Venice Biennale Oliver Croy and Oliver Elser’s “387 Houses of Peter Fritz,” right, part of the main show, “The Encyclopedic Palace.” By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: June 5, 2013

VENICE — Dark weather and high water were the backdrop to the start of the 55th Venice Biennale, an event that predictably combines enough cold cash and hot air to create a storm system of critical opinion. The main barometric indicator is always the big show that gives each Biennale its theme, and on this score, for the first time in years, there’s fairly smooth sailing.

The main show, “The Encyclopedic Palace” — organized by Massimiliano Gioni, 39, chief curator at the New Museum in Manhattan and this Biennale’s director — is a quiet success. Spread over two sites, in the park called the Giardini and the fortresslike Arsenale nearby, it’s immense, with more than 150 artists, but as tightly thought out as a small show — maybe too tightly to allow for wild-card surprises. Most shows on this scale are too messy; this one may be too neat. But it works.

Plus — a significant plus for anyone fed up to here with big-buck art — “Palace” doesn’t seem to have much interest in the mainstream market. It doesn’t say no to it, exactly. It just goes its own interesting way, not without problems.

And of course, the show is not the whole story. The Biennale is as much an archipelago of islands as Venice itself is.

Clustered around the main exhibition are dozens of national pavilions, each with an exhibition of its own, with more pavilions scattered around town in premises — churches and palazzi — more interesting than any on the Biennale grounds. Nearly 50 “collateral events,” semiofficially part of the Biennale, must be included in any comprehensive tour.

The total is overwhelming, but equipped with decent shoes and multiday vaporetto pass, I saw roughly 80 percent of this year’s sights on a trek that took me through most of city, always the Biennale’s real attraction.

Mr. Gioni titled his exhibition after a single piece of art, an 11-foot-high tower built by the self-taught artist Marino Auriti. Born in Italy in 1891, Auriti moved to the United States in the 1920s, settling in Kennett Square, Pa., where he ran an auto body shop while painting on the side.

After retiring in the 1950s, he began work on the tower, a stack of seven cylindrical layers surrounded by a colonnaded piazza, constructed of wood, glass and plastic (including hair combs). He conceived it as a model for a museum to be called the Encyclopedic Palace of the World, which would display the range of human achievement, “from the wheel to the satellite.”

He also made it a monument to ethical values, spelled out on the colonnade entablatures: “Live by your work,” “Make friends of your enemies,” “Watch that you don’t become greedy.” He wanted the museum to be erected on the Mall in Washington, took out a patent on it, even initiated a fund-raising campaign.

Mr. Gioni has placed Auriti’s dream tower up front in the Arsenale as a key to what follows: art that embodies utopian and dystopian visions; or attempts to encompass and categorize vast amounts of data; or is composed of many small and repeated parts.

Among works that qualify are paintings by the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, who claimed to receive her images from otherworldly beings. A video by the young French artist Camille Henrot jams the entire creation story into one short, percussively edited video. A set of 130 small clay sculptures made by the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss cover a period of 30 years.

Although Mr. Gioni includes several young artists on the rise — Ed Atkins, Helen Marten, Paloma Polo, James Richards, Shinichi Sawada — he also chooses some offbeat figures, like the nature photographer Eliot Porter, and brings in spiritual utilitarian objects like Tantric paintings and Roman Catholic ex-votos that were not created to be art in the conventional sense.

In combining these things, Mr. Gioni refers to the model of the “wunderkammer,” or cabinet of curiosities, collections of uncategorizable, often exotic objects first assembled in Renaissance Europe. This concept is not original, and it gets tricky when, as here, some curiosities are works by “outsider artists,” which can simply mean self-taught, but often implies having some form of physical, social or psychiatric disability.

The outsider art concept is tired by now, even ethically suspect, the equivalent of “primitive art” from decades ago. Mr. Gioni finesses the problem without really addressing it by integrating outsider-ish-looking inside art (there’s more and more of this around) so the two designations get blurred.

However you label them, it’s great to see in one place outsider pieces like the embroidery-encrusted vestments of the Brazilian Arthur Bispo do Rosario and the paper and twine sculptures of the American James Castle together with out-of-the-mainstream art like the copper-wire paintings by Prabhavathi Meppayil from Bangalore, and the thickly collaged notebooks of the Japanese noise-rock musician Shinro Ohtake. That they’re elbow to elbow with Bruce Nauman, Charles Ray, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel and Jack Whitten is nice too.

Ms. Sherman is here as guest curator of a minishow embedded within Mr. Gioni’s larger one, but so much in its spirit as to be indistinguishable as a separate entity. Ms. Trockel is represented by components from the exhibition “A Cosmos,” from the New Museum.

She’s an artist I admire, but I found that show surprisingly unsurprising.

With a blend of insider-outsider and art-nonart components, it could have been stimulating. But the objects had little to say to one another. I feel a lack of surprise in Mr. Gioni’s show for the opposite reason: Its pairings — spiritualists paintings by af Klint and Emma Kunz, digital-printer abstractions by Alice Channer and Wade Guyton — are too neat and museumy.

Yet at the same time, the show’s curatorial line is so firm, its choice of artists so strong and its pacing so expert that you are carried along, and ultimately rewarded. This is particularly true toward the conclusion of the Arsenale, with its purgatory of sculptures by Pawel Althamer, followed by Ryan Trecartin’s video hell, followed by Walter De Maria’s Minimalist heaven. It’s a great end to a serious, standard-setting endeavor.

