Janet Cardiff’’s sound installation “The Forty Part Motet,’’ 40 loudspeakers in an oval in the Fuentidueña Chapel at the Cloisters in Upper Manhattan.

By JIM DWYER

Published: September 19, 2013

Wobbling, blissed out, a few in tears, people emerged every 12 minutes or so from the remnant of a 12th-century Spanish chapel tucked into the Cloisters museum.

Something had happened there, up on a hill at the northern end of Manhattan.

“It’s too soon to talk,” Margaret Cardenas said as she left the chapel.

“Too raw,” said another young woman, Alyssa.

Inside the ancient chapel was the first presentation of contemporary art ever at the Cloisters: “The Forty Part Motet,” an 11-minute immersion in a tapestry of voice, each thread as vivid as the whole fabric. A sacred composition of Renaissance England is rendered by the multimedia artist Janet Cardiff through 40 speakers — one for each voice in the Salisbury Cathedral Choir, which performed the piece in 2000. What started as one microphone per singer is now a choir of black high-fidelity speakers arrayed in an oval, eight groupings of soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass.

In the intimate space of the museum’s Fuentidueña Chapel, the sound, from invisible people, as if from ghosts, feels like charged, living sculpture. Through Dec. 8, it plays in a loop all day.

Ms. Cardenas, 24, had stayed in the chapel through four full cycles, walking along the ranks of speakers, then sitting on a bench in the center.

“I’m kind of out of it — I can’t articulate it,” she said. “Each speaker is a different person. It’s not something you think about: you feel it.”

In a moment, she found the word.

“Transcendent,” she said.

Ms. Cardenas was visiting the East Coast from Oregon for a wedding, and came to New York this week specifically to see a monumental installation by James Turrell in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. Then she heard about the Forty Part Motet and trekked uptown. “This is cooler, honestly, than Turrell,” Ms. Cardenas said. “I was super fortunate to get to see both.”

Others stumbled onto the “Forty Part Motet” while doing a lap around the city museum circuit. No one who sets foot inside the Cloisters can miss the sounds; although they are at their most powerful within the jeweled acoustic space of the chapel, they soar through the building.

“We had no idea it was here, and then we heard it all along as we went around the exhibits,” said Bengt Ehlim, who was visiting the city from Sweden with his wife, Susanne. She seemed to be stepping out of a trance.

“I am so really moved,” Ms. Ehlim said.

The core of Ms. Cardiff’s installation is a motet, “Spem in Alium,” a Latin fragment of the phrase “In No Other Is My Hope,” composed by Thomas Tallis sometime in the 16th century. Its transformation into the “Forty Part Motet” has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the museum’s space in Long Island City, Queens.

“I’d seen it at MoMA, and the gallery was very neutral,” Jeff Gray, 33, a computer programmer and musician, said outside the chapel. “But there’s nothing like this kind of space, the resonance of brick with wood roof. The kind of ghost qualities are a lot more apparent here. Everything bounces a lot more: you hear a voice over here, and you kind of feel it float around you.”

He was accompanied by Etta Yuki, who works in independent film. The sensations, she guessed, were what the director of an orchestra would feel. “And seeing it in a place like this puts it in a spiritual context,” Ms. Yuki, 36, said.

Sampled from the familiar, the sum of the ancient sound and space arrives in modern ears and eyes like nothing else: not like hearing a church choir, not like listening to music on a superb sound system.

“I’ve sung in English church choirs, and I know what it’s like to be in a space with 40 people and singing something like this,” Norman Yamada, 50, a composer and high baritone, said. This was a different, slightly unsettling experience, he said; acoustically “dry” sound was reconstituted. “By close-mikeing each singer, you’ve got it very dry,” he said. “Then you put it back in this space, and it takes the coloring of the space.”

The space, of course, takes its coloring from history. The Fuentidueña Chapel was part of a castle-fortress complex in Segovia during the hundreds of years of war between Muslims and Christians in Spain. Ms. Ehlim, the Swedish visitor, had made the journey from her accommodations in the hectic East Village to the Cloisters looking for the opposite of war. “My sister told me this is a lovely place to go if you want to have some peace in New York,” Ms. Ehlim said.

A new color.

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Escaping the Heat in Art’s Fortress

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Chanel Baldwin, exploring the Brooklyn Museum after learning that admission fees were “suggested.”

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Published: August 22, 2013

CHANEL BALDWIN’S eyes sipped on that painting and only that painting, because it was what was available to her on this side of the money line.

On steaming afternoons for much of the season, Ms. Baldwin, who turned 16 on Thursday, parked herself after summer school at the Brooklyn Museum, a refugee seeking the asylum of air-conditioning.

Because she could not afford the $8 suggested student admission — one that she, like so many others, understood to be required — she never got further than the lobby. She helped herself to the bathroom and water fountain, though, and spent a lot of time gazing at the painting called “Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps,” by Kehinde Wiley. On Mondays and Tuesdays, when the museum was closed, she sometimes stood outside the glass doors that whispered puffs of cool air through their divide.

