The George Lindemann Journal

LOS ANGELES—Making an art of material science, researchers at the Getty Conservation Institute have labored for a year to repair one of the 20th century's most important American paintings—a Jackson Pollock creation called "Mural."

In the process, conservators at the Los Angeles-based center are pioneering the use of digital X-ray radiography, near-infrared imaging, electron scanning microscopy and mass spectrometers to probe the painter's flamboyant work. Their forensic tools turned the $140 million canvas into a crime scene in which the culprit is the chemistry of decay.

"From the chemical composition and buildup of paints, we are unlocking evidence of Pollock's creative process, his choice of materials, and any alterations through time," said Getty conservation analyst Alan Phenix.

Mural is one of a half dozen Pollock paintings undergoing restoration recently at collections around the world. The University of Iowa, which owns it, commissioned its repair. Art collector Peggy Guggenheim, who commissioned Pollock to paint "Mural" for her New York townhouse, donated it to the university, located in Iowa City.

Photos: Probing Pollock's 'Mural'

Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

Experts examined 'Mural,' by Jackson Pollock, at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles.

Graphic: The Restoration Work

Get an up-close look at some of the restoration work on the painting, see the results of analysis of the paint used, and take a look around the Getty Conservation Institute.

The massive 8-by-20-foot canvas was a turning point in modern art when it was painted in 1943, energizing the abstract expressionism movement. "Scholars have always looked at this painting as a seminal work; a moment in which Pollock is changing," said Yvonne Szafran, senior conservator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, which is collaborating on the project with the conservation institute at the Getty Center complex.

The 70-year-old painting embodies the conundrum posed by all famous works of art—whether conservators should restore and refurbish, or simply preserve what they find as best they can. But time is especially cruel to modern art. Commercial paints fade and flake. Canvas sags. Frames warp. Exotic creative materials, from synthetic dyes, neon tubes and plastics, to body fluids, animal parts and table scraps, readily disintegrate or rot.

That limits a conservator's choices in the effort to save modern works. "If they are made of lettuce, there is only so much you can do," said conservation expert Gillian McMillan at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

And the artist's palette keeps expanding. "If a material has been invented—and there are millions of materials out there—I swear there is an artist who has tried to use it," said James Coddington, chief conservator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who has been restoring three Pollock paintings. "It is very hard to know what the longer-term performance of these materials might be."

Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

Alan Phenix at the Getty Conservation Institute points to a digital image of the Jackson Pollock painting under repair.

Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

The artist's signature.

At the Getty, researchers are trying to make necessary repairs without changing the character of Pollock's work—to preserve rather than restore. But the materials in his painting posed their own technical challenges. The painting is so large that it took three days to X-ray the canvas in its entirety.

"Big paintings like 'Mural' lead a hard life," said Getty conservator Laura Rivers. "They are stretched, un-stretched, rolled, unrolled over and over."

As a result, its paint in places has chipped. Some colors have faded—driven by the internal chemistry of the pigments they contain. The canvas itself has sagged under the weight of all the paint it holds. And like other famous works of art, Pollock's painting also suffered the ill effects of earlier preservation work.

Using a noxious solvent called xylene, Ms. Rivers spent weeks removing the acrylic varnish applied across the painting during a restoration in 1973, which had masked the painting's texture and sheen. To protect herself from the fumes, she wore a face mask as well as three layers of gloves.

To safely analyze the chemistry of Pollock's paints, the conservators used a series of noninvasive imaging techniques, including infrared imaging and X-ray fluoroscopy, which let them probe the canvas with different electromagnetic wavelengths without having to touch it. A single application of teal blue contained 12 different pigments, the spectroscopic analysis showed.

Microscopic examination of paint samples—each no more than a half-millimeter across—revealed as many as 25 layers of color splashed, spattered and brushed on the linen canvas.

Their tests revealed that Pollock had been surprisingly cautious for an artist once renowned as "Jack the Dripper" for his exuberant splatters of color. He painted "Mural" methodically, working from right to left, with the canvas upright and not horizontal on the floor, as with many of his later paintings.

Moreover, Pollock relied almost exclusively on traditional oil paints, the researchers determined. "In a funny way, despite its radical creative dimension, it is really quite conservative from a materials point of view," said Dr. Phenix.