Once outside, you’re in a world of hit and miss among the national pavilions, which tend to be high in polish, low in impact. Some
of the best extend the accumulative density of Mr. Gioni’s show. This is true of Sarah Sze’s assemblages of countless tiny found things in the United States pavilion, and of archival photographic installations by Petra Feriancova at the pavilion of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

There are persuasive alternatives to material density. In the otherwise empty Romania pavilion, Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmus have directed performers in stylized enactments of art from Biennales past. The work owes much to the example of Tino Sehgal, but it has its own charms. (Mr. Sehgal, who is in Mr. Gioni’s show, received the Gold Lion award for best artist this year.)  

Three young artists, Ei Arakawa, Gela Patashuri and Sergei Tcherepnin, make similarly interactive use the Georgia pavilion, a temporary, raised, loftlike enclosure at the edge the Arsenale for more sporadic performances. And Alfredo Jaar’s show at the Chile pavilion is centered around a sculpture that moves, an exact model of the Giardini campus that emerges from and sinks back into a vat of fetid-looking water.

Mr. Jaar is telling a story about the alignment of art and power: Many of the older, pre-World War II pavilions are relics of a murderous nationalism were built as cultural trophies by economically competitive nations that created colonial empires and eventually led Europe into war.

This show is filled with narratives. Everything seems to have a back story, many of them politically inflected. Tavares Strachan’s entrancing installation at the Bahamas pavilion tells of exploration and who really got where first.

At the Lebanon pavilion, a film by Akram Zaatari fleshes out a real-life account of an Israeli Air Force fighter who, in 1982, was sent to destroy a building in a Lebanese town, recognized the place as a school and dropped his bombs into the sea. And in a church converted into an exhibition space, a group of dioramas installed in a church dramatize, in exacting detail, the ordeal that artist Ai Weiwei underwent in police custody in China.

This notable display, technically a collateral event, is not far from the Arsenale but hard to find. Others are long walks or boat rides away, but worth tracking down. An Iraq pavilion is an informal affair up the Grand Canal. You’re invited to relax, read up on Iraq, have tea. And the artists, based in Babylon, Basra and Baghdad, are terrific, from Abdul Raheem Yassir, who has been producing mordant political cartoons since 1970, to the two-man collective called WAMI (Hashin Taeeh and Yaseen Wami), which produces ingenious furniture from cardboard boxes.

Without biennales we would probably never see shows of such art, made under truly challenging conditions. And without such shows, we would never see so many of Venice’s varied interiors, from sports arenas (the Cyprus and Lithuania pavilions), to commercial galleries (the Kosovo pavilion), to the National Archaeological Museum, where work by the Cuban-American artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons sits amid Roman sculptures.

Every now and then, a visit gives a shock.

When I climbed the stairs of an old building to the Angola pavilion, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Gorgeous photographs by Edson Chagas, from the city of Luanda, were there, in neat stacks of giveaway prints. And the walls around them were lined with Renaissance paintings: Sassetta, Bernardo Daddi, Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo. I and Angola were in the Palazzo Cini, a private museum that, except during the Biennale, keeps eccentric hours.

Mr. Chagas worked perfectly into the setting. (The pavilion, with his installation, was later awarded best of show.)

He and the young curators, Paula Nascimento and Stefano Rabolli Pansera, had keyed colors in the photographs to the paintings: a stack of prints of a blue-painted Luanda door stood in front of a blue-robed Botticelli Virgin. Neither blue was more beautiful than the other, but the African blue was soaked in sunlight. And I could take it away. It made my Venice stay.

The George Lindemann Journal

Ellsworth Kelly has been on earth for 90 years — his birthday was Friday — and he has been making abstract art for over 60 of them. Now the New York art world is treating him, and us, to a big party. His boldly colored, emblematic paintings and reliefs can be seen in five exhibitions around town. In unusually gorgeous terms, they attest to a lifelong fusion of austerity and high spirits, and a narrow yet deep exploration of pure colors and simple shapes.

The shows range from a mini-survey at the Mnuchin Gallery on East 78th Street, to an array of brand-new work at the Matthew Marks Gallery‘s three locations in Chelsea, to a radiant exhibition of Mr. Kelly’s 1971 “Chatham Series” at the Museum of Modern Art. The 14 paintings in the series have not been exhibited together since they made their public debut in 1972 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.

All told, these exhibitions present 82 works produced from 1951 to 2013. They reveal an artist who is making some of his strongest work right now, at times with a decidedly erotic undercurrent.

Mr. Kelly has spent much of his career romancing the vaunted monochrome in Modernist painting. He has approached this absolute without reverence or irony; it is simply the main building block of his art. For him, the monochrome has been something to particularize through shape and color, render in metal, or combine with another monochrome of a contrasting color, whether they are side by side or overlapping. The results are not so much paintings as crisp, flat objects devoid of spatial illusion. Yet the best of them are so perfectly made that we tend to forget about their physical nature, concentrating solely on their visual effects instead. Their perfection creates an aura of eternal newness that can sometimes seem antiseptic but just as often is central to their power.

Whether by plan or not, these exhibitions outline the three basic ways that Mr. Kelly has used monochrome panels. Consistent with its title, “Singular Shapes 1966-2009,” at Mnuchin, surveys his single-shape works. It starts with his first, “Yellow Piece of 1966,” a fat yellow rectangle with two rounded corners at the lower left and upper right. It could be the daffodil-colored emblem of a fifth suit of playing cards — something between a diamond and a heart.