In a perfectly air-conditioned world, Ms. Baldwin’s art consumption might never have been. It was a boiling city that drove her into the frosty museum, and she’s not alone. In a city where culture is supposed to be king, New Yorkers in the summertime sometimes pop into a museum mostly to escape the heat. They come for the air but can grow to love the art, too.

Ms. Baldwin’s confinement to the lobby has made her something of an expert on that Napoleon painting — one of the few works hanging before the place where you pay. First she saw the obvious: A black man with Timberland boots had supplanted Napoleon in a riff on the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David. Then Ms. Baldwin saw the Starter brand wristband. Then she noticed the sperm cells swimming over the canvas. It made her wonder what the artist was trying to say about men of her race.

Ms. Baldwin could have remained at the school for chill air, but who wants to stay there a minute longer than you must? She could have gone home to her mother’s, not far away in Flatbush, but the miserly bedroom air-conditioners breathe too little into the living quarters. Here in the museum the air was different, almost lush. “It’s like when you’re getting into a pool, and they make you shower,” she said.

In the season now passing, museums in New York actively pursued people like Ms. Baldwin — potential visitors for whom liquid-cool air might have been a gateway drug to the art. On Twitter, where so many institutions speak more authentically than elsewhere, there were lures like “Beat the summer heat!” from @MuseumMileNYC, representing several institutions on Fifth Avenue. “Looking to beat the #NYC heat?” the Park Avenue Armory asked. “Beat the heat with our Store’s new Marilyn Minter water bottle & Jasper Johns beach towel,” the Guggenheim offered.

At the Museum of the Moving Image, in Queens, the chill seekers were easily detected: the ones with the soaking shirt backs, and those who sprinted in and asked the receptionist some variation of, “So what kind of museum you got here exactly?” During the heat wave, searing temperatures had driven most people from the surrounding streets, save for a crew of fluorescent-vested construction workers, belt deep in the chopped-up road, singing.

Over at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the next day, Nauman Shah, 25, was leaving French salon paintings on his way to Cypriot sculpture. For this Pakistani-born engineer, who works below earth on the Second Avenue subway project, the air-conditioning was especially important. He was observing Ramadan, the holy month of fasting for Muslims. He woke before dawn and gobbled breakfast, chased by four or five glasses of water — and then the fast. He had to conserve his hydration until 8:23 p.m. Ordinarily, he would have returned to bed, waking only for dinner. But a friend had persuaded him to go out, and they agreed on the Met over other activities, he said, in part because its cool air was almost as effective as sleep at forestalling thirst. It was aiding his monthlong quest, he said, to achieve “control over your soul and desires.”

Around this time, but in another wing, a bird, perhaps also fleeing the heat, fluttered overhead through Rooms 229 and 230. It jolted a teenage boy with a Germanic accent. He asked aloud, “Was that really a bird?”

Back at the Brooklyn Museum, Ms. Baldwin was hanging with Akeem Reuben, 16, her second cousin and another summer-school air-conditioning refugee. Ms. Baldwin was on her usual bench, where she perched because of her belief that it cost money to roam further. But the fee was only “suggested,” I told them. The cousins said no one had explained that before.

Next thing, the three of us were in line. When our turn came, I uttered the museum equivalent of “open sesame”: “No donation today, thank you.”

The gates parted. We received green tags to prove our bona fides. Ms. Baldwin and Mr. Reuben looked stunned: such a formidable barrier, so easily breached. Ms. Baldwin realized they had given her an extra admission tag. She made sure to return it.

Now what did the cousins want to see? “Statues,” Ms. Baldwin replied.

But she never made it there, because the first room set her alight and held her rapt until she had to leave. There was no label too tedious to read, no piece undeserving of her scrutiny. She couldn’t help touching some of the works.

“Look at the detail on it,” she said of a Fred Wilson mirror, gasping. Then over to a grid of shelves with dozens of jugs from around the world. Each column of jugs had a Rolodex-like set of descriptions. She and Mr. Reuben stood there and went through every last jug — reading the card, then looking up at the corresponding piece, then the next and the next. They had time.

A piece called “Avarice,” by Fernando Mastrangelo, gripped Ms. Baldwin. It appeared from afar like a classic Aztec sun stone. But she got up close. Traced her fingers over it. Went to one side, looked at it; went to the other side, considered it that way. She noticed that the piece was made of corn, and then detected a toothpaste tube, soda bottles and cowboy hats lurking on the surface, all crackling with meaning.

Watching her, I realized how the inadvertent exclusion from these rooms must have trained her eyes. Instead of cruising across many floors, she had stared at the Napoleon painting and a nearby sculpture until they had little to give. Having only them to consider had taught her how to see. Now her sight could be marshaled against anything.

But she was irritated with the museum. New York is run on the kinds of understandings that kept the cousins in the lobby, with so many places formally open to anyone but protected in their exclusivity by invisible psychic gates.

Ms. Baldwin suggested a more honest approach, since people tend to think you have to pay: “They should just put a sign out telling us that it’s somewhat free.” Either way, she pledged to inform all her friends.

