"Richard Artschwager, Painter and Sculptor, Dies at 89" @nytimes - George Lindemann

Richard Artschwager/Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photograph by Ben Blackwell

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

William McDonald contributed reporting.

 

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 10, 2013

 

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the date of Mr. Artschwager’s last solo exhibition with the Gagosian Gallery. It was held last fall, at its gallery in Rome, not in 2008.

"Lawyers Fight to Keep Auction Sellers Anonymous" @Nytimes - George Lindemann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Robin Pogrebin contributed reporting.

By TOM MASHBERG

"Frieze Has the Art Fair Mastered: The British Brand Hits a Home Run With a New Event for Older Art " @adamlindemann

Last week, London hosted three major art fairs and several smaller and younger ones, enough to make any sane person wonder: have we reached the point of art fair overkill? I’ve often thought—and written—that the art fair scene has gone overboard, and now I’m not alone. On his Facebook page New York magazine’s art critic Jerry Saltz recently lamented the explosion of art fairs and the new custom among hungry galleries to send out email blasts from them announcing how many works they’ve sold. “We’ve built a worm into the system,” Mr. Saltz wrote. “The system is self-supporting and draws its power from everyone.” The point is timely, because London’s annual Frieze art fair—the highlight of a week of art parties and hobnobbing in British style—has sprouted a second fair, Frieze Masters, for more “historical” artworks. I was there for the opening of Masters, and it forced me to change my tune. And so, in the words of the great Marcel Duchamp, I will now “force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”

 

Since 2003, Frieze has brought dozens of galleries from all over the world to London every October, and showcased some of the best and worst in cutting-edge contemporary art. The show happens under an architect-designed big top in Regent’s Park, and it has been a smashing success since its inception, drawing thousands of buyers and gawkers who feast their eyes and empty their wallets on fresh pieces of art. By riding the Saatchi wave of hipness and hotness in British art, Frieze founders Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover succeeded in crowning London as the world’s second great capital of contemporary art. For one crazed week every year, London’s parties and gallery openings rival anything New York can offer.

 

So, in 2012, has the sinking world economy affected London’s weeklong art bonanza? Apparently not, since several New York galleries continue to open across the pond in a big way. There was plenty of “friezing” at the opening of Pace’s brand-spanking-new space in the Royal Academy building, which featured the unlikely pairing of painter god Mark Rothko with Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. Then there was the opening of a swanky new townhouse outpost for David Zwirner, who presented a large Luc Tuymans show well-tailored to European taste. There was even an all-new gallery for Milan’s ever-popular Massimo De Carlo featuring new work by Piotr Uklanski, as well as sundry other extensions, expansions and pop-up shops.

 

With so much going on, it seems that now almost everyone is saying that art fairs are “out of control.” I’ve thought so for quite a while, yet when I satirized Art Basel Miami Beach less than a year ago, some readers were confused, while others, like Mr. Saltz, attacked me as if I had committed heresy against their church. Funny how quickly the tide turns in art’s little pond. In his Facebook post last Friday, Mr. Saltz proved he’s a switch hitter, rightly pointing out that we have “a hundred art fairs and international biennials … skyrocketing prices during a worldwide economic contraction. The art world’s reflexes are shot; its systems so predetermined that they’re driving us; we’re no longer driving them.”

 

This may be true, but the dynamic has changed for good and there’s no turning back. I can no longer think of the art fair phenomenon as “out of control,” because the fairs are the ones firmly in control. They control a large percentage of gallery sales, and therefore exert a big influence on the size and shape of art; they are a huge force behind art-buying habits and tastes. Fairs are no longer a good or bad thing, they are the thing, the new reality. Fewer and fewer people go to gallery shows, because sadly, people just don’t have the time or the interest. Or perhaps it’s just easier and more fun to show up in London, Miami, Rio or Dubai to see your friends and party like a rock star, while picking up a painting by a hot artist. These days, art fairs are the only weapons smaller galleries can wield against the large and ever-more-powerful auction houses, which continue their incursion even outside the sales rooms, with the expansion of their own privately brokered art sales. Fairs give the art-buying experience an auction-house sense of urgency, and those impulse sales keep many smaller galleries afloat.

 

Understanding the delicate balance between art and the art market is where the founders of Frieze have proven their mettle. Remember last May when they launched Frieze New York on Randall’s Island and drew dozens of galleries from around the world? Back then, I thought New York needed another art fair like I needed a root canal, but I was wrong. It was a big success—the place rocked, and it was packed. I was at first skeptical about the new London fair, Masters, which ran simultaneously with Frieze in another tent, across Regent’s Park: why would a company cannibalize its own business by running two fairs in the same town at the same time? The stated charter included only a subtle difference between the venues: “old” Frieze (now called Frieze London) shows only newish work, whereas new Frieze (Frieze Masters) is limited to “oldish” art. The criterion for “old” seemed pretty random: the work merely had to predate the year 2000, meaning in order to qualify for inclusion, it only had to be 12 years “old”!

You may recall that London already has a modestly successful fair for older and more expensive art that runs concurrently with Frieze, the two-year-old PAD (Pavilion of Art and Design), located conveniently in Berkeley Square. No matter, the Frieze duo forged ahead and hooked up Masters with a whopping 175 of the world’s top galleries, easily dwarfing the two-year-old PAD and creating a fantastic new art fair experience, arguably the best I’ve ever seen. Pace Gallery had a $17 million early black mobile by Alexander Calder that was drop-dead, and Helly Nahmad rivaled it with his own colorful 1960s Calder mobiles fancifully twirling to a ’60s bossa nova soundtrack, one of them priced at $20 million. I got to ogle a sumptuous 16th-century portrait of Jesus by Luis de Morales at Madrid’s Galería Caylus, priced at 250,000 euros, and then swoon over Donald Ellis Gallery’s Navajo chief’s blanket, arguably the finest in the world (the ultra-rare first phase), justifiably priced at $2.5 million; now that’s fun. Frieze Masters was an unqualified success, another feather in the cap of the British franchise, and a considerable feat.

But what does Masters mean in the grand scheme of things—and what does all of this say about the market today? Remember the story of the Greek god Kronos, king of the Titans. He came to power by castrating his father, Uranus, and then, fearing his own children (the Olympians) were destined to do the same to him, he ate them (Zeus was spared and eventually overthrew him, fulfilling the prophecy). Like Kronos, Frieze Masters has castrated its father—this year’s Frieze, newly dubbed Frieze London to distinguish itself from its younger New York sibling, logically lacked the energy and testosterone of prior Frieze fairs. It was crowded with art and people but lacking in quality, although, to be fair, there were hidden treasures. Why would the Frieze founders jeopardize their successful franchise by creating a fancier and more mature version of the same thing? Going forward, collectors will demand a higher-quality experience—more bang for their art fair buck—and the new Masters fair delivers the goods. This is not a bad thing; now the Frieze London fair can keep to its original course and stay true to its commitment to be younger and, hopefully, edgier.

 

In a sinking world economy, dollars will, in all fields, seek out the best values. The feeding frenzy and knee-jerk hunt for the hot, the new and the trendy will not come screeching to a halt, but it is definitely slowing down. Art collectors are bound to get smart and demand quality. Frieze has anticipated this shift and built an all-new venue, one that is both elegant and sophisticated. The decision to emasculate your own art fair by creating a new one must have been a tough one, but in the clash of the titan art fairs it was a smart bet, and it paid off. Frieze Masters could also work well in New York, where fairs of historical art are generally to be found in the fustier confines of the Park Avenue Armory. I hope to “see you real soon”!

-By Adam Lindemann