The show’s most recent work is the declarative “Blue Curves” (2009). It instantly reads as a heart shape turned on its side with its point lopped off — and as breasts or buttocks. (The art historian Pepe Karmel notes in the show’s catalog that the artist himself has said as much.) It also resembles, fittingly, a capital B.

For the “Chatham Series” at MoMA, Mr. Kelly made shaped paintings using a brilliantly obvious method: abutting two ordinary rectangles to form an inverted L. The looming vertical paintings evoke giant rulers, or details of architecture, especially posts and lintels.

Each rectangle is decisively colored — red, blue, yellow, green, black or white — and their combinations pack a punch. There is a white rectangle above a black, and black above white, as well as black above red, blue, yellow or green. Red above yellow or blue. No two works have exactly the same measurements.

Seen in a quadrant of spaces formed by two intersecting walls, the “Chatham” paintings encourage a dizzying process of compare-and-contrast that is less about shape than about the perception of color in terms of weight, balance and proportion. From the end of one wall, you can see one painting that is red-blue and, in the opposite direction, one that is blue-red. From another juncture, two red-blue works with completely different proportions are visible, along with a black-white and a yellow-red with similarly squat proportions but no common color. After a while the show starts to feel subtly animated, as if the blocks of color were expanding or contracting, elongating and shrinking as you move around them.

The Chatham series is shown with a group of 40 small drawings and collages from 1951 whose geometric configurations presage, on a small scale, motifs later developed by artists as disparate as Sol LeWitt and Brice Marden. They also remind us that Mr. Kelly’s career lacks the traditional linear development of most artists of his stature. Most of his compositions first appeared in his works on paper in the 1950s and early 1960s, which he has repeatedly mined. Now he seems interested in circling back to translate them, almost verbatim, into larger sizes or heftier materials, or both.

That is the case with “Blue Curves” at Mnuchin, which is based on a 1956 collage reproduced in the show’s catalog. And such translations figure prominently in the shows at Matthew Marks. Here the third use of the monochrome — one laid on top another — often dominates, and the libidinous undercurrents continue.

At Mr. Marks’s newly renovated 24th Street gallery, four works from 2011 employ some abrupt curved shapes from the early collages and a green and orange painting from 1964. Now the shapes are separate canvases painted red, green, yellow, or blue, laid over white rectangles. More physically defined, these bulges suggest big, cartoonish tongues.

“Black Form II” (2012) in the big Marks space on West 22nd Street reiterates a double-lobed black motif from a 1962 collage. But now it is a funny, suggestive, magnificent wall relief, nearly 7 by 6 feet and over 4 inches thick, in aluminum painted a high-gloss black. The satisfying fat capital C that results looks as if one of Myron Stout’s meticulous black-on-white abstractions had been repurposed by Jeff Koons, only it’s better.

Another standout in the big West 22nd Street showcase is “Yellow Relief Over Blue,” from 2012. Basically it is a blue vertical rectangle whose bottom half is covered by a yellow almost-rectangle with a gently curved top edge. It’s like sunrise from the sun’s point of view. The blue and yellow are so intense and equal in strength that the physicality of the piece all but disappears. And the experience of pure, dense color is no less effective in the details. From the side, the continuation of the blue panel behind the yellow is breathtaking. It encapsulates, in miniature, the passion for color that fuels Mr. Kelly’s singular art.

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By CAROL VOGEL

Published: June 2, 2013

VENICE — They park their hulking yachts with names like “Lady Nag Nag,” “Wally’s Love” and “Sea Force One” on the choppy waters of the lagoon just outside the main entrance to the Venice Biennale. Every two years, scores of superrich collectors arrive here by sea, joined by museum directors, curators, artists and auction-house experts. They come to see and be seen and to take the temperature of contemporary art today.

But amid the glamorous parties and the people-watching — celebrities like Elton John and Tilda Swinton were here, along with Milla Jovovich, who performed in a glass box atop a Byzantine-style palazzo — there was also serious talk about the contrast between this Biennale and the recent spring auctions in New York, in which Christie’s sold nearly a half-billion-dollars’ worth of art in just one night.

That frenzied moment of spending seemed like another world altogether compared with this year’s Biennale, which opened to the public on Saturday and is about discovery and looking closely, not conspicuous consumption.

“Half the people I’ve seen here seem to be en route from the art fair in Hong Kong to Art Basel,” said Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Yet this Biennale is anything but commercial. Massimiliano has managed to bring together a surprising and interesting group of artists in an exhibition that is both thought-provoking and engaging.”

Mr. Campbell was referring to Massimiliano Gioni, the Biennale’s 39-year-old artistic director, who has chosen “The Encyclopedic Palace” as the theme of this year’s supersize event. It is taken from a symbol of 1950s-era Futurism — an 11-foot-tall architectural model of a 136-story cylindrical skyscraper — that was created by a self-taught Italian-American artist named Marino Auriti and was intended to house all the knowledge of the world. While Auriti’s dream was never realized, his model serves as the centerpiece and symbol of the exhibition.

Mr. Gioni said he chose “The Encyclopedic Palace” because it best reflects the giant scope of this international show and what he called “the impossibility of capturing the sheer enormity of the art world today.”