As the cousins left the museum for the oven of the outdoors, two schoolmates crossed their path, heading inside. “What’s going on here?” one asked. It was the cousins’ first occasion to share their discovery.

Art Basel in Miami is one of many international art fairs. Olafur Eliasson’s “Your Shared Planet” at a booth there in 2012.

By GRAHAM BOWLEY

The Threads That Tie a Show Together

Rudolf Stingel’s Carpeting Makeover in Venice

Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times

In Venice, the exhibition “Rudolf Stingel” unfolds over the atrium and both upper floors of the Palazzo Grassi; in the larger salons, the carpeting reinforces the architecture of the building.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: August 20, 2013

VENICE — François Pinault, the French megacollector and mogul, was smart to give the painter Rudolf Stingel the run of his regal Venetian exhibition space, the Palazzo Grassi, along with an elastic budget. Still, it was a risk. Quantities of money and space can bring out the worst in artists, including Mr. Stingel. But this time, the resources were well used.

The visually explosive, historically charged transformation of the palazzo’s interior is one of the signal achievements of Mr. Stingel’s fascinating career and just about the best contemporary art in Venice outside of “The Encyclopedic Palace,” the exceptional centerpiece of this year’s Biennale.

At a moment when art is swamped with big-ticket, high-tech spectacles that overwhelm, Mr. Stingel’s effort is the exception that proves the rule. It engulfs but also backs off, giving the viewer plenty to look at and think about, and plenty of room for doing so, often with a weird, unexpected one-to-one intimacy.

Mr. Stingel has achieved this rarity by lining most of the palazzo’s public spaces — the vast atrium and the two floors of enfiladed galleries overlooking it — with synthetic carpet printed with an enlarged, repeating digital facsimile of a predominantly red Ottoman carpet. He then countered the blazing color with noncolor: grisaille oil paintings hung sparingly throughout the palazzo, usually one, and occasionally two, canvases in each gallery. Abstract paintings dot the second floor; the third has loosely Photo Realist paintings of carved-wood medieval saints and madonnas, some quite small, copied from old art history books.

The result of this makeover is a three-dimensional interplay of two-dimensional mediums (painting, textiles and photography) that carefully layers abstraction and representation; original and reproduction; East and West; art and craft; and personal, local and world history, all into an encompassing environment of exhilarating complexity.

Mr. Stingel is among the great anti-painting painters of our age, a descendant of Warhol but much more involved with painting’s conventions and processes, which he alternately spurns, embraces, parodies or exaggerates. His art asks what are paintings, who makes them, and how?

Among much else, he has made paintings by walking on thick slabs of white plastic foam in shoes dipped in corrosive acid, creating the one-liner effect of footsteps in snow. He has made painting kits (canvas, paint, spray paint, instructions and a bit of ballet tulle to use as a stencil), whose purchasers can attempt their own Stingel abstractions, simpler versions of those on view here.

He has also installed silver foil-covered insulation foam that the public is allowed to mar and write on; he subsequently divides these “ready-made” surfaces into paintings. And in the past decade, Mr. Stingel has revisited his early training in representation with Photo Realist works: morose self-portraits, and portraits of people important to him, like his longtime dealer, Paula Cooper. These works signal the autobiographical subtext to his seemingly distanced approach.

Throughout his career, Mr. Stingel’s installation pieces have expanded painting’s physical borders in starkly efficient ways, including the unfurling of great expanses of carpet on either wall or floor and the claiming of them, often convincingly, as paintings.

The Grassi carpet painting is his biggest ever, the first to cover both walls and floors at once, and unusually freighted with history. It is from the early 18th century (the palazzo is mid-18th-century) and just the kind of exotic luxury item that regularly passed through Venice when it was a major gateway to the Middle East.

Such carpets sometimes ended up depicted in Renaissance paintings, with the result that certain patterns are forever linked to the artists who used them and are, for example, referred to as Lotto, Memling, Holbein or Crivelli.

(The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a Lotto carpet from 16th-century Turkey on view in Gallery 459 that is thought to be the carpet depicted in Lotto’s 1542 “Alms of Saint Anthony,” an oil-on-wood painting hanging in the Basilica of Santia Giovanni e Paolo, not far from the Palazzo Grassi.)

At first sight, Mr. Stingel’s pictorial wonderland is mesmerizing; you seem to float like a fish in an aquarium or fall, like Alice, into some unusually lavish rabbit hole. The white cube is obliterated, absorbed completely into an encompassing, unending visual fact. Appropriately, the Persian word for “carpet” means to spread.

The mind is pulled in, too, figuring it all out: the carpet has a large central medallion on a tight field surrounded by an ornate border; its pattern is greatly enlarged (roughly eight times the original); it is the same throughout the building. Above all, it just keeps going: up the walls and the stairs, into the elevator. Always it softens sound (and comforts the feet). This built-in sense of “hushed awe” enhances the privacy of the experience.

Upstairs, space folds and unfolds, as patterned walls and floors seem to meld into continuous planes. You become aware of the care taken with piecing the carpet to fit the rooms. In the smallest, it seems magnified. In the larger salons, the giant motifs seem closer to human scale, chiefly because the carpet borders sometimes reiterate the architecture, implying wide molding around doors or wainscoting along walls. This makes sense: such carpets often had architectural inspiration in Islamic buildings, monuments and gardens.

