Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Rosemarie Trockel, an influential German artist, is receiving her first prominent exhibition in the United States with a show at the New Museum.

Any simple description of the solo exhibition opening on Wednesday on three floors of the New Museum on the Lower East Side runs the risk of sounding like a passage from a Paul Auster novel: the artist is a German woman whose work is among the most celebrated in Europe; the artist is a man from rural Idaho who could neither read nor speak and pieced together haunting constructions from cardboard; the artist is a Chicago man who secretly fashioned and photographed childlike dolls; the artist is a California woman with Down syndrome who made sculpture from yarn; the artist is an orangutan named Tilda.

“Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” — a highly unorthodox survey of more than three decades of Ms. Trockel’s work and the first time she has had such prominent exposure in an American museum — is described accurately by all of the above. Ms. Trockel, 59 and based in Cologne, is indeed esteemed and widely influential, though for various reasons she has never been as well known in the United States as German contemporaries, including Anselm Kiefer and Martin Kippenberger, who died in 1997.

And yet several years ago, when she and Lynne Cooke, the chief curator of the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, began considering a retrospectivelike exhibition that would define Ms. Trockel for a larger audience, the idea that emerged was a show that, if anything, would make it difficult for viewers to decide which works were hers and which were by somebody else.

She wanted to include pieces she loved by James Castle, a highly regarded, self-taught artist who died in 1977 after laboring in utter obscurity in Garden Valley, Idaho, making work that seemed to lie in some forgotten land between Rauschenberg and Warhol. She wanted art by Morton Bartlett, a commercial photographer from Chicago whose eerie plaster child-dolls, discovered after his death in 1992, have become a minor sensation, and by Judith Scott, a profoundly disabled woman who began making cocoonlike, yarn-encased sculpture at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, Calif., in the last two decades of her life.

In addition to these artists, there are nine more, living or dead, not counting a few anonymous ones, who join Ms. Trockel in the show, their work sometimes intermingled closely with hers.

“I think of work often as the invisible made visible, and it doesn’t matter so much to me whether I made it or not,” Ms. Trockel said one recent afternoon on the New Museum’s second floor, as pieces by her and the other artists were readied for three large glass vitrines that looked like museum appurtenances from the 19th century.

In a recent essay in The New York Review of Books, the critic Charles Rosen wrote, “Art does not, of course, liberate us completely from meaning, but it gives a certain measure of freedom, provides elbow room.” In contemporary art Ms. Trockel has long provided more elbow room than most, in wildly esoteric work that ranges from figurative drawings to textile “paintings,” artist books, appropriation and surrealist sculpture and video.

In itself, the work can look like that of several different artists, as Ms. Trockel burrows into ideas, exhausts them and then moves on, sometimes returning to recycle the old, occasionally with a vengeance. One piece in the New Museum show is a clear plastic cube filled with the cut-up remains of many years’ worth of her trademark textile paintings, which she had saved in her studio. (A single painting similar to those she destroyed sold last year at auction for almost a million dollars.)

“It felt strange, but it also felt good,” she said of creating a kind of tomb of her earlier work. “I thought: it’s done.”

Part of the affinity Ms. Trockel feels for the so-called outsider artists she has included in the show comes from a sense of isolation that has often defined her life, caused by severe agoraphobia, which prevented her when she was younger from going outside much at all, and which still limits her ability to interact with people.

In a wide-ranging interview at the New Museum, where she was dressed elegantly and casually, with a dark sweater thrown around her shoulders, she spoke with an easy friendliness and enthusiasm about the exhibition. But throughout, she kept an interpreter at her elbow, despite being fluent in English and rarely having to search for words.

“I often see myself as an outsider artist,” she said at one point, “though of course I’m not. It’s wishful thinking, I suppose.”

Ms. Trockel shows at the Gladstone Gallery in New York and had a prominent installation at the Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea from 2002 to 2004. But perhaps because of her relative isolation and her general ambivalence toward the conventions of museum exhibitions, her exposure in the American art world has long been out of sync with her international reputation.

“With her the focus is always on the art, not the artist,” said Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum’s director of exhibitions, who organized the show there with Jenny Moore, an associate curator. “Rosemarie’s work is important for a lot of younger artists right now, I think, because we’ve had so many years of the phenomenon of artist as rock star.”

He added, “You could think of this as a choral solo show.”