But the tests also showed that Pollock had used a white, water-based house paint to lighten the background spaces between the swirls of oil paint. That paint had grown transparent as it aged. "Oil and water don't mix, so you get some odd interactions that pose a conservation challenge," said Dr. Phenix.

Even so, the Getty conservators don't plan to repaint those patches. "We accept changes like that," said Ms. Szafran. "It is part of the aging of the painting, its inherent vice."

In the weeks ahead, the Getty researchers expect to rebuild the wooden framework that supports the large canvas and keeps it taut. They have spent months consulting with art scholars on the proper way to proceed. "You are balancing historical accuracy and authenticity with what you know of the artist's intent," said Getty conservation scientist Tom Learner. "We want this painting to look like a well-preserved 70-year-old."

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com

"Going to MoMA to See the Sounds" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

"Soundings’ Features Art With Audio Elements

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Soundings: A Contemporary Score, a survey of sound art, opens at the Museum of Modern Art on Saturday. Tristan Perich’s “Microtonal Wall” is a 25-foot panel with 1,500 tiny speakers, each at different pitch. More Photos »

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: August 8, 2013

Three summers ago, the Museum of Modern Art installed a 1961 sound art work by Yoko Ono in its atrium. It was called “Voice Piece for Soprano — Scream 1. against the wind 2. against the wall 3. against the sky.” It consisted of a live standing microphone and some extremely loud amplifiers. Anyone passing through the atrium was invited to stand in front of the mike and follow the instructions in the title: that is, scream.

Countless visitors, including many kids and antic-minded adults, gleefully complied. But where Ms. Ono could turn a scream into a coloratura aria, the average amateur participant just gave an explosive shriek and scampered away. The piece stayed in place for months. It turned the museum into a sonic hell. MoMA habitués, including guards, couldn’t wait for it to go away.

Still, it had its merits. It was, for one thing, a very un-MoMA phenomenon: unpredictable, uncontrolled, anarchic, all that that institution is not. It also did what sound art was historically meant to do: to give sound — variously referred to as noise, or music or silence — the assertive presence of any other art medium, make it fill space, claim attention and time.

In recent years, attention has been slight. The much-maligned 2002 Whitney Biennial included a substantial amount of sound art, by the likes of Maryanne Amacher and Stephen Vitiello. But like many of that show’s innovations, this one sailed straight over the heads of critics and didn’t get much follow-up.

Now, more than a decade later, MoMA is picking up the slack with a survey show of new art called “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” which opens Saturday. As if in reaction to Ms. Ono’s eruptive brashness, it is low key to the point of timidity. And formally speaking, much of it isn’t sound art in any pure sense. It’s sculpture, film, installation and work on paper with audio components.

Throughout the 20th century, sound was frontier terrain, staked out by crazies and visionaries: pro-violence Futurists, war-addled Dadaists and out-there beings like Antonin Artaud. The composer John Cage and his Fluxus successors were part of sound art’s gentler, though no less radical side. And that’s the side, now neatly landscaped, that “Soundings” is on.

The simple fact that the show looks like a normal, neat, stuff-on-the-walls-and-floors MoMA fare says a lot. Two artists are represented only by drawings. Marco Fusinato’s are based on the printed pages of a score by the composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001). On each page, Mr. Fusinato has drawn hundreds of ink lines tying all the notes to a single central point. Were the piece played the way the score looks, it would sound like a detonation.

The large-format drawings on paper by Christine Sun Kim are also scores, but look expressive and personal, even diaristic. Ms. Kim has been deaf since birth, and her approach to sound is highly conceptual. Basically, she’s creating the idea of it, visually, in terms most useful to her: American Sign Language, written English, physical gesture.

Both artists present sound in abstract form, as notion. The work of a third artist, Carsten Nicolai, incorporates sound that’s actual but inaudible. Using a tanklike container, he directs low-frequency sound waves onto the surface of a pool of water and, with mirrors, projects the patterns the waves create onto a display screen. The screen is the first thing you see when you enter the galleries. You could easily take it for an abstract painting with the shakes. Only when you circle around, do you see that it’s really an elaborate, overly ingenious kinetic sculpture.