As for the “normal” paintings: On the second floor, their loose, abstract gestures contrast with the considered craft of the rug. Some paintings with hints of brocade and signs of the stenciled tulle echo carpet’s foliate motifs and evoke the tiny grid of carpet weaving.

In a stately second-floor salon, overlooking the Grand Canal, a large portrait of the Austrian artist Franz West — a close friend of Mr. Stingel’s, who died a year ago — startles. West’s youthful image is flecked with paint and coffee cup stains, as if it had sat around his (or Mr. Stingel’s) studio for years. (One of Mr. Stingel’s darker self-portraits, based on a similarly damaged photograph, hangs in a corner of the ground floor, as if intended as a signature.)

The paintings of carved saints on the third floor set up an especially lively dialogue, contrasting Christian imagery with Islamic semiabstraction, European with Middle Eastern, opulence and love of nature with colorless deprivation and martyrdom. Moving in to examine the small paintings of St. Elizabeth, St. Barbara or John the Baptist brings you up against the Op-Art blurriness of the printed carpet, and also contrasts modern pixilation with one of its ancient precursors: hand-tied carpets.

In a sense, Mr. Stingel has merged two forms of local architecture, turning a formerly residential palazzo into a setting for religious art after purifying it with the high, sometimes religious, art of another culture. It is by far the best exhibition seen at the Palazzo Grassi since Mr. Pinault bought it from the city of Venice in 2004 as a showplace for his often tone-deaf, inordinately blue-chip collection. Maybe its run should be extended.

In a city full of centuries-old churches, whose in situ artworks never move, why not leave an aggressively contemporary site-specific one in place? Maybe the Dia Foundation could take it over; it has just as much startling displacement as Walter De Maria’s famed “New York Earth Room,” yet it is also profoundly at home.

Theft Charges Reverberate in Connecticut Art World

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Jasper Johns in his studio in northwestern Connecticut in 1999. Unlike some artists, who employ many assistants, Mr. Johns is said to work with a small staff.

By PETER APPLEBOME and GRAHAM BOWLEY

Published: August 18, 2013

For 16 years, William Morrison has watched the passing parade at his airy, contemporary Morrison Gallery in Kent, in northwestern Connecticut, where luminaries like Meryl Streep, Sam Waterston, Kevin Bacon and Kate Winslet, and far-flung artists great and small live the understated good life of the Litchfield Hills.

Last week he was pondering something less genteel — federal charges that James Meyer, a familiar local artist and longtime assistant to the modern master Jasper Johns, had stolen 22 works from Mr. Johns and had sold them through an unidentified New York gallery for $6.5 million.

“I never would have imagined this,” Mr. Morrison said. “He was always very nice to me, and I thought he was loyal to Jasper. If it’s true, I’m shocked about it and disgusted. It’s crazy. Isn’t being Jasper Johns’s assistant enough?”

Mr. Meyer’s arrest last week rocked the New England reserve of the area, where Mr. Johns is a revered but largely invisible presence and Mr. Meyer a midlevel figure in the local art scene whose stature was elevated by his relationship with a celebrated master. And it highlighted a dynamic as old as fame itself, the often-fraught relationship between an established star and a younger hopeful working on his behalf.

While an artist like Jeff Koons is famous for hiring dozens of assistants to help produce his paintings and sculptures, Mr. Johns, who did not respond to requests for an interview, works with only a small number of assistants at his compound; they are said to be loyal and tight-lipped, even after leaving his employ, which made the news even more surprising.

Chris Mao, founder and director of Chambers Fine Art, a Chelsea gallery, who said he had known Mr. Johns well for several years, had the impression that his assistants were few in number. “It is mostly him,” Mr. Mao said. “He is working hard even at this stage.”

One person who worked for years as an assistant to an internationally known artist — who spoke anonymously because he did not want this instance to reflect on his experience and who had no knowledge of the Johns-Meyer relationship — noted that most artists’ assistants are artists on their own who can risk losing their own artistic identities and identifying to a dangerous degree with someone else’s success.

He said: “I’m sure that many, many years ago, there were a few guys running around the Sistine Chapel trying to pick up girls or impress a potential patron by saying things like: This thing would be a mess if it weren’t for me. You see the way those hands are almost touching? Mike wanted them further apart.”

The relationship between Mr. Johns and Mr. Meyer was long-lived and extraordinarily important for Mr. Meyer, whose Web site says he was “born of Mexican heritage and adopted in Lynwood, California, in 1962,” grew up on Long Island, attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and became the studio assistant for Mr. Johns in 1985.

The indictment charges that Mr. Meyer, 51, carried out the thefts from September 2006 to February 2012. He was arrested on Wednesday and appeared in court in Hartford, where he was released on an unsecured $250,000 bond. The indictment accuses Mr. Meyer of having falsely told an unidentified New York gallery that Mr. Johns, who is 83, had given him the pieces as gifts. According to a federal official, Mr. Johns’s lawyer was the one who contacted the authorities. Mr. Meyer has pleaded not guilty. Neither Mr. Meyer nor his lawyer, Donna Recant, responded to requests for comment.