In addition to Mr. Gioni’s Biennale, which includes 158 artists, nearly double the number in the two previous ones, there are pavilions representing 88 countries. Many occupy spaces in the Giardini, the shaded gardens that have been home to the Biennale for more than a century. Others can be found in the Arsenale, the nearby medieval network of shipyards, or scattered around the city in cloisters, palazzos, medieval warehouses and disused churches. Among the first-timers is the Vatican, whose group show examines the biblical story of creation. There are countless collateral events too, like an exhibition by the artist Rudolf Stingel, who covered the Palazzo Grassi with his own Persian-inspired carpeting on which he hung his abstract and Photo Realist paintings.

By the time the Biennale ends on Nov. 24, officials estimate nearly 500,000 people will have come to see it.

But it is Mr. Gioni’s show that anchors the Biennale. In two parts — a central pavilion in the Giardini and in the Arsenale — it features self-taught and outsider artists alongside superstars like Ryan Trecartin, Robert Gober and Danh Vo.

While there are paintings, drawings and sculptures dating back 100 years, there are also works made just months ago. In a circular darkened room at the entrance to the pavilion in the Giardini are 40 pages of Carl Jung’s “Red Book,” an illuminated manuscript on which he worked from 1914 and 1930. Off this space are galleries displaying an eclectic array of artworks including Shaker drawings, modern miniatures inspired by late-16th-century Mughal drawings by the contemporary Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi; abstract canvases by the Swedish painter and mystic Hilma af Klint and meticulously carved wild and mythical animals dating from 1870 to 1900 by the woodcarver Levi Fisher Ames.

In the central gallery there is also an enigmatic performance piece by the British-born artist Tino Sehgal, the winner of this year’s Golden Lion award for best artist in the Biennale; two or three individuals sit on the floor improvising their own music, humming and chanting while responding to one another in movement and gestures.

As crowds poured into the show for the three-day invitation-only preview last week, museum curators could be seen taking pictures of the wall labels with their smartphones because there were so many artists they had never heard of.

Everyone had theories about what they were seeing and why.

“It’s saying that something in this old art needs to be incorporated into contemporary practices,” said Leah Dickerman, a curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Tobias Meyer, director of contemporary art at Sotheby’s worldwide, called the show a “game changer.”

“It finally addresses the theory of contemporary art that is based on Jung, on the unearthing of the subconscious,” he explained. “The art world right now is all about Pop and global culture and dispersing images via the Internet whereas this is about exploring the deepest sense of oneself and the genesis of art. It is the antidote to Warhol and Koons.”

In past years the scrappy raw spaces of the Arsenale seemed endless and confusing. But this year Mr. Gioni enlisted the New York architect Annabelle Selldorf to reconfigure the space into a coherent museumlike suite of galleries where visitors could see an intriguing selection of paintings, sculptures, videos and objects. There are remnants from a 200-year-old church imported from Vietnam by Mr. Vo and a lounge-like space where new videos by Mr. Trecartin — a surreal mash-up of college kids behaving badly — play continuously. The winner of this year’s Silver Lion award for a promising young artist, the Paris-based artist Camille Henrot, has a video about the history of the universe that is shown at the beginning of the Arsenale exhibition.

The American photographer Cindy Sherman organized a section where visitors are greeted by a giant rag doll, created by Paul McCarthy, whose internal organs are spilling out. Nearby is a nearly eight-foot-tall sculpture of a blond woman in a blue suit by Charles Ray as well as photo albums by Norbert Ghisoland of early-20th-century portraits that were discovered in the family attic by his grandson in 1969. There is also a meticulously fashioned doll’s house made by Mr. Gober, now 58, when he was just 24 and struggling to get by.

Many of the standout pavilions were inspired by Mr. Gioni’s theme of reflecting on the past, as is the case with this year’s winning national pavilion, from Angola. Located in two floors of the Palazzo Cini Gallery at San Vio, a museum that is rarely open to the public, are walls covered with old master paintings of madonnas and saints. Beside them on the floor, for the taking, are neat piles of 24 large-format photographic posters by the artist Edson Chagas depicting the complex contradictions of a post-independent African metropolis.

In the Russian pavilion, the artist Vadim Zakharov created an environment based on the Greek myth of Danae, who was locked in a room by her father, a king, yet impregnated by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold. Only women are allowed in the first-floor gallery, where they are handed clear plastic umbrellas to protect them from a shower of gold coins raining down from the ceiling, and every woman was allowed to take a coin. “It’s about how money corrupts,” said Udo Kittelmann, a curator from Berlin who helped organize the pavilion, “and the hope for the future of women.”

Crowds stood in rapt attention at the Romanian pavilion, where five dancers acted out artworks from past biennales. Using performance as a vehicle for questioning identity and history, they posed as paintings by masters like Chagall, Matisse, Mondrian and Klimt. They also re-enacted installations by artists including Mona Hatoum and Yinka Shonibare as well as sculptures by figures like Rodin and Vito Acconci.

“We went into the archives and looked at everything from 1895 and have included works that were political but also things we liked,” said the dancer and choreographer Manuel Pelmus, one of the artists who created the work. “It’s our way of writing our own history.”

By David Walter

Special to The Miami Herald

By WILLARD SPIEGELMAN

Tulsa, Okla.

Black gold, aka oil, turns into real gold, which often makes for artistic wealth and civic pride. Consider the case of this city in the green country of eastern Oklahoma, a landscape that resembles the gently rolling hills of adjacent Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas more than the dustbowl plains of the western part of the state or the Texas panhandle. Until the mid-1950s, Tulsa was the undisputed international capital of the oil industry. Men became rich, almost overnight. Some of them did great things with their gains.