The show has more busy sculpture. One by the American composer Richard Garet is an ensemble of old stereo speakers, a spinning turntable, a microphone and a glass marble, joined to produce a sound like a skipping record. A concoction of buzzes and flashes by the British artist Haroon Mirza is notable mostly for serving as a frame for one of MoMA’s Mondrian paintings, which looks like a fancy acoustic panel in this context.

And the Rube Goldberg bug carries over into an installation by the Scottish artist and filmmaker Luke Fowler and the Japanese composer Toshiya Tsunoda that includes electric fans, landscape images projected on a loose cloth, stretched piano wires and a dollop of Cagean chance. If the cloth, blown by the fans, touches the wires, we get a sound, a dull drone. The piece is very pretty to see, but to hear, not much.

Both of the show’s videos are good. For the 2011 “Music While We Work,” the Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang recruited retired sugar factory workers to return to their former plant, record its ambient sounds and create a score from them. As we watch them attentively holding microphones at assembly lines and loading platforms, we’re hearing what they are conscientiously rehearing: the soundtrack of their lives.

The Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard also recorded and filmed specific environments, four public buildings in Chernobyl, abandoned after the 1986 nuclear disaster. Unlike Ms. Wang, he manipulates his data by recording and rerecording it multiple times, until sounds and images become dense, grainy and heavy. Interiors seem to be slowly leaking out of darkness into visibility; sounds swell from near-silence to a carillon clamor.

Bells — church bells, stock exchange bells, bicycle bells, all taped in Manhattan — are the substance of a charming timed sound installation by Mr. Vitiello in MoMA’s sculpture garden. (One bell goes off every minute; they all go off on the hour.) It’s one of several works that extended the exhibition — organized by Barbara London, an associate curator in the department of media and performance art, and Leora Morinis, a curatorial assistant — into other parts of the museum.

Most of the outlying things are physically plain and audio-intensive. In a sweet, slight piece by Florian Hecker, three discretely placed speakers carry on an electronic conversation between two floors of the museum. Tristan Perich’s “Microtonal Wall,” a 25-foot-long panel pieced together from 1,500 tiny speakers, each tuned to a different pitch, is a kind of monumental musical instrument. To walk past it is to feel the sensation of a xylophone playing in your head.

Susan Philipsz’s “Study for Strings,” inside the galleries, is the closest thing to conventional music, and one of the show’s strong entries. It’s a recording of only the viola and cello parts, and their pauses, from a string orchestra composition written in 1943 by Pavel Haas in a German concentration camp. A performance by prisoners of the full, 24-part piece was filmed for Nazi propaganda purposes, after which the musicians, including Haas, were killed.

Clearly, sound, all but dematerialized, can be extremely powerful. Here’s proof. And there’s more in Jana Winderen’s “Ultrafield,” a classic “field recording” piece for which the artist taped sounds made by bats, deepwater fish and insects pitched beyond human hearing. Converted to the minimal audibility, the whirs, ticks and crackles of invisible beings turn a dark gallery into a kind of cosmic acoustic device.

Finally, one piece, Camille Norment’s “Triplight,” radiates that wondrous thing, the music of silence. The hardware involved is bare-bones: a 1955 standing microphone, of a kind once regularly used by jazz, blues and pop singers. In this one, though, the amplification unit has been replaced by a small light that flickers and brightens as if responding to a singer’s breath and voice.

It’s tempting to see Ms. Norment’s mute mike as a counterweight to Ms. Ono’s loud one. And a few more comparisons, probing the parameters of an understudied discipline, might have given some punch to a show that, like too many others at MoMA these days, tames unruly impulses in art, past and present, when it should be egging them on. There’s still a major sound art exhibition waiting to be done, and it will be, but not here.

"Invitation to a Dialogue: Art in Hard Times" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

To the Editor:

The choice being debated in Detroit — whether to sell works from the Detroit Institute of Arts to help pay the city’s debts — is agonizing. How can we equate a few pieces of canvas with paint on them with the pensions of thousands of firefighters, nurses, police officers, teachers and other civil servants?

The same choice is being played out in many other communities across the country. In a sense, we have always had this dilemma, but this time, there are several special factors. One is that cities and towns are going bankrupt, and they can’t continue to provide basic services, let alone support for art museums. Another factor is the stunning rise in prices for works of art. Thousands of works go for over a million dollars every year; eight- and even nine-figure prices are common.

