The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

ROSENBAUM

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/ARS

Jackson Pollock's 'Number 7, 1952.'

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

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

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

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

Alfonso Ossorio's 'Head' (1951).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos: Probing Pollock's 'Mural'

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Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

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

Graphic: The Restoration Work

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

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

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

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

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

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Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

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

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Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

The artist's signature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com

"Soundings’ Features Art With Audio Elements

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

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

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: August 8, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To the Editor:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many people have offered opinions in the long-running and literally heated battle between the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and a next-door condominium called Museum Tower. The condominium stands accused of producing glare that has compromised the museum’s galleries and garden.

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Paul Moseley/Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Mike Snyder, who was hired to help the tower, posted blog comments under a fake name.                           

Reflected light from the Museum Tower in Dallas, above, is a point of contention with the Nasher Sculpture Center next door.                           

A group show at the Detroit Mercantile Company, called “Art Ethereal: Beauty and the Beast,” included the photographs of Sebastian Sullen.

By COURTNEY BALESTIER

Published: August 6, 2013

The night of June 20 was the Detroit native and photographer Sebastian Sullen’s first art exhibition, a group show called “Art Ethereal: Beauty and the Beast,” named for his contradictory subject: his city’s majestic architecture and scarred urban blight. Part of a monthly event called Third Thursday, the show packed the Detroit Mercantile Company, a retro general store and event space. There were carrot cake, beer from a nano-brewery and, in the storefront, “You Gotta Save Art!” stickers ($2.50) and T-shirts ($25) for sale in support of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

It was an apt message, even more so now. On July 18, Detroit, the cradle of the country’s automobile industry, filed for bankruptcy, the largest American city to ever do so. The tumble into insolvency has left officials pondering the likely fallout. For example, the Detroit Institute of Arts, which is owned by the city, faces the possibility of the sale of artwork from its impressive collection, which includes gems by van Gogh, Diego Rivera, Caravaggio, Breugel, Rembrandt, Rodin and Picasso, to help pay down the city’s crippling debts.

How Detroit’s bankruptcy will affect cultural life, and the 20 million tourists who visit the metro region a year, remains to be seen. But the city’s tourism bureau and others say that what the local government does has little bearing on what attracts people to Detroit. “Private investment in the city is at an all-time high, and while the bankruptcy process will be painful in the short run, officials know that the key to a successful city are the assets that draw visitors and residents,” said Renee Monforton, the communications director at the Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau, a privately funded organization that has had concerned calls from convention groups but as of Aug. 5 no cancellations.  

Tourism officials are still promoting attractions like the arts institute, the North American International Car Show, the Detroit Zoo and the sites downtown where the Detroit Tigers, Lions and Red Wings play. According to a February 2013 report from the nonprofit D:hive, 10.5 million people visit the greater downtown Detroit area a year for sites like the River Walk and the Detroit Opera House.

Jeanette Pierce, the director of community relations at D:hive, which assists visitors and new residents, said that this is not the first time that there has been dire news about Detroit. “It’s not a top-down city,” she said. “There’s nothing the government is doing that is why somebody would visit here.”

The bankruptcy has added an odd layer onto what has become a thriving, albeit complicated, local art scene.

Detroit’s dismal financial situation has been a subject of minimal regard for many artists, who said that their city is far from the ghost town some might assume from the news. They point out that a rich cultural undercurrent has grown only stronger in recent years, with a rise in contemporary art. They say that the arts, in the end, may propel economic development in Detroit, as it has from Asheville, N.C., to Bilbao, Spain.

“I think we’ll have a little cloud for a while, but I don’t think it’s going to be long-lasting,” said George N’Namdi, the founder of the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art and a part of the city’s artistic life for decades. “We have too many forces working on art that supersede that.”

Artists have flocked to cheap rents and have converted shuttered storefronts and abandoned buildings into studio spaces and galleries as private money has poured into the local art scene. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation began a $19.25-million commitment to local arts projects last fall, the Kresge Foundation has awarded annual fellowships to artists since 2009, and Red Bull opened its first domestic House of Art, an emerging-artist incubator, here in May 2012.