Around the end of the period cited in the indictment, some friends of Mr. Meyer were surprised to learn he was no longer employed by Mr. Johns. Soon stories began to circulate in Connecticut and New York that the split involved allegations of theft. There were other signs that not all was normal. On March 5, 2012, less than a month after the split, Mr. Meyer transferred ownership of the house he and his wife, Amy Jenkins, had owned together to her name alone.

In an interview from the 1990s with Matthew Rose, an artist and writer, Mr. Meyer described himself as a total naïf who barely knew Mr. Johns’s work or how art studios functioned when he was looking for a job and was given a list of some of the most important artists in New York. He stumbled into a position with Mr. Johns that lasted 27 years. During that time, he also tried to make his own name as an artist with works whose influences included suburbia and Dostoyevsky filtered through the techniques and sensibilities of Mr. Johns.

“While 1960s suburban American remains my primary source of inspiration,” Mr. Meyer wrote on his Web site, “rethinking the linkage of image, shadow and subsequent images, sets off a conceptual clock of instantly recognizable pieces to a more complex puzzle. It’s my way of generating psychological power.”

During the last three decades Mr. Johns rose to almost unimaginable heights in the art world and marketplace. His painting “Flag” from the collection of the best-selling author Michael Crichton, who died in 2008, sold for $28.6 million at a New York City auction in 2010. Koji Inoue, a Christie’s specialist and contemporary art expert, said Mr. Johns’s works can change hands in private sales for significantly higher prices — sometimes above $100 million.

Mr. Meyer has regularly exhibited his art, including at galleries in New York like the Gering & López on Fifth Avenue, where he had a show this spring. According to Mr. Meyer’s Web site, his work has been acquired by some prestigious collectors and institutions including the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

But he appears to have had only modest success at public auction. Artnet, which tracks auction sales, lists only five instances when his works were put up for auction. Four times his works were “bought in,” or failed to sell, including a 1995 watercolor with an estimate of $2,500 to $3,000. In 2011, however, a mixed media collage sold at auction in Stockholm for $788.

The indictment alleges that Mr. Meyer deposited $3.4 million of the $6.5 million in illegal sales in a Connecticut bank. Records show that Mr. Meyer owns four cars: a 2005 Subaru, 1971 Volkswagen bus, 2008 Mini Cooper and 2006 Toyota pickup; two motorcycles, including a 2007 BMW; and three trailers. In recent years, he has owned several boats including a 42-foot fiberglass sailboat that is now registered in his wife’s name.

But the house, now in his wife’s name, is a modest one in Lakeville, Conn., and was purchased in 1996 for $185,000, records show. Over the years, he took out six mortgages on the property, which is now assessed at $361,428. Mr. Meyer lists as his residence a slightly frayed house in Salisbury about 15 minutes on two-lane country roads from Mr. Johns’s 102-acre gated estate in Sharon.

A few people in Mr. Meyer’s circle were familiar with the allegations, but more common was concern for Mr. Meyer and Ms. Jenkins, an admired art teacher and artist, and their two children, who attended local schools.

Mr. Meyer is lauded by friends as a public spirited part of the community who helped found the popular artgarage in Falls Village, Conn., an after-school art studio at a local high school. Others describe him as overbearing and too quick to traffic on his association with Mr. Johns.

“Everyone is shocked, because they know him to be someone of integrity,” said one friend, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the situation. He added: “It’s got to be a complicated psychological thing, working with an artist for so long. Who knows, maybe Jim felt entitled.”

Ruth Asawa, an artist who learned to draw in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II and later earned renown weaving wire into intricate, flowing, fanciful abstract sculptures, died on Aug. 6 at her home in San Francisco, where many of her works now dot the cityscape. She was 87.

Her daughter Aiko Cuneo confirmed the death.

Ms. Asawa had been shunted from one detention camp to another as a child before blossoming under the tutelage of the artists Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Franz Kline and Josef Albers. Gaining notice in the art world while still a student, she soon began building a wider following with abstract wire sculptures that expressed both the craftsmanship she had learned from Mexican basket makers as well as her ambition to extend line drawings into a third dimension. Many of these were hanging mobiles.

In 1968 she startled her admirers by creating her first representational work, a fountain in Ghirardelli Square on San Francisco’s waterfront. It had two mermaids — one nursing a “merbaby” — frogs, turtles, splashing water and a recording of frogs croaking.

Lawrence Halprin, the distinguished landscape architect who designed the waterfront space, had planned to install an abstract fountain. But after a long, unexplained delay, the developer chose Ms. Asawa for the job. Her creation set off a freewheeling debate about aesthetics, feminism and public art. Mr. Halprin, who had been a fan of Ms. Asawa’s abstractions, complained that the mermaids looked like a suburban lawn ornament.

Ms. Asawa countered with old-fashioned sentiment. “For the old, it would bring back the fantasy of their childhood,” she said, “and for the young, it would give them something to remember when they grow old.”