Mixed into this is the fact that museums have become dependent on support from federal, state and local government in the form of tax subsidies, tax exemptions, especially from real estate tax, and, most important, tax deductions. At the same time, private donors are being asked to give more and more; how long will the 1 percent agree to subsidize a service for the 99 percent? There are more than 100,000 nonprofit arts organizations in this country, all with their hands out.

How can museums justify this kind of support? We claim to be moral institutions, open to all, providing the best to the most, and we all work hard to do just that. But is that really our audience? Don’t we, for the most part, serve the affluent, the educated, the converted, those who are on our side of the income and education gap?

Museums make a determined effort to widen their audience — the Detroit Institute of Arts is a leader in that effort — but we are still falling short. The shortfall is where that agonizing question arises: How many lives is a Rembrandt worth?

FRANK ROBINSON
Ithaca, N.Y., Aug. 5, 2013

The writer was a museum director for 35 years, at Williams College, the Rhode Island School of Design and Cornell University.

Editors’ Note: We invite readers to respond by Thursday for the Sunday Dialogue. We plan to publish responses and Mr. Robinson’s rejoinder in the Sunday Review. E-mail: letters@nytimes.com

"Ross Bleckner Wipes the Canvas Clean" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

Robyn Lea/GMAimages

Ross Bleckner's home in Sagaponack, N.Y., was once owned by Truman Capote. Mr. Bleckner expanded the once-modest footprint of the home twice and added a pool to the five-acre property. More Photos »

 By STEVEN KURUTZ

Published: July 24, 2013

All was quiet at Ross Bleckner’s house last week, if you didn’t count the four yappy dachshunds gnashing their teeth in a downstairs window. Strange, because the renowned artist had an appointment to show a reporter around the place.

An hour passed. The sun intensified. Still no sign of the homeowner.

Then a tall man was spotted in the distance, trimming trees. He explained that Mr. Bleckner was in his studio, at the far, wild end of the property, accessible by a path cut into waist-high grass.

Indeed, Mr. Bleckner was inside, working feverishly on a large-scale painting in the morning heat.

“Oh, you’re here,” he said in a high, scratchy voice. “I forgot all about our meeting.”

He worked a brush quickly back and forth on the canvas. “What is this article about, again?”

Your home.

“Oh. Well, what do you want to know?”

In the early ’90s, Mr. Bleckner paid $800,000 for Truman Capote’s old beach house, which sits on five cloistered acres here on the East End of Long Island, a short walk from the ocean. Over 20 years and two major renovations, he has taken a little two-story, box-shaped dwelling and added wings, a pool and the art studio. He expanded the guesthouse, too, and repaired and winterized the whole place.

“I had to,” Mr. Bleckner said. “It was falling apart.”

He was happy to show the home, he said, but he needed to use this fresh paint before it dried. He works on several groups of paintings at the same time, he said. The one in front of him, a dark canvas layered with ghostly white and red dots, was part of his brain-scan series: “They go from very calm to schizophrenia. This is not calm. This is plaque.”

Mr. Bleckner is friendly, quick-witted, curious and well read. He is not, however, prone to lengthy digressions about decorating or his domestic life. Nor does he exhibit much interest in the lore surrounding the previous owner.

Did Mr. Capote do a lot of entertaining here?

“I don’t know,” Mr. Bleckner said.

Do you?

“No.”

Mr. Bleckner said he uses the home as a summer retreat, and relishes the quiet. Noise was one of the main reasons he sold his longtime home in the city, a loft building in TriBeCa whose ground floor once held the Mudd Club.

“Every time you turned around someone was tearing down a building,” he said. “If you want quiet, you need to be in a place that is deeply established architecturally.” (He moved to the West Village, where he still lives most of the time.)

Eventually, the morning’s work was completed, and Mr. Bleckner walked through the football-field-size yard and up to the main house.

In Mr. Capote’s day, the home was filled with books and tchotchkes, and decorated with yellow stuffed chairs, pillows and animal skins. Mr. Bleckner, it quickly became apparent, is not Mr. Capote. Though he shares the home with Eric Freeman, an artist who lives here year-round and designed the space, the rooms looked barely lived in.