Several suburban galleries have moved back to the city, and arts hubs are solidifying. A notable one is Midtown, home to the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, as well as galleries like the Butcher’s Daughter, Re:View, and the N’Namdi center. In Southwest, a white box called What Pipeline opened in April, down the street from community-focused spaces like 555 Nonprofit Gallery and Studios, housed in a former police precinct. In Eastern Market, two new destinations, Inner State Gallery and Trinosophes, opened in the spring on busy Gratiot Avenue, blocks from the Red Bull House of Art.

Third Thursday, the event that the photographer Sebastian Sullen participated in in June, is run by a local organization called Art Detroit Now. Third Thursday currently includes 62 galleries, cafes and storefronts; it is part of a growing arts ecosystem, one where those involved expect to continue expanding outside the shadow of the bankruptcy proceedings.

Monica Bowman, the director of the Butcher’s Daughter, said the bankruptcy filing does not change her mission or her market. “Since the announcement, I’ve had multiple national news inquiries and record numbers of new visitors,” she said. “I believe a renewed curiosity about what is possible when cultural capital is put first will fuel sustainability and growth.”

The Detroit Institute of Arts, the city’s premier museum, had almost 50,000 out-of-town visitors last fiscal year, a modest increase from the year before. (Only 11 percent of its visitors came from out of state.) The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, a k a MOCAD, always has a strong local audience, said its executive director, Elysia Borowy-Reeder, but this year visitors from Canada, Germany and Sweden have come for the “Mobile Homestead,” by the late Mike Kelley. International artists also exhibit in Detroit, Ms. Bowman said; What Pipeline’s inaugural show featured the Europeans Lucie Stahl and Tom Humphreys.

On the day the bankruptcy was announced, Mr. Sullen, whose photos contrasted the city’s grandeur with its decline, replaced his Web site’s lead image with a colorful mural depicting the Detroit flag, its official motto proclaiming: “We hope for better things. It shall rise from the ashes.” In his view, it still sums up the people of Detroit. “Nothing has changed for me as an artist.”

It's a tall order to capture the full sweep of history on a single canvas. But that seems to be the goal of Chicago painter Kerry James Marshall, who is making history in his own right as the first living African-American artist to be given a solo show at Washington's National Gallery of Art.

National Gallery of Art, Washington/Gift of the Collectors Committee

Kerry James Marshall's 'Great America' (1994) is on view at Washington's National Gallery of Art.

The history genre has had its stars, such as 18th-century painters Jacques-Louis David and Francisco Goya, with their roiling battle scenes. Mr. Marshall's wall-size paintings of everyday life often hint at the entire arc of the African-American experience, from slavery to the Civil Rights movement and beyond.

The National Gallery exhibit of more than 30 artworks, "In the Tower: Kerry James Marshall," is on view through Dec. 7 and includes some of the artist's best-known works, such as 1995's "Our Town," the painter's unsettling riposte to Thornton Wilder's idyllically set 1938 play of the same name.

Mr. Marshall's version depicts a seemingly cheery suburban neighborhood rimmed with a white-picket fence but shows a pair of African-American children fleeing the scene, their faces frozen in cryptic terror. The painting, which Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton bought at auction for $782,500 four years ago for her Arkansas museum Crystal Bridges, conjures questions that aren't easy to answer about the inclusiveness of upwardly mobile America, said James Meyer, associate curator at the National Gallery.

"Kerry's work is politically potent without telling you what to think," Mr. Meyer added. "That's a tough note to hit well, but he does it—I think he's one of the best painters in America, period."

Another exhibit highlight is "Great America," an amusement park scene from 1994 owned by the National Gallery that depicts a group of black people aboard a "Tunnel of Love" boat ride.

At first glance, the work's brightly colored palette makes everything seem merry, but Mr. Marshall fills his tunnel with ghostly, hooded shapes that evoke the Ku Klux Klan. The passengers are also crammed into the boat in a way that's reminiscent of the Middle Passage, the centurieslong slave trade that involved shipping kidnapped Africans to the New World.

In an interview, Mr. Marshall said the challenge of a history painting comes in finding fresh ways to embed symbolic imagery throughout one universally relatable scene, such as that amusement-park ride. The reward for the viewer, he added, lies in "unpacking it all."