By and large, San Franciscans loved it. Ms. Asawa went on to design other public fountains and became known in San Francisco as the “fountain lady.” For a work in a plaza near Union Square, she mobilized 200 schoolchildren to mold hundreds of images of the city in dough, which were then cast in iron.

The work became the locus of a dispute this summer with Apple Inc., which wanted to remove the sculpture to make way for a plaza adjacent to a store it is building. After a public outcry, the company and the city promised to protect the sculpture, but the final disposition of the piece remains unresolved.

Ms. Asawa’s wire sculptures are in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In May, one of her pieces sold at auction at Christie’s for $1.4 million, four times its appraised value.

After the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco opened a new building in 2005, it installed 15 of Ms. Asawa’s most significant hanging wire sculptures at the base of its tower. As they drift with air currents, her large organic forms have been said to resemble a giant, eerie kelp forest.

Her work is inextricably linked to her life. “Glimpses of my childhood” inspired her, she once said. One memory, of sunlight pouring through a dragonfly’s translucent wing, was transmuted into the crocheted wire sculptures for which she first became known. In 1958, The New York Times wrote of their “gossamer lightness” and the way “the circular and oval shapes seem like magic lanterns, one within the other.”

Ms. Asawa said another influence came from riding on the back of horse-drawn farm equipment on the fruit and vegetable farms where her Japanese-American parents worked in California. She made patterns with her feet as they dragged on the ground.

“We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within forms in my crocheted wire sculptures,” she said in an interview with The Contra Costa Times in 2006.

A third influence — one she insisted was positive — was being held in internment camps with her family during the war, a fate that befell 120,000 Japanese-Americans, rounded up by the federal government for fear that they might aid the enemy. Her family spent the first five months of detention in stables at the Santa Anita Park racetrack. It was there that three animators from the Walt Disney Studios taught her to draw.

“I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one,” she said in 1994. “Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am.”

Ruth Aiko Asawa was born on Jan. 24, 1926, in Norwalk, a Southern California farming town. Her third-grade teacher encouraged her artwork, and in 1939, her drawing of the Statue of Liberty took first prize in a school competition to represent what it means to be an American.

In 1942 F.B.I. agents seized her father and sent him to an internment camp in New Mexico. Ms. Asawa did not see him for six years. Two months later, she, her mother and her five siblings were taken to the racetrack. After five months, they were taken to a camp in Arkansas, where Ms. Asawa graduated from high school.

In 1943, a Quaker organization arranged for her to attend Milwaukee State Teachers College, now the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to prepare to be an art teacher. She completed three years but was unable to earn her degree after being barred from a required student-teacher program because of her ethnicity.

Ms. Asawa then spent three years at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a magnet for budding artists and renowned teachers. There she befriended the choreographer Merce Cunningham and studied painting with Albers, whose theories on color were immensely influential. While still a student of his, in 1948, she caught the attention of a reviewer for The Times, who observed that her work “transformed Albers’ color-shape experiments into personal fantasy.”

Ms. Asawa had started exploring wire as an artistic medium after a trip to Mexico in 1947, when she noticed looped wire baskets being used in the markets to sell eggs and produce.

“I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out,” she explained. “It’s still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.”

Ms. Asawa wore bandages to protect her hands when working with wire, but still suffered constant cuts. When young, her children were usually at her side while she worked.

Her husband of 59 years, Albert Lanier, an architect she met at Black Mountain, died in 2008. Their son Adam died in 2003. In addition to her daughter, Ms. Cuneo, she is survived by her sons, Xavier, Hudson and Paul Lanier; her daughter Addie Lanier; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Ms. Asawa supported arts education in San Francisco public schools, and in 2011, the one to which she was most devoted was renamed for her. For years Ms. Asawa maintained the grounds herself.

Her own educational experience came full circle in 1998, when the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which had prevented her from graduating a half-century earlier when it was a teachers college, sought to present her with an honorary doctorate. Ms. Asawa asked that she be awarded the bachelor’s degree instead.

In today's contemporary art world, most people would consider the status of California Light & Space artist James Turrell (b. 1943) to be nothing short of paradisiacal. He has three concurrent, major museum exhibitions going: a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and solo shows at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. At Lacma, time-sensitive tickets limit the number of people admitted at any one time, with posted suggestions as to how much time should be spent with each work so the visitor's eyes can adjust for optimum viewing. Houston is exhibiting seven of Mr. Turrell's "immersive light environments" that date from the late 1960s to the present, along with what the museum calls its "beloved light tunnel," "The Light Inside" (1999). "Aten Reign"(2013)—a hyperpretty, computer-controlled, colored-light installation—occupies the Guggenheim Museum's famous rotunda.

Each exhibition affords viewers the kind of pure, unencumbered-by-things perception commonly associated with religious ecstasy and revelatory near-death experiences. Add to this heady mix Mr. Turrell's continuing, ultragrand project to turn Roden Crater—an extinct volcano in the northern Arizona desert—into a celestial observatory that's one giant work of art, and you've got an artist whose oeuvre comes as close as any out there to being timeless and universal. Or so it may seem.