The living area had very little furniture or art. The kitchen was showroom-neat. Upstairs, in the master suite that Mr. Bleckner added (Mr. Capote used a tiny sleeping loft), a Zen-like sparseness prevailed. A wooden shelf held a simple framed photo of Mr. Bleckner’s mother, who died in 2008. The main attraction was not inside but out the windows, where a beach and white-capped water were tantalizingly visible in the distance.

Still, Mr. Bleckner was anxious about the potential for personal revelation. “You see a lot when you come into someone’s room,” he said. “Even when you don’t see a lot, you see a lot.”

He picked up a copy of the New York Review of Books on a low table. “You can see what I read,” he said, mock scandalized.

Back downstairs, Mr. Bleckner said he would probably pick up a sandwich for lunch and spend the rest of the afternoon in his studio, followed by a late swim in the ocean.

Asked if he was happy here, he smiled and replied, simply, “Yes.”

"The Death of a Museum" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

Fresno Met’s Closing Could Hold a Lesson for Detroit

By ROBIN POGREBIN

How does a museum decide to dissolve?

That question could ultimately face two cultural institutions: the Detroit Institute of Arts, whose artwork may be sold off because the city has declared bankruptcy, and the South Street Seaport Museum, which is desperately trying to stay afloat.

Museums don’t often go out of business. They cut back, they pare down, but they tend to persevere as cultural anchors of their communities. And neither of these institutions has announced plans to close; both are hoping to weather their current storms.

But both are arguably in jeopardy — the Detroit Institute because a sale would denude its prestigious collection of its most valuable artworks and compromise its integrity, since nonprofit museums, founded in the public trust, are ethically obligated not to sell pieces except to acquire others; the Seaport because it has struggled for years to pay its bills and recently lost its white knight when the Museum of the City of New York said it could no longer afford to run the museum, which was damaged by Hurricane Sandy.

Should these institutions find themselves forced to close, they could look to the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art and Science, which shut down in 2010, as an object lesson in the complex, painful process of dissolution.

Although vastly different in scale and reputation from the august Detroit Institute and the endearing Seaport Museum, the Fresno Met had certain key things in common with those institutions. It was a nonprofit whose building was in the end owned by the city. (The City of Detroit owns the Institute and much of its collection, and the Seaport Museum leases its building from the city’s Economic Development Corporation.) Also like the Detroit Institute and the Seaport Museum, the Fresno Met was a flagship attraction and a local point of pride.

“It was extremely difficult,” said Dana Thorpe, the Fresno Met’s last executive director. “For many people in the community, this was their Disneyland.”

The Fresno Met was one of nearly 30 museums that decided to close in 2009, the last year statistics were compiled, according to the American Alliance of Museums, a national association. The alliance no longer tries to calculate the number of closings, said a spokesman, Dewey Blanton, because many go unreported.

The Fresno Met didn’t have a lot of history behind it. It was created in 1984 in the former home of The Fresno Bee newspaper, a 1922 Renaissance Revival building on the National Register that the Bee’s owner donated. Among the largest arts institutions in California’s Central Valley, the museum had a few gems in its collection like American Indian baskets and a cache of Ansel Adams photographs.

For a while, the Fresno Met thrived as a center for programs in art and science. But by the time Ms. Thorpe became director in June 2008, the museum was foundering. A $28 million renovation project was $15 million over budget and three years behind schedule, closing the museum during construction.

Although the Met finally managed to reopen in November 2008, and attendance reached a record 110,000 over the ensuing year, contributions diminished as the recession hit donors’ stock portfolios. In 2009, carrying more than $4 million in debt, the museum cut its operating budget by 45 percent, went through two rounds of layoffs and closed its Chagall exhibition early.

“It was a Taj Mahal and a beautiful museum, but the demographics were not there to support it,” said Stewart Randall, the former board president.

The museum sought help from the City of Fresno, which agreed to guarantee a $15 million loan. But the economic downturn left the museum unable to raise money to refinance the loan, so the city took over the building. And the writing was on the wall.

“We were spending $300,000 a month and had income of $200,000 a month,” Mr. Randall said. “That’s when it became evident to me that there was no way this was going to survive.”