Mr. Marshall's past merits a little unfurling as well. Born the son of a hospital janitor in Birmingham, Ala., in 1955, he first encountered art in a scrapbook that his African-American kindergarten teacher kept in her desk and occasionally showed to students who exhibited good behavior. Mr. Marshall was captivated by the book's collage of greeting cards, photographs and cartoons, a more-is-more aesthetic that carries over into his paintings today.

In 1963, racists bombed a Baptist church in Birmingham, killing four black girls and galvanizing the civil-rights movement. Mr. Marshall's mother, who knew the family of one of the girls, soon after told him that their own family was moving to Los Angeles—specifically a housing project in Watts. (Two years later, Watts would became famous as the site of race riots.)

Mr. Marshall said it was in Watts, and later in the city's troubled South Central neighborhood, that he began watching art shows on television and teaching himself how to draw comic-book heroes without tracing them first.

In the seventh grade, a teacher gave him a tour of Charles Wilbert White's studio at the Otis College of Art and Design. (Mr. White, who died in 1979, was a realist who portrayed black America in prints and murals.) "Going into that room changed my life," Mr. Marshall said in the interview. Surrounded by easels and sketches and finished artworks, Mr. Marshall saw the life he wanted. He went home, cut a hole in his parents' garage for added light and turned it into a studio of his own.

By the time he was 25, the artist had put himself through college, read a library's worth of history books and created the painting that would become his imaginative breakthrough, an inky black self-portrait called "Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self." The work's silhouette style got the attention of a gallery owner and would later influence rising-star artists like Kehinde Wiley and Kara Walker, who is known for her own silhouette art.

"I've always been plagued by levels of doubt," Mr. Marshall said, "wondering if the people who make decisions about my chances of participating in the art world know more about things than me. So I've always felt like I had to know my history better than anyone—I had to make myself invulnerable."

-By Kelly Crow

Porcelain objects by Aldo Bakker at Villa Noailles.

By ALICE RAWSTHORN

Published: August 4, 2013

HYÈRES, France — When a flag bearing the Noailles family crest fluttered above Villa Noailles in the 1920s and 1930s, the house was renowned as one of the most luxurious homes in the south of France and an avant-garde haunt where Luis Buñuel, Alberto Giacometti and Igor Stravinsky had holidayed, and Man Ray had shot a surrealist film “Les Mystères du Château du Dé.” So why has that aristocratic insignia been replaced by the straggly, colorful contraption now flying from the flagpole?

It is a windsock made by the Dutch designer Bertjan Pot to celebrate an exhibition of his work in what were once the swimming pool and squash court of the house built by the Parisian art collectors Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles. Months after their marriage in 1923, they commissioned the French architect Robert Mallet-Stevens to design it as their holiday home on the site of a ruined Saracen fort on a wooded hill above the pretty Provençal town of Hyères.

Not that anyone who is interested in design needs an excuse to visit Villa Noailles, which was inspired by the radical De Stijl movement in the Netherlands and is hailed as an important early example of Art Deco architecture. But Mr. Pot’s show and a cluster of other design exhibitions, all running through Sept. 29, make going there seem even more enticing.

Villa Noailles is a perfect forum for modern and contemporary design, and not just because of its architectural pedigree. Like her husband, Marie-Laure de Noailles belonged to a grand French family (her ancestors included the Marquis de Sade and the Comtesse de Chevigné, an inspiration for the Duchesse de Guermantes in Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past”) but she was also the heiress to a banking fortune that enabled her to live in extreme opulence. As well as filling Villa Noailles with the work of artists like Constantin Brancusi, Piet Mondrian and Giacometti, she and her spouse commissioned furniture from Pierre Chareau, Eileen Gray and other progressive designers. Equally radical was their choice of landscape architect, Gabriel Guevrekian, who designed the gardens in an iconoclastic Cubist style.

The couple eventually separated. (An entry in the journal of the novelist André Gide describing how he and his host frolicked naked in the pool with their respective boyfriends helps to explain why.) Charles de Noailles spent subsequent summers on a nearby family estate, while his estranged wife stayed at Villa Noailles. But she lost control of her fortune after a scandalous affair, and by the 1950s, the house had started to deteriorate. After her death in 1970, it was sold it to the town, but became increasingly decrepit, until its restoration in the late 1980s.