As at the Reina Sofía museum, where Ms. Trockel and Ms. Cooke originated the exhibition, the artwork has been supplemented in New York by natural-history objects that were never intended as art. But they embody many of Ms. Trockel’s biotic interests and slip into the new context as if they were made by her, or perhaps by Dalí or Matthew Barney or Mike Kelley. One is a giant taxidermied lobster nicknamed Cedric that Ms. Moore tracked down and borrowed from the Delaware Museum of Natural History. (The wall label for the lobster notes, with impressive precision, that it was “cooked on May 13, 1964, and weighed 27.5 pounds.”)

“I think when people come to the show,” Ms. Trockel said, “they should try first just to look and not to think, not to bring all of their conceptions and influences into it.”

It is a lesson that Ms. Trockel said she tried hard to follow in her own life. A creature of habit (she eats the same type of pasta for every lunch), she starts her day by staring deeply into a Bridget Riley dot painting that she owns, until the dots seem to move and sometimes change color.

Then her meditation moves on to a group of spare, smeary canvases also in her collection. These were painted not by an artist or even a human but by Tilda, an orangutan in the Cologne zoo. Three of them are included in the New Museum, credited to Tilda but identified as a single work by Ms. Trockel and given a title she has used for many works over the years: “Less Sauvage Than Others.”

“I just think of it as abstract art,” she said, looking at the green and yellow marks of simian expressionism. “Of course it’s not intentional, but it doesn’t matter so much to me.”

“I look at them so often,” she added. “But every time, it seems like the first time.”

“Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” continues through Jan. 20 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side; (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org.

-By Randy Kennedy

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"Lawsuits Claim Knoedler Made Huge Profits on Fakes" @nytimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-By Patricia Cohen

"Beijing Artist Brings Visions of Birds and Bamboo to U.S." @wsj

[image]Liu Ye / Sperone Westwater

Liu Ye's 'Birds' (2011) is part of a gallery show in New York.

Beijing's Liu Ye has made his mark with modest-sized, bright-hued paintings of childlike figures, his favorite cartoon character Miffy the bunny and works inspired by his art hero, Dutch-born abstract artist Piet Mondrian.

But now and then, Mr. Liu, one of China's most prominent contemporary painters, likes to make a bigger statement.

He's done that in "Bamboo Bamboo Broadway," at New York's Sperone Westwater gallery. The title's name comes from the show's centerpiece, a just-finished painting that's roughly 21 feet by 30 feet. His largest work to date, it includes bamboo imagery as well as nods to Mondrian, one of whose nonrepresentational classics is called "Broadway Boogie Woogie."

Trained as a muralist at Beijing's prestigious Chinese Academy of Fine Art, then in Berlin, Mr. Liu started working on "Bamboo Bamboo Broadway" last year in a friend's studio on Broadway and later moved it to the gallery, where visitors would see him working. The artist interprets the grass, a classic subject in Chinese art, to create a grid-like abstraction that also suggests a landscape, often considered the apex of Asian ink painting.

"What I do is about painting and art history. Chinese aesthetics have a traditional system, history, very high quality and taste, different from Western taste but quite meaningful in our time," says Mr. Liu, born in 1964.

His art remains highly coveted in Asia. In December 2010, "Baishi Knew Mondrian" sold at Beijing's Poly International Auction for $4.4 million, very likely to a local buyer. The work depicts a much-revered modern Chinese master artist who worked in ink and died in the 1950s. Last October at Sotheby's in Hong Kong, "Portrait of Qi Baishi" sold for US$1.8 million.

Art adviser Jehan Chu of Vermillion Art Collections in Hong Kong says Mr. Liu's most sought-after paintings "are from the mid-to-late 1990s and feature nautical-themed cherubs posing against sweeping battleship or theater-themed backdrops." In November at Christie's Hong Kong, "Blue Sea," with one of Mr. Liu's trademark sailor boys, went for $1.8 million.

Sperone Westwater would not disclose prices for its show, which will have seven works—including older, more typical small pieces that usually trade in the $500,000 range, and new paintings like the 8-by-10-inch "Birds." Classic Northern European painting inspired that work, Mr. Liu says. "I love Flemish paintings—small, but the idea is huge. I like making small paintings because I need to use my mind. But I also love large paintings because they are physical." The exhibition closes Oct. 27.

—Alexandra A. Seno