Staff members were let go. The collection had to be sold. Debts had to be paid. “We were now talking about closing the museum with dignity and grace,” Ms. Thorpe said.

To deal with all this, the museum hired Riley C. Walter, a Fresno bankruptcy lawyer.

The museum considered filing for Chapter 11 protection. But, after calculating the potential costs and delays, it instead pursued an insolvency proceeding to benefit creditors that is governed by state law rather than federal bankruptcy law.

The procedure turns the museum’s assets over to an assignee — in this case, O. James Woodward III, a prominent local lawyer and art collector — who then oversees their disposal.

“It was far less expensive and far faster than a Chapter 11,” Mr. Walter said. “In Chapter 11, you would have to go through elaborate notice procedures and give a lot more opportunity for people to object.”

The museum notified creditors of its liquidation, so that they could file claims, then auctioned off non-art items like pedestals and display cases. Sotheby’s handled the sale of the most valuable art works, which brought about $2 million; other auction houses sold the rest.

The unsecured creditors received 80 cents on the dollar.

At the beginning of the process, a group of local patrons lent the museum $675,000 and took a lien against its assets. That money was used in the liquidation for payroll while the museum was obtaining valuations from auction houses. This loan was paid off through the Fresno Met’s first sale of assets.

The liquidation prompted only one lawsuit: The family of Ansel Adams said the photographs were meant to stay in a museum. So the family traded other pieces it had for those in the collection, based on a fair market value price determined by an auction house.

Note to institutions contemplating a similar move: The aftermath wasn’t all grim. A science and math exhibition for children was bought by a children’s museum in north-central California; a large collection of original boxed puzzles went to a toy museum. The museum’s building is now rented out by the city as commercial space. And some of the staff members and trustees landed at the Fresno Art Museum, an older institution that focuses on contemporary American art.

Still, “it was really unfortunate,” Mr. Walter said. “And it’s led to there being one fewer cultural amenity in the whole region.”

Ms. Thorpe said she had received calls for advice from other museum directors whose institutions were in similar straits on how to avoid the same fate.

“I share the story of the Fresno Met,” she said. “I never want to see another museum close, even though I know it continues to happen.”

"By Design | Josef Albers’s ‘Interaction of Color’ Goes Interactive" @nytimes

By Design | Josef Albers’s ‘Interaction of Color’ Goes Interactive

Design
By PILAR VILADAS
July 23, 2013, 4:28 pm 1 Comment

A color plate from Josef Alberss Interaction of ColorrdquoCopyright Yale UniversityA color plate from Josef Albers’s “Interaction of Color.”

“Interaction of Color,” the landmark 1963 book by Josef Albers — the German-born artist and educator who taught at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and Yale University over the course of his storied career — isn’t just for aspiring artists. Its mesmerizing illustrations are a revelation for anyone interested in color theory and human perception. On Thursday, to mark the book’s 50th anniversary, Yale University Press, the publisher of the original edition, will offer a fresh way to engage with Albers’s lessons by releasing the “Interaction of Color” App for the iPad. The $9.99 app bundles the book’s full text and more than 125 of its original color studies with more than 60 new interactive plates that allow users to perform their own experiments with color, along with a new color palette tool and video commentary that explains Albers’s principles. There are also interviews with the graphic designer Peter Mendelsund; the artists Brice Marden and Anoka Faruquee; the architect Annabelle Selldorf; the textile designers Denyse Schmidt and Christopher Farr; and the director of sourcing and product development of Fab.com, Brian Mullan, all of whom talk about the use of color in their professional practices; as well as Nicholas Fox Weber, the director of the Albers Foundation. In addition to the app, a 50th anniversary edition of the book is available in paperback for $18.

In the video below, the designers involved in the project talk about the importance of color and the influence of Albers.


This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 24, 2013

A previous version of this post incorrectly described Brian Mullan, one of the people interviewed on the "Interaction of Color" app. He is the director of sourcing and product development for Fab.com, not the design director.

"Announcement of Jeffrey Deitch's departure from MOCA is expected" @latimes - The George Lindemann Journal

Eli Broad and Jeffrey Deitch

Eli Broad and Jeffrey Deitch at the announcement of his appointment as MOCA director in January 2010. (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times / July 23, 2013)                                        

By Mike Boehm

July 23, 2013, 11:05 a.m.