Villa Noailles has since hosted an annual fashion and photography festival and, more recently, Design Parade, a summer exhibition of work by young product and furniture designers. Each Design Parade provides a snapshot of current design thinking, and the current show, the eighth in the series, is particularly strong.

Among this summer’s participants, Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini has produced an ingenious series of trestle tables in an elegantly rational style, while Laureline Galliot’s exuberant objects reflect the growing interest of young designers in experimenting with handcraftsmanship.

One designer in each Design Parade is awarded the Grand Prix (this year it went to Mr. Peyroulet Ghilini) and is invited to stage a solo show at Villa Noailles the following summer. The exhibition devoted to last year’s winner, the Swiss designer Julie Richoz, includes the outcome of her residencies at the Sèvres porcelain works and the Cirva contemporary glass center in Marseille. The vases she made there in vividly colored, interlocking slabs of glass are dazzling examples of how a traditional material can be reinvigorated by being translated into dynamic, new forms.

Elsewhere in the house, Mr. Pot has filled the swimming pool and squash court with his comically surreal objects, and his compatriot Aldo Bakker has commandeered the gymnasium to present the seemingly simple, intensely subtle jugs and containers he designed in Sèvres porcelain. Another highlight is a survey of the Modernist furniture and architecture produced by the mid-20th century Hungarian designer Marcel Breuer. Beginning in Villa Noailles, it continues in the Medieval setting of the nearby Knights Templar Tower, which dates back to the 12th century.

An hour’s drive from Villa Noailles is another modern architectural masterpiece, albeit of a different type: La Cité Radieuse in Marseille, which was designed by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a new model of mass housing. Conceived as a vertical village, La Cité Radieuse combines more than 300 apartments with a “street” of shops, a post office, a hotel and restaurants on one floor and a roof terrace that includes a paddling pool, children’s art school and panoramic views over the Marseille rooftops to the Mediterranean and Provençal hills.

One of the pleasures of visiting La Cité Radieuse is that you can wander in and look around, just like a conventional village. For a few weeks each summer, visitors can also see inside the apartment belonging to Jean-Marc Drut, who works for the fashion company Comme des Garçons, and the actor Patrick Blauwart.

Every year, they invite a different designer to install his or her furniture in the apartment while it is open to the public. The German designer Konstantin Grcic is responsible for this summer’s show, which runs through Aug. 15. He has filled the apartment with his angular, technocratic chairs, tables and lights, and pinned giant prints of portraits from a 1970s punk fanzine on the walls.

The result is an engaging insight into Mr. Grcic’s work and an unforgettable opportunity to see how thoughtfully Le Corbusier and his team, which included Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé, designed the apartments. The sensitivity with which they divided the interiors and enlivened them with natural light and splashes of color make the modest homes in La Cité Radieuse seem as luxurious in their own way as the opulent Villa Noailles.

Like junkyard parts brought to life by extraterrestrial energy: “Striding Figure II (Ghost),” one of Thomas Houseago’s sculptures at the Storm King Art Center. More Photos »

By KEN JOHNSON

Published: August 1, 2013

MOUNTAINVILLE, N.Y. — Poor Masculinity, he’s but a shell of his former self. He’s been in decline for a long time — since as far back as the Industrial Revolution, one might say, when people began turning into cogs. Lately, what with the shifts in gender roles and sex, and the moral undoing of so many male heroes, he finds his prerogatives challenged on every front. Since his loss of authority, he’s been acting out in all kinds of inappropriate ways. He needs therapy.

These thoughts are inspired by Thomas Houseago’s obstreperous monumental sculptures of exaggeratedly masculine figures rendered in early Modernist styles, on view here at the Storm King Art Center in a show called “As I Went Out One Morning.”

Mr. Houseago has been highly visible in recent years. Represented by the major league galleries Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth, he has had more than two dozen solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States since 2000 and was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Born in Leeds, England, in 1972, he studied art in London and Amsterdam and now lives in Los Angeles, having recently become a United States citizen.