Waite Phillips (1883-1964), whose brothers had already amassed a major company in Bartlesville, developed his own petroleum company here and sold it in 1925 for the then-enormous sum of $25 million. That's when the real fun began. The grand result was his in-town villa, Philbrook, 72 rooms on 23 acres, which he had built in 1927 for himself, his wife and two children, and which he began filling with the art that still hangs on the walls and stuffs the cabinets here. This estate would not seem out of place in Hollywood. But the Phillips family stayed here for less than a dozen years. In 1938 they deeded the house to the city. Then they moved to the penthouse of a downtown skyscraper; and the Philbrook Museum opened in 1939.

The "house museum" is a lovely genre whose members include the more famous Frick Collection in New York and Gardner Museum in Boston. We go to them for the art and also to breathe the air and get a feeling for how the owner-occupants lived and what made them tick. Philbrook mixes Greek, Italian Renaissance, Baroque and Southwestern styles, the building covered by red-tile roofs, in an engaging hodgepodge. Its beautifully landscaped gardens, which include fountains and a classical tempietto, are the go-to spot for Tulsans who want backdrops for wedding photos.

Phillips had a taste for western things—his "man cave" rooms are on the ground floor—while his wife, Genevieve, went in for French style. The museum's collection has 12,000 items and constitutes a modest encyclopedia as well as a fortuitous anthology of Phillips and post-Phillips bequests, the most splendid of which are 40 Italian Renaissance works (34 paintings, six sculptures), a handout from Samuel H. Kress, the five-and-dime-store magnate who disposed of his vast holdings, most generously to Washington's National Gallery, throughout the mid-20th century.

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Evan Taylor

The main Philbrook campus includes beautifully landscaped gardens.

The Kress works at the Philbrook include some strong and interesting pictures: an "Enthroned Madonna" attributed to Gentile da Fabriano; Tanzio da Varallo's very buff St. John the Baptist (1627); a Madonna from a follower of Andrea Mantegna; a splendid small portrait of a bearded man attributed to Giovanni Bellini; and other impressive pictures by Carpaccio and Piero di Cosimo. For a schoolchild in the middle of the middle of the country, far from Chicago or even Kansas City, these works—no four-star masterpieces—define what we used to call the Renaissance. They are approachable (when I visited the museum in mid-April, it was as silent as a tomb) and all are in perfect condition.

Most of the Phillips furniture has gone, and the original building has been adapted for the display of art. Architectural additions have been made, but the bones of the house survive, as do charming details, like the frescoes by Philadelphia artist George Gibbs on the walls of the music room, which depict four "tempos" (Allegro, Andante, Rondo and Scherzo) in neoclassical tableaux with young girls who look like nothing so much as 1920s flappers with bobbed hair and flowing gowns.

Although the villa's low ceilings and dark rooms are not ideal for the display of art, French pictures by Rosa Bonheur, Eugène Boudin, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Charles-François Daubigny and Edouard Vuillard look pretty good. Even better, in an adjacent gallery added to the original house, is the Herbert and Roseline Gussman Collection (he was a New Yorker who moved to Oklahoma, one of several prominent Jewish oilmen in the state), 450 works that came to the Philbrook. Paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, Emil Nolde, Georges Roualt, Pablo Picasso, Raoul Dufy and André Derain comfortably command the wall space.

The appealing house really cannot display larger, modern and contemporary work. But on June 14 the museum is opening Philbrook Downtown, an industrial space, in the Brady Arts District. Like much of Tulsa, this wonderful old neighborhood of low brick buildings and unused warehouses is redolent of Art Deco style. New restaurants, galleries and lofts are springing up. Think Brooklyn, or even Berlin, on the Arkansas River. Much of this development comes courtesy of the George Kaiser Family Foundation. The new place will free up space in the villa for the display of some of the collection's 600 Asian works, none of which is up now. More American Indian pottery and baskets will come out of storage, and will be joined in the downtown facility by the newly acquired Eugene B. Adkins Collection.

Under the energetic leadership of Randall Suffolk, the museum's director since 2007, the Philbrook has increased attendance by 50% and changed its programming to include more family-friendly events. In a city where horrible race riots occurred 90 years ago, and which still bears traces of the American Indian displacement of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Mr. Suffolk proudly notes that 42% of the museum's visitors come from minority populations, versus an average of 9% nationally.

The downtown facility joins a complex of arts buildings (plus a lovely adjacent green space, on which concerts and exercise classes are already taking place) that includes the archives of Woody Guthrie, one of Oklahoma's most famous sons, embraced more warmly after his death than during his life. This socialist songwriting minstrel of the plains has been reborn, courtesy of his state's wealthy philanthropists. It's an appropriate irony. This land is everyone's land.

Mr. Spiegelman, who writes about the arts for the Journal, lives in Dallas.

An Artist Depicts His Demons

Cristiano Bendinelli for The New York Times

One of Ai Weiwei’s dioramas that recreate his harrowing experiences as a prisoner of the Chinese authorities. More Photos »

By EDWARD WONG

Published: May 26, 2013

BEIJING — For a year and a half the artist Ai Weiwei and a sculptor friend oversaw a team of 20 to 30 people toiling away here in secret on one of his most political and personal projects.