Jeffrey Deitch is expected to resign as director of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art imminently, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

One person, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said that Deitch was "choosing to step down." Another person who has spoken to Deitch said that MOCA is expected to announce Deitch's exit along with the news that the museum is nearing completion of a fundraising campaign it announced in March to boost its endowment from about $20 million to $100 million.

The person who spoke with Deitch, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the fundraising success would enable Deitch to exit with a parting accomplishment. Deitch had a five-year contract to lead MOCA and has served slightly more than three years.

TIMELINE: MOCA in flux

A MOCA staff member who was not authorized to speak publicly said that “major news” is anticipated from a museum board meeting scheduled for Wednesday.

Neither Deitch nor a MOCA spokesperson immediately returned calls for comment.

Citing unnamed sources, Tom Christie of the arts blog B.L.A.T.C. posted an item Monday saying MOCA has formed a search committee to replace Deitch, who, Christie said, was hunting for an apartment and a new gallery space on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The Times

Deitch rose to prominence in the contemporary art world as an art dealer and head of Deitch Projects, a Manhattan gallery in which he focused not only on established artists who commanded big prices but emerging figures who explored intersections between visual art and popular culture.

Deitch earned $917,377 in 2011, his second year at MOCA and the most recent one publicly reported in the museum’s tax filings. That included a delayed $300,000 signing and relocation bonus that boosted his second-year earnings past the salary in the $600,000s he had earned his first year.

In an interview with The Times last year, Deitch acknowledged that his tenure at MOCA had been rocky amid disputes with curators and a struggle to raise money. But he defended MOCA’s exhibitions program: “What we’re doing here now, it’s on the most serious level. It’s as good as any museum in the country.” 

"Qatari Riches Are Buying Art World Influence" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

Qatari Riches Are Buying Art World Influence

By ROBIN POGREBIN 

The prices have been record breaking, and startling.

More than $70 million for Rothko’s “White Center” in 2007, a high-water mark for that artist.

More than $20 million later that year for a Damien Hirst pill cabinet, then a record for a living artist.

And $250 million for Cézanne’s “Card Players” in 2011, the highest known price ever paid for a painting.

Given the secrecy of the art market, few knew at the time who had laid out such unprecedented sums.

But it has become increasingly clear that those masterpieces and many more have been purchased by Qatar, a tiny Persian Gulf country with enormous wealth and cultural ambitions to match: it is buying art at a level never seen before.

“They’re the most important buyers of art in the market today,” said Patricia G. Hambrecht, the chief business development officer for Phillips auction house. “The amount of money being spent is mind-boggling.”

The purchasing is directed through intermediaries by Sheika al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, chairwoman of the Qatar Museums Authority and a sister to Qatar’s new emir. At age 30 she has become one of the most influential players in the art world.

No one knows exactly how much Sheika al Mayassa has spent on behalf of her family or the museum authority since she was named chairwoman by her father, the former emir, in 2006. But experts estimate the acquisition budget reaches $1 billion a year and say the Qataris have used it to secure a host of undisputed modern and contemporary masterpieces by Francis Bacon, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons.

Where all this art will eventually end up remains something of a mystery. But it seems clear that, just as Qatar has used its oil riches to boost its influence in the Middle East with ventures like arming Syrian rebels, its wealth is also being deployed to help the country become a force in the world of culture.

This effort to create a first-class contemporary art collection, essentially from scratch, has buoyed the international art market, experts say, and contributed to some of the escalation in prices.

Until Qatar’s 2007 purchase, for example, the most expensive Rothko ever sold at auction (“Homage to Matisse”) had drawn $22 million in 2005, less than one-third of the price Qatar paid. In 2011 the $250 million spent for “Card Players” was four times the highest public price ever paid for a work by that artist.

“When they finish their buying program and withdraw from the market,” said David Nash, a New York dealer who spent 35 years as a top executive with Sotheby’s, “they will leave a big hole which I don’t see anyone else ready to fill at their level.”