His most impressive piece at Storm King is both thrilling and comically outlandish, and it is especially striking to view outdoors against a backdrop of peaceful park grounds and the verdant rolling hills of the Hudson Valley. At 15 and a half feet tall, “Striding Figure II (Ghost)” is a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, blockheaded colossus.   One muscular arm is a cutout plate painted black, the other an assemblage of bent rebar with a hand like a pitchfork. Its torso is framed by an open grid of bent rods, and its tree-trunk-like legs and enormous splayed feet are crusty concatenations of boards and metal pieces cast in bronze.

The whole thing resembles a cinematic monster emerging from a junkyard where some extraterrestrial energy brought it to life. Metaphorically, it’s a terrific embodiment of what is repressed in modern masculinity.

Other works are less wildly imaginative and more serious about their art historical ancestry. “Sleeping Boy I” is an oversize youth whose body was fashioned from viscous oozy material like wet clay or plaster before being cast in bronze; it evokes ancient Greek sculpture via Rodin. “Rattlesnake Figure (Aluminum),” a nearly 11-foot-tall monolith carved with a chain saw from a single block of wood and then cast in aluminum, is a Cubist variation on the ancient architectural form of the caryatid. The interplay of old and Modern tropes comes off as academic gamesmanship.

An appealing exception to the humanoid works is “Standing Owl I,” a massive eight-foot-tall bronze sculpture of an owl that has the modeled-by-hand look of a work by Rodin, whose “Monument to Balzac” it calls to mind.

Indoors is a pair of bigger-than-life baseball-inspired figures made of intersecting plaster slabs reinforced by rusty rebar. One crouches like a catcher behind the plate while across the room the other hunches over like an umpire, his head in the form of an oval bowl. The contemporary aspect neatly matches up with a mythic dimension. They’re like the sculptures of archaic warriors made by Picasso during his early Cubist years.

In these and other sculptures by Mr. Houseago, you sense a melancholic anxiety about masculinity. His images appear to memorialize some more or less distant past when manliness was an unquestionable virtue. It seems as if he wants to rekindle that spirit in himself by working as ambitiously with materials, processes and forms as did the artists of old, from the ancient ones of Egypt, Greece and Rome to pioneers of Modernism like Picasso, Matisse and Brancusi.

He is not without a humorous self-awareness. “Vader Mask,” a dark bronze helmet-like object set on a Brancusian pedestal of solid redwood, alludes, of course, to the evil patriarch of the “Star Wars” movie franchise. But Mr. Houseago’s relationship to the dark side of masculinity — and the bright side, too, for that matter — remains fuzzily unresolved. He seems as much beholden to some creaky idea of virility as he is doubtful about it.

In an engaging interview with Nora Lawrence, an associate curator at Storm King, Mr. Houseago talks about “Column I (Light House),” a bronze monolith over 10 feet high resembling a giant bearded head of a Homeric hero. He observes somewhat disconnectedly that “it has this consciously phallic, Freudian sense — as a male sculptor that’s kind of bouncing around — the craziness of that.”

Would that his work were crazier than it is. There are hints of something more extravagantly and surprisingly idiosyncratic in works invoking popular culture like the junkyard giant and the baseball figures. But Mr. Houseago’s eccentric enthusiasms are muffled by his reverence for traditions old and Modernist and by his Postmodernist play with generic formal and stylistic conventions. His art is too much about art and not enough about his inner life. It’s too impersonal.

It’s also a problem that Mr. Houseago is far from alone in his preoccupation with the past. His work would have looked right at home in the Neo-Expressionist 1980s, when artists like Anselm Kiefer and Julian Schnabel were turning out their gassy retrogressive masterpieces. Lately the sculptor Huma Bhabha, too, has been making sculptures of ancient-seeming figures out of disparate, junky materials. Recycling antiquity is the tiresome order of the day.

In his interview with Ms. Lawrence, printed in a museum brochure, Mr. Houseago speaks at some length about how inspiring music has been for him. He mentions the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour” and Bob Dylan’s psychedelic period in the ’60s. The title of his exhibition, “As I Went Out One Morning,” is in fact the name of a song from Mr. Dylan’s 1967 album “John Wesley Harding.” Yet those mind-blowing influences are hard to detect in Mr. Houseago’s lugubrious backward-looking sculptures. Now would be a good time to leave the past behind and make way for the art of a new man.