Mr. Turrell—a handsome man with an oracular presence, a long beard and a full head of silver hair that he often tops with a black cowboy hat—is the son of an aeronautical-engineer father and a mother, trained in medicine, who worked in the Peace Corps. Mr. Turrell earned a pilot's license at 16, studied perceptual psychology at Pomona College and art as a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine. Perhaps influenced by his Quaker parents, he registered as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war.

LACMA/James Turrell/Florian Holzherr

'Afrum (White)' (1966)

"Afrum (White)" (1966), in the Lacma exhibition, was Mr. Turrell's ingeniously simple breakthrough work: a rectangle of brilliant white light projected into the corner of a room to give the illusion that it was a luminous, hovering box. A year later, at age 24, he had a solo show of several such projections at the Pasadena Art Museum, and was credited in many quarters as being the first artist to put light itself on display as art.

But Mr. Turrell didn't just slide down a beam of light and land, sui generis, in the Southern California art world. Los Angeles—with its shiny custom-car culture and surfer-Zen regard for the Pacific horizon—already had a "finish fetish" art style that emphasized light reflections on shiny surfaces. As early as 1963, Larry Bell was experimenting with mirrored boxes and Craig Kauffman with vacuum-formed plastic, and by the mid-1960s, Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler were busily dematerializing the art object by including a gauzy electric-light surround as part and parcel of their minimalist wall works. (Mr. Irwin, who's about to turn 85, has one of his miraculous scrim pieces, "Scrim Veil—Black Rectangle—Natural Light," from 1977, reinstalled at the Whitney Museum through Sept. 1.) But where light is concerned, Mr. Turrell—whose daunting output falls into such categories as "Space Division Constructions," "Veils," "Perceptual Cells," the "Magnatron Series," the "Tall Glass / Wide Glass Series," the "Window Series" and "Skyspaces"—is clearly the head honcho.

A Skypace is essentially a beautifully placed and tailored hole in a ceiling (or the open top of a specially built enclosure) that reveals a crisply cropped sliver of sky that seems to exist as a flat shape on the ceiling's own plane and at the same time accentuates one's perception of changing natural light. In 1974, Mr. Turrell's first Skyspace was installed in the residence of the Milanese collector Giuseppe Panza. Since then, Mr. Turrell has executed more than 80 such works around the world.

They're not cheap. Much of the proceeds of their sales, however, have been pumped—along with funds from the DIA Foundation and other helping hands—into the Roden Crater project. Completion dates for this remote complex of architecturally and sculpturally fastidious tunnels, ramps, stairs, platforms and a Skyspace iteration, have been set, variously, at 1990, 2000 and 2011. As of now, it looks as if the Roden Crater might take its place—although much more serviceable and beautiful in its incompletion—alongside the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota, which was begun in 1948 and is still being worked on.

Mr. Turrell isn't bogged down in a probably neverending Roden Crater enterprise, however. In the Lacma retrospective, there's a spherical Perceptual Cell entitled "Light Reignfall" (2011), into which a viewer (after paying about double the cost of an ordinary ticket to the show) is slid, face up in a big drawer, in order to experience a personal 10-minute lightshow. More democratically, spectators at the Guggenheim can stand, sit or lie supine and look up at the smooth, 60-minute color cycle of "Aten Reign," a cone of concentric ovals ascending toward the museum's famous skylight.

The purposes of Mr. Turrell's art are profoundly simple: To make the viewer realize that his art takes place within one's perceptual apparatus—indeed, consciousness—rather than outside of it, embedded in a configuration of inert material, and to make the viewer aware of the act of perception itself. "Seeing oneself see," Turrellians call it. By doing this, viewers shake themselves free from a more earthbound kind of aesthetic perception that is rooted in objects, making judgments of good-better-best among them, and improving one's taste. (Mr. Turrell has said that "Taste is repression.")

Do Mr. Turrell's work, and its wonderful, breathtaking arc from "Afrum (White)" to "Aten Reign," truly escape taste? Which is to ask, do they fly free from history, style and the vicissitudes of culture? Although the attempt is both noble and exhilarating, the answer is no.

photograph by David Heald - Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Installation view of 'Aten Reign' (2013) at the Guggenheim Museum

After a while, looking up at "Aten Reign," one notices in the first layer of scrim, stretched overhead, a couple of individual threads, a bit of dust, an incipient wrinkle. Inexorably, one begins to pay attention, as it were, to the man behind the curtain. And the nested ovals are necessarily tints of one color or two closely neighboring colors at a time, a convention in high-end room décor redolent of Los Angeles in the 1950s. As shapes, they evoke the post-Surrealism and abstract classicism of such earlier Southern California artists as Helen Lundeberg and Frederick Hammersley. And on a track parallel to the pop-culture influences of custom cars and surfer's bliss, those two painting styles fed directly into the work of the "finish fetish" artists who were Mr. Turrell's artistic contemporaries in mid-1960s Los Angeles.