Their task was to reconstruct scenes from Mr. Ai’s illegal detention in 2011, when he was held for 81 days in a secret prison guarded by a paramilitary unit. What took shape this spring at an industrial space in the Chinese capital were six fiberglass dioramas that depict, at half-scale, his often banal daily existence as a captive of the vast government security apparatus.

The dioramas were quietly transported out of China — Mr. Ai declined to say exactly how — to Venice, where they will be publicly exhibited starting on Tuesday in a church being used as an art gallery by the Zuecca Project Space, in parallel with the 2013 Venice Biennale, though not officially part of it.

Each diorama is enclosed in a 2 ½-ton iron box. There are sculptures of Mr. Ai sleeping, eating, showering, undergoing interrogation and sitting on the toilet, all under the watch of two young guards in green uniforms. Mr. Ai said the details were meticulously recreated from memory, down to his blue flip-flops and the white padding taped to the walls of the room.

Along with an obscenity-laced music video posted online last week, the dioramas are the first of Mr. Ai’s pieces to address his detention, which was the most difficult period of his life, he said.

On a recent morning at his studio and home in northern Beijing, he explained in an interview that his goal was simple: “To give people a clear understanding of the conditions.” An assistant used an iPad to show visitors photographs of the dioramas while a shaved cat padded around, looking forlorn.

Mr. Ai, 56, has another work being shown by Zuecca, one that comments on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. He also has a more conceptual piece at Venice that uses 800 small wooden stools and is an attempt, Mr. Ai said, to build a “monsterlike lively structure” that is “completely dysfunctional.” That work is part of a group exhibition put together by the curator for the German Pavilion in the Biennale, though the exhibition will be displayed in the French Pavilion as a gesture symbolizing ties between the two nations. Mr. Ai’s artwork is making its first appearance in the Biennale since his debut there in 1999.

“China is still in constant warfare, with destroying individuals’ nature, including people’s imaginations, curiosity, motivations, dreams,” Mr. Ai said. “This state’s best minds have been wasted by this high ideological control, which is fake. Even the people who are trying to use it as a tool to maintain power or stability know that this is a completely fake condition.”

Mr. Ai’s vitriol against the Communist Party has made him a polarizing figure in the Chinese art world. Many artists quietly resent the attention Mr. Ai has received from the West, as well as his occasional denunciations of other Chinese, including former friends, who are unwilling to take the same uncompromising stand against the party.

Critical reception in the West to his recent art varies — a 2010 exhibition of sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern in London was widely praised, while a 2012 retrospective at the Hirshhorn in Washington had mixed reviews.

“Can political art still be good art?” Mr. Ai said. “Those questions have been around for too long. People are not used to connecting art to daily struggle, but rather use high aesthetics, or so-called high aesthetics, to try to separate or purify humans’ emotions from the real world.”

The earthquake-related artwork in Venice literally builds on Mr. Ai’s previous political criticism. For the Hirshhorn show, Mr. Ai’s work “Straight” consisted of a pile of long reinforced steel bars from the Sichuan earthquake sites, which he collected and then had straightened. At Venice Mr. Ai is again exhibiting a pile of the bars, but double in terms of weight, for a total of 90 tons.

As earlier, the piece is meant to criticize how corruption in China has led to shoddy construction across the country and thus to loss of lives in the quake. Nearly 90,000 people were killed or missing, including more than 5,000 children who died when schools collapsed.

“It will remain for a long time to remind people what happened,” Mr. Ai said. “Until today they have never answered our questions.”

Philip Tinari, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, said in general, “Weiwei has been looking, in the years since his detention, for a way to use art to talk about social issues in a way that still codes and functions as art.” The metal rods from Sichuan, he said, are “a good example of his search for this middle road between overtly political and purely formal.”

The six dioramas, titled “S.A.C.R.E.D,” are more personal. Since his release two years ago, Mr. Ai has been obsessing over the details of his detention and the ordeals of several friends persecuted at the same time. In late 2011 he gave several long interviews to The New York Times in which he described the conditions of his detention and his daily activities. The details in the dioramas are consistent with his earlier accounts, down to the color of the wallpaper.

“I am sure that it will be a powerful piece,” said Karen Smith, an art historian and independent curator who has seen photographs of the project. “In spite of the fact that to all outward appearances Weiwei seems to be holding up well and maintaining his focus in the period since his detention, this work suggests a need to confront the ‘demon’ that such an experience certainly represents for him.”

She added, “Although this work will seem like a very public indictment of the system, the personal aspect of the piece will no doubt be the element that lends it weight.”

Officials are still holding his passport and the police sometimes follow him to unlikely places (a ski resort, for instance), but Mr. Ai has more freedom than he did in the first year after his release. The loosening of surveillance is demonstrated by the fact that he was able to work secretly on both the dioramas and the music video, which was shot by Christopher Doyle, a renowned cinematographer, in a life-size model of Mr. Ai’s cell.

Mr. Ai said he is almost through mining his detention for his art, but there is one more project to come.

“I have a book I’m writing,” he said. “It’s already 80 percent finished. I have this terrible responsibility: I have to record every stupid detail, and it’s so dry and so boring, and to me it’s so terrible. That’s why it’s taken me two years to try to finish it. Every time I sat down, it was a struggle — ‘Why do I have to write this down?’ But I have to. This is just an obligation.”