“Forty-Part Motet,” a sound installation by Janet Cardiff, in 2005.

By BLAKE GOPNIK

Shhh. Listen.

Nothing?

Listen again.

Note the sound of your computer’s fan amid distant sirens. Hear your spouse in the next room, playing the Bowie channel on Spotify while chatting on the phone with your mother-in-law. Farther off, a TV is tuned to the news and a stereo plays Bach, while a mouse skitters inside a wall.

And know that every one of those sounds can now be the subject of art, just as every vision we see and imagine, from fruit in a bowl to the color of light to melting clocks, has been grist for painting and sculpture and photos. Sound art has been on the rise for a decade or two, but it may have at last hit the mainstream: On Saturday, the Museum of Modern Art is opening its first full sonic survey, “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” while two major sound installations are to go up in New York in the fall.

“The art of sound questions how and what we hear, and what we make of it,” the curator Barbara London writes in her catalog essay to the Modern show — which means the movement has purchase on a lot that matters. Perched in an office high above MoMA’s garden, where her exhibition will insert stealthy recordings of bells, Ms. London explained that artists are more than ever drawn to sound art, maybe because it sits on the exciting double cusp, as she said, of both music and gallery art. Her new show (or should we call it a “hear”?) reflects the “apogee,” as she put it, that sound art has now reached.

Ms. London’s survey will include those recorded bells, by the American soundster Stephen Vitiello, as well as recordings made near Chernobyl by Jacob Kirkegaard, a Dane, and a grid of 1,500 small speakers, each playing a different tone, by the young New Yorker Tristan Perich. It will also feature the Glasgow-born Susan Philipsz, whom the larger art world has taken to heart.

At the Modern, Ms. Philipsz will be reprising a 2012 work from Germany’s Documenta, the twice-a-decade festival that is one of the world’s most prestigious artistic events. Her “Study for Strings” riffs on an orchestral piece composed in 1943 at the Theresienstadt concentration camp for musicians there. For her recording, Ms. Philipsz has redcted the parts for all the instruments except one cello and one viola, leaving plangent silences between those two players’ scattered notes — and, of course, evoking the erasure of musicians and artists by the Nazis.

“For the public, sound art it still a fairly new and also a very, very accessible medium,” said Tom Eccles, the curator of a new Philipsz commission this fall in New York. “On a very basic, basic level,” he added, “sound is one of our first experiences — in the uterus, in fact.”

Ms. Philipsz’s new piece, called “Day Is Done,” will be the first permanent work of contemporary art on Governors Island, a former military site just south of Manhattan whose public spaces are being revamped with a budget so far of $75 million. Ms. Philipsz is mounting four old-fashioned “trumpet” speakers — the kind you’d see in an old ballpark — across the facade of a sprawling old barracks, and for an hour every evening, they will broadcast the notes of the bugle call “Taps.” The tones of the ghostly melody will pass from speaker to speaker, fanning out across the island’s open spaces.

At a test run one cold day in the spring, the piece evoked the era when “Taps” would have been played daily on the island, while it also triggered thoughts of military funerals and loss of life. (On Sept 11, those on the island were able to see the collapse of the twin towers.)

“Day Is Done” also evokes New York’s maritime presence. Visiting from her home in Berlin for the test run, Ms. Philipsz said that after the recording had played on site for the first time, “we thought it was still on.” She added: “But it was the sound of a ship’s horn. We were so happy.”

Mr. Eccles pointed out that with a piece like “Day Is Done,” “you don’t have to recognize it as art, immediately” — meaning that any knee-jerk resistance to contemporary art is less likely to kick in. “A sound work allows you to do something quite complex that might be unacceptable in another medium,” he said.

That could be because of the role MP3s and podcasts now play in our lives and because of our new comfort with the immaterial world of pure data, which makes immaterial sound art seem less esoteric. Sound waves floating through air may not seem any more exotic than information flowing through cyberspace.