In recent years the Qatar Museums Authority has created three high-profile museums in the capital, Doha, by the architects Jean Nouvel, I. M. Pei and Jean-François Bodin. But each of these projects — a new home for the National Museum of Qatar now under construction; the Museum of Islamic Art; and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art — is focused on regional art and artists. So experts expect that a good portion of the Western collection being amassed will become part of a new contemporary art institution in the country, though officials have yet to announce that.

The annual acquisition budgets of major museums typically amount to just a small fraction of what Qatar is spending. The Museum of Modern Art, for example, spent $32 million to acquire art for the fiscal year that ended in June 2012; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, $39 million.

While other gulf states like Abu Dhabi and Dubai are also trying to become cultural capitals, those two members of the United Arab Emirates have teamed up with existing institutions — namely the Louvre and the Guggenheim — to establish themselves. Qatar, meanwhile, is going it alone.

“They see themselves as an international center for many cultures,” said Allen L. Keiswetter, a scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “It establishes them as another reason to be a destination for travel, for business. If you want to attract people, you need to have a reason to go there.”

Sheika al Mayassa declined to be interviewed for this article, but she has made limited remarks about the role art will play in Qatar’s future.

“We are revising ourselves through our cultural institutions and cultural development,” she said in a 2010 TED Talk. “Art becomes a very important part of our national identity.”

In an interview that year with The New York Times, the sheika suggested that establishing art institutions might challenge Western preconceptions about Muslim societies.

“My father often says, in order to have peace, we need to first respect each other’s cultures,” she said. “And people in the West don’t understand the Middle East. They come with Bin Laden in their heads.”

Sheika al Mayassa appears to combine Western and Muslim influences. Sometimes she dresses like a stylish business executive; sometimes she wears a traditional black abaya, which covers everything but her round face. She speaks French and English as well as Arabic.

The sheika does not have a formal background in art history, having studied political science and literature at Duke University in North Carolina. Both she and her husband, Sheik Jassim bin Abdulaziz al-Thani, also did postgraduate work at Columbia University before returning to Qatar.

“The sheika has a very grand vision and is a very educated woman,” said Leila Heller, a New York dealer with many Middle Eastern artists. “She wants to make Doha a hub for art in the region, where people don’t necessarily have to fly to New York and to Paris and to L.A. to see great shows. Doha has an ambitious plan of opening close to 20 museums of different kinds.”

As to the guiding principle behind the buying, art experts say the sheika is simply trying to amass the best of the best, whatever the price. The pace of her purchasing during the past three or four years has vaulted her, many say, to a place among the art world’s most powerful figures. She has been written about by publications like Forbes and Vanity Fair; The Economist recently pronounced her “the art world’s most powerful woman.”

And yet her profile within the places where art is bought and sold is all but nonexistent. The sheika does not visit art galleries. She won’t be found in the auction room on sale nights among the other major collectors for whom the business is something of a high-society fraternity.

Auction houses and galleries will often wine and dine these collectors before a big sale. Significant works will be flown to their homes. The Qataris don’t take part in this. They delegate their purchasing to a handful of experienced art advisers who do it for them — initially the dealers Philippe Ségalot and Franck Giraud and now Guy Bennett.

Mr. Bennett, a former co-head of Christie’s Impressionist and Modern art department worldwide, is known as a master dealmaker. He is just one of a number of Christie’s alumni who have taken on roles with Qatar. In June 2011 Edward Dolman, the auction house’s former chairman, was named executive director of the Qatar Museums Authority. Jean-Paul Engelen, the director of public art programs for the authority, is also a Christie’s veteran.

The Qatar team typically buys from dealers, though some of its most major purchases have been at auction. Experts said that another intermediary may act on Mr. Bennett’s behalf so that the sales cannot be traced to the Qataris, who want to keep their buying private to prevent driving up the market and fueling speculation about their plans.

“They are very secretive about their purchases and activities in the art market and I am not quite sure why,” Mr. Nash said.

American art institutions could be expected to be frustrated to see so many important pieces leaving the United States. But some museum executives say that’s just how it goes.

“Sure, there are lots of works of art that we have absolutely wanted,” said Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art. “But if Rothko and de Kooning and Kline, among others, end up circulating in Moscow, Qatar and Shanghai, that’s not so bad — it’s a projection of American culture and importance that is meaningful.”