The George Lindemann Journal

In the increasingly crowded field of stuffed fabric sculptures, Aiko Hachisuka’s stand out for their deliberation and complexity and for their sleights of hand. At first sight, the five sculptures in her New York solo debut suggest giant, colorfully glazed ceramic planters or tea bowls; their bright surfaces almost gleam.        The tactile reality of these big, barrel-like forms quickly reveals itself, however; then comes the recognition that the textiles used are all garments individually stuffed and carefully stitched together. Shirt collars and sleeves emerge, as do pant legs, the necks of sweaters and the occasional pleated skirt. Sometimes tangles of human forms are intimated: an arm flung here, a leg there. (They can bring to mind the jumbled limbs and lavishly patterned kimonos found in erotic Japanese woodblock prints.) The final realization is that the fabrics’ patterns are often supplemented by scattered shards of bright red, gold, green and other tones. These result from applying silk-screen ink to a tightly bunched garment that may then be rebunched and painted with a contrasting color. Or, after painting, the garment may be smoothed out and pressed against a second garment, making a kind of monoprint. The applied color covers the forms like a net, holding them together while also suggesting the crushed metals of John Chamberlain’s sculptures. The process of making these works is more elaborate than their content, which is to say that they verge on craft. They are also so complete that it is difficult to see where Ms. Hachisuka will take them from here, but it will be interesting to watch.

The George Lindemann Journal

By JENNIFER MALONEY

Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

Picasso's 'Woman in an Armchair (Eva)'

As curator Emily Braun stepped inside a Zurich vault with billionaire art collector Leonard Lauder, the small painting they had come to see made her giddy with excitement.

Ms. Braun, the private curator of Mr. Lauder's world-class collection of cubist art, was encouraging him to fill a gap in the collection by acquiring "The Oil Mill," a rare landscape by Pablo Picasso painted in a Catalan village in 1909. Passed down through the family of a French collector, it hadn't been seen in public for 70 years.

Standing before it, "we just couldn't contain ourselves," Ms. Braun recalled. Still, the cosmetics magnate wasn't convinced it was the right fit for his collection. Five years later, in 2000, he came around to her thinking and bought it.

Ms. Braun, known by friends and colleagues as "Mimi," has for 26 years been at Mr. Lauder's side, helping him shape a renowned collection of 78 cubist artworks that last month he donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The works, by Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger, are valued at $1 billion.

"We formed, I think, a very, very powerful partnership," Mr. Lauder said. "She and I are joined at the hip."

In addition to serving as steward of Mr. Lauder's cubist collection, a part-time job for which she is on call 24 hours a day, Ms. Braun is an art-history professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has also written books, curated shows and contributed to exhibition catalogs. She is co-curating an exhibition of the Lauder collection planned by the Met next year and guest curating a retrospective of the Italian painter Alberto Burri at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2015.

Friends and colleagues say she moves effortlessly from the scholarly world, where she is known for doggedly tracking down historical details, to the art market, where she keeps tabs on which cubist works are available for sale—and whether they merit Mr. Lauder's consideration. (With Ms. Braun's help, Mr. Lauder will continue to acquire works for the collection even after it goes to the Met.)

"A lot of my job has been saying no before things get to him," said Ms. Braun, 55 years old.

To avoid conflicts of interest, Ms. Braun is paid on retainer by Mr. Lauder, rather than at a percentage of the purchase price of the works she advises on. This is in keeping with the ethical guidelines of the College Art Association. She also discloses her side job each year to the university.

Ms. Braun grew up near Toronto. She studied art history at the University of Toronto and New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, where she completed her Ph.D. on the modernist Italian artist Mario Sironi and the politics of art under fascism.

Throughout her studies, she held jobs that kept her connected to the contemporary-art world. In 1984, she was hired as a consultant to commission works by artists including Sol LeWitt and Scott Burton for the public spaces in and around the new headquarters for the Equitable Life Assurance Society, then being developed in midtown Manhattan. She was 27 years old and had a budget of $10 million.

While Ms. Braun was conducting research in Italy, her friend Dorothy Kosinski was working in Switzerland as curator of the collection of the late British art historian and collector Douglas Cooper. Ms. Kosinski, who is now director of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., invited Ms. Braun for a tour of the Cooper collection in Geneva, which included stunning Picassos and Braques stored in crates in a cold warehouse.

Not long after, in January 1987, Ms. Braun met Mr. Lauder for a job interview in New York. She had been recommended by her professor, Kirk Varnedoe, then an adjunct curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

Mr. Lauder explained that he intended to assemble a museum-quality collection of cubist art. "Very desirous of impressing him, I said, 'Oh, I think you should go to this collection that's sitting in a warehouse in Switzerland,' " Ms. Braun recalled. Mr. Lauder grinned and said: "I just bought that."

Mr. Lauder ultimately decides which works to buy. But each addition to his cubist collection has been preceded by in-depth conversations with Ms. Braun, whom Mr. Lauder described as "my partner and teacher and mentor."

While Mr. Lauder evaluates art on aesthetic grounds—looking for works, he said, that "sing to me"—he relies on his curator to weigh in on each work's historical significance, provenance, and physical condition.

Ms. Braun has traveled across the U.S. and Europe to view works that might interest her boss. Well-known as Mr. Lauder's curator, she tries not to tip her hand: When she attends an auction preview, she looks at everything, so as not to drive up bidding on a work he is after.

The first painting from Mr. Lauder's cubist collection was put on display at the Met last month: "Woman in an Armchair (Eva)," painted by Picasso in 1913 or early 1914. Mr. Lauder bought it in 1997 at a Christie's auction for $24.7 million.