That doesn't mean Mr. Turrell's art falls short in its ambitions. Its inescapable Southern California flavor merely reiterates the truth that particular times, places and, yes, tastes, cling to works of art even as cosmically intended as "Light Reignfall" and the Roden Crater project. Such human traces are, in fact, what give visceral life to art that wishes to be abstractly universal.

Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York.

A version of this article appeared August 15, 2013, on page D7 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Can the Light Set You Free?.

“Untitled” by Jackson Pollock was one of the forged works. How imitations of the most heralded Abstract Expressionists by a complete unknown could have fooled connoisseurs and clients remains a mystery.

By PATRICIA COHEN and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Published: August 15, 2013

For 15 years, some of the art world’s most established dealers and experts rhapsodized about dozens of newly discovered masterworks by titans of Modernism. Elite buyers paid up to $17 million to own just one of these canvases, said to have been created by the hands of artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell.

But federal prosecutors say that most, if not all, of the 63 ballyhooed works — which fetched more than $80 million in sales — were painted in a home and garage in Queens by one unusually talented but unknown artist who was paid only a few thousand dollars apiece for his handiworks.

Authorities did not name or charge the painter and provided few identifying details except to say he had trained at a Manhattan art school in a variety of disciplines including painting, drawing and lithography. He was selling his work on the streets of New York in the early 1990s, they said, when he was spotted by a Chelsea art dealer who helped convert his work into one of the most audacious art frauds in recent memory.

The new details about the man said to have created the fakes were contained in a superseding indictment, handed up Wednesday against one of the co-conspirators, Glafira Rosales, an obscure dealer from Long Island who was arrested after a lengthy Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry. She has been charged with wire fraud and money laundering in connection to what authorities have called a scam, but her boyfriend, alleged to be the other co-conspirator who discovered the painter, has not been charged.

Investigators say Ms. Rosales sold 40 of the counterfeit works through Knoedler & Company, a venerable Upper East Side gallery that took in about $63 million from their sale. The gallery, which abruptly closed in November 2011, kept $43 million of that sum, and paid Ms. Rosales $20 million. Fakes sold through a second Manhattan dealer, Julian Weissman, brought in another $17 million, according to the indictment.

Meanwhile, the painter earned $5,400 for a painting in December 2005 and $7,000 for another in February 2008, the indictment said.

Ms. Rosales has pleaded not guilty and was released on bail earlier this week. Knoedler, its former president Ann Freedman, and Mr. Weissman have repeatedly said they believed the works they sold had been authentic.

How imitations of the most heralded Abstract Expressionists by a complete unknown could have fooled connoisseurs and clients remains a mystery.

“It’s impressive,” said Jack Flam, president of the Dedalus Foundation, the nonprofit organization that authenticates Motherwell’s work. “Whoever did these paintings was very well-informed of the practices of the artists.”

One of the first experts to publicly identify some of these paintings as forgeries, Mr. Flam noted that not only the works themselves, but also the backs of the paintings and the way the canvases were treated and the frames constructed aped the styles of the artists.

But he said “the way we look at reality is highly influenced by the context it’s presented to us.” The fact that they were sold by Knoedler, a respected gallery, influenced people’s opinions, he said.

Ms. Rosales’s boyfriend and business partner, who was not named in the indictment but has previously been identified in court papers as Jose Carlos Bergantiños-Diaz, processed the freshly painted fakes, “heating them, cooling them, and exposing them to the elements outdoors, in an attempt to make the fake works seem older than, in fact, they were,” the indictment said.

Ms. Rosales concocted various stories about the sudden appearance of so many never-seen-before works, telling Knoedler and Mr. Weissman that a majority came from a family friend who had inherited them from his father and insisted on remaining anonymous. The works, she said, were acquired in the 1950s and kept stashed in a sealed container.

Eight lawsuits have been brought by customers who say they were duped into buying forgeries. Many of the works were subjected to forensic testing that concluded they were forgeries.

Two of those suits were settled, including one involving a Pollock bought by a London hedge fund director for $17 million.

Ms. Freedman’s lawyer, Nicholas Gravante Jr., said: “Rosales’s confession confirms that Ann Freedman was the central victim of this criminal scheme.” Knoedler’s lawyer, Charles D. Schmerler, said in a statement: “If proven true, the new allegations against Rosales are a sad development for the entire art world.” But he said claims that Knoedler knowingly sold inauthentic paintings were baseless.

A lawyer for Ms. Rosales, Steven R. Kartagener, declined to comment on the new charges.

John Howard, a Wall Street executive who has sued Knoedler, Ms. Freedman and Ms. Rosales after paying $4 million for a painting attributed to Willem de Kooning, said that after he purchased the work in 2007, he asked Ms. Freedman to be on the lookout for a rare item — a small Motherwell from the artist’s acclaimed “Spanish Elegy” series.

“I doubt you’ll ever see one,” he remembered her saying.

Then six months later, he said, he got a call from the gallery saying one had surprisingly turned up. He decided not to buy it, he said. He noted that the work remained in an inventory of works unsold when the gallery shut its doors.                       

Owner Who Plans to Sell a Banksy Mural Steps Forward

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