Acquisitions are only part of Ms. Braun's job. As the collection's steward, she has overseen conservation efforts, arranged loans to museums and invited scholars to view works at Mr. Lauder's apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Perhaps most importantly, she has spearheaded research on every work in the collection. A trove of archival materials documenting the life of each painting and drawing—including photographs, catalogs, inventories and articles—will go to the Met along with the collection.

Historical riddles that Ms. Braun is investigating include a painting hiding on the backside of a Léger painting in the collection. At some point, the artist crossed it out with diagonal brush strokes in diluted black paint. Did he ever exhibit that side of the canvas? She is still digging to find the answer.

Write to Jennifer Maloney at jennifer.maloney@wsj.com

The George Lindemann Journal

“Sacrilege (2012),” a blowup version of Stonehenge by the English artist Jeremy Deller, is part of the “Inflation!” exhibition at Mobile M+ in Hong Kong.

 By JOYCE LAU

The inaugural Art Basel Hong Kong, which opens to the public Thursday, has drawn planeloads of collectors and gallery bigwigs from the West, lured here in part by the growing, glittery market. It’s billed as a mutually beneficial arrangement: Art Basel capitalizes on the moneyed collectors heading to Hong Kong, while giving international credibility and exposure to local artists, galleries and the city itself.       

But as Hong Kong welcomes its new guest for four days of openings, parties and lunches, there are also some backstage jitters about finally being on the world stage, as well as trepidation that an event that started as ART HK will lose its distinctively Asian flavor. Art Basel has taken over ART HK, which began as a local fair in 2008 with about 100 galleries and quickly doubled in size, reflecting the city’s growing art market. (Hong Kong is planning to pour billions of dollars into developing a cultural district in West Kowloon.)

“You can feel the difference in the air — there’s a lot of anticipation,” said Nicole Schoeni, a local gallery owner. “Art Basel is a very well-established professional art fair with immense knowledge. We can benefit and learn from it.”

But, she added, “Who knows how it will go this week?”

To try to ease concerns, Art Basel retained Magnus Renfrew, Art HK’s director since its inception, and he has taken pains to maintain its roughly 50-50 division of Western and Asian participating galleries. Art Basel, in a nod to the local culture, also abandoned its original plan to hold the event in February, when it would have run up against Lunar New Year.

Still, Art Basel’s influence is easy to spot.

The week started with the first art gala to be held at the Asia Society Hong Kong headquarters, which opened last year. On Monday night, as a tropical storm lashed the $50 million complex, a renovated 19th-century British Army compound, about 200 invitees rubbed shoulders with major dealers and artists like Takashi Murakami. At one table, exquisitely bejeweled Korean women plotted which dealers to meet, while lamenting how hard it was now to hit both Frieze New York, which ended last week, and this newly ascendant fair (which was at least closer to home).

The fair has an iPhone app and a catalog “like a telephone directory,” Mr. Renfrew said. “The quality is really a step up. The architecture is much improved. We have a huge V.I.P. lounge with views of the harbor. The expectations of the visitors are higher, and there is increased interest from collectors, both from the U.S. and around Asia.”

Local galleries planned their best shows, installations and openings for this week. But of the fair’s 245 galleries — chosen from more than 600 applicants — only 26 have a permanent presence in Hong Kong, and many of those are relatively recent imports like White Cube, Gagosian, Ben Brown and Lehmann Maupin.

Even a few local boosters will admit that the paucity of Hong Kong galleries is largely a reflection of the weakness of the local art scene. In past ART HK events, pride of place went to Western galleries, mostly from London, showing celebrity artists like Damien Hirst.

“They made an effort to include Asian galleries, but, of course, they have to choose the right galleries,” said Pearl Lam, an eccentric violet-haired dealer who made a splash last year when she timed the opening of her new Hong Kong space with the 2012 ART HK fair. “What we need is to increase standards so that our own galleries can compete with Western galleries. It’s not good enough to just have Art Basel here.”

To that end, Ms. Lam hosted a lunch for collectors on Tuesday with Paul Moorhouse of the National Portrait Gallery in London, who is curating the abstract painter Zhu Jinshi’s first solo show in Hong Kong, opening at Ms. Lam’s space this week.

Another problem is a lack of plain old experience. While there are now almost 100 galleries in Hong Kong, only a few were around when the Chinese art scene first boomed in the 1980s.

Ms. Schoeni, who took over her gallery from her father, Manfred Schoeni, is one of those who have seen the changes. “When dad started 20 years ago, there were only a handful of galleries in Hong Kong,” she said. “It wasn’t until 2004 that auction houses started paying attention to contemporary Chinese art, and that’s when the big market boom — the big gallery boom — came.”

But even now, exposure to the West remains limited. Ms. Schoeni points to the Hong Kong artist Hung Keung, whom she chose for an interactive solo show during Basel.

“He’s garnered international attention among critics and has been collected by the Hong Kong Museum of Art, but he hasn’t had much exposure on the commercial level,” she said. “He will be teaching participants about Chinese characters and inviting people to create their own characters, which will then be animated and digitized for his next work.”

Many gallery owners are not worried. Henry Au-yeung of Grotto Fine Art, which represents local artists, said of Art Basel, “They did the right thing in being more inclusive, in presenting Hong Kong art, and not just using Hong Kong as a platform for selling.”

“If you go to a fair in New York,” he added, “there will be a lot of New York galleries. Same for London. And, hopefully, it will be the same for Hong Kong.”