The Perez Art Museum Miami has announced its first year’s schedule of exhibitions, all of which reflect South Florida’s international attitude.

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Tech entrepreneurs are starting to peer out from their hoodies and explore the art world, and dealers and museum boards couldn't be more thrilled. WSJ's Ellen Gamerman joins Lunch Break with a look at the new players, and the culture clash it's setting up with Wall Street's elite. Photo: Getty Images.

Next week, San Francisco will unveil a major public art installation using 25,000 energy-efficient lights to illuminate the city's Bay Bridge in countless abstract combinations.

The Bay Lights, set to run every night for the next two years, will also spotlight a new role for the area's tech entrepreneurs: patrons of the arts.

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Winni Wintermeyer for The Wall Street Journal

BETA TESTING Leo Villareal, a tech-world favorite, with his computer-assisted light sculpture that will illuminate San Francisco's Bay Bridge in abstract patterns every night for the next two years.

Created by artist Leo Villareal, the $8 million computer-assisted light sculpture has been financed by some high-profile tech donors including Yahoo YHOO +2.86%CEO Marissa Mayer and Internet power couple Mark and Alison Pincus. Mr. Villareal, who designed the bridge's light patterns using software he created, is also emblematic of a new breed of artist that is especially attractive to wealthy technology executives. A former researcher at Microsoft MSFT +0.61%co-founder Paul Allen's think tank in the early 1990s, Mr. Villareal weaves that tech background into his work.

"This was a whole I.T. job, which you wouldn't associate with a monumental piece of public art," Mr. Villareal said one chilly evening on a San Francisco pier as he tested the work with his laptop. Every time he stabbed at the keyboard through a hole in his glove, the lights rearranged across the bridge.

Around San Francisco, tech entrepreneurs who spent years building businesses and accumulating wealth are starting to peer out from under their hoodies and explore the art world. As the Internet industry matures, the people who helped make it happen are having children, buying houses and taking tentative steps into philanthropy—and now the art world. It's a lucrative emerging market that is gaining the attention of museums, dealers, consultants and other art-world heavyweights.

"Art comes between buying the Ferrari and getting the kids into college," said New York mega-dealer Larry Gagosian, who added that he sees "tremendous potential" from tech entrepreneurs as they grow older.

As they have with risky and fast-growing startups, the new tech players are putting a distinctive spin on the art scene—both in the type of work they collect and the low-profile way they acquire it. Many tech collectors exploring the market, for instance, are seduced by works with a digital twist.

"An engineer will look at a photograph or video art in a way a banker couldn't—we think in ones and zeros, we think in terms of screens," said Trevor Traina, a 44-year-old collector of photography who sold his first tech company to Microsoft for more than $100 million.

Unlike on Wall Street, where a trophy canvas can work as a passport to highflying social circles, flaunting isn't part of the tech culture. "If you saw these people, you'd never guess that they have money—it's all about just being cool," said San Francisco dealer Chris Perez, who works with about 20 tech clients.

Two years ago, as a service largely to its growing base of tech clients, Christie's began shipping artworks to San Francisco ahead of the major modern and contemporary art sales, said Ellanor Notides, who runs the Christie's San Francisco office. She said tech clients are chasing pieces by market darlings like Gerhard Richter, whose work sold for more than $34 million at Sotheby's last year.

Lately, some art insiders have been buzzing that the wife of Google co-founder Larry Page, Lucinda Southworth, is starting to buy art. (A Google spokeswoman said the company doesn't comment on executives' personal endeavors.) Tech entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen collects—including works by Robert Rauschenberg—as do tech venture capitalists Matt Cohler, who favors contemporary photography, and Jim Breyer, who owns pieces by emerging artists in China and Brazil.

Mr. Breyer, a board member of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, finds parallels between art and startups. He loves taking a chance on lesser-known talent and often visits galleries while traveling abroad on business. He particularly admires artists like Picasso who show the capacity to reinvent themselves. "It's a personal characteristic not only of the artists I gravitate to but the entrepreneurs," he said. (Mr. Breyer sits on the board of News Corp NWSA +1.04%., which publishes The Wall Street Journal.)

The new collectors' interests sometimes contrast with the more traditional tastes of tech pioneers before them: Oracle ORCL +1.18%CEO Larry Ellison buys centuries-old Japanese art. Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang hunts for leading examples of Chinese calligraphy. Microsoft's Mr. Allen collects masterpieces by blue-chip artists like van Gogh and Mark Rothko.

Now San Francisco museums are stepping up their pursuit of the tech industry, particularly as companies like Twitter, Pinterest and Dropbox settle in new offices in the city rather than Silicon Valley.

Mr. Traina, the Internet entrepreneur, loaned his impressive photography collection for a show at the city's de Young Museum last year. Dave Morin, an early Facebook FB +2.68%employee who is now CEO and co-founder of the private social network Path, just joined the board of SFMOMA.

Since 2010, SFMOMA has brought on 12 new trustees—at least half from the tech community, according to museum deputy director of external affairs Robert Lasher. He added that in addition to donating money and loaning artworks, tech contributors are helping retool the institution's digital strategy and guide the museum to a more global role in a nearly $555 million expansion.

Next week, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's annual Mid-Winter Gala is expected to be populated by a number of tech-world all-stars. Yahoo's Ms. Mayer bought a table while Apple lead designer Jonathan Ive is expected to come as well. Organizers are hoping for the return of past attendees like Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman.

 

Ligorano/Reese/Catharine Clark Gallery/Nora Ligorano (photo)

Tech collectors chase works like Ligorano/Reese's fiber optic tapestry.

From her glass-walled office at Web retailer One Kings Lane, co-founder Alison Pincus has been working her contacts for San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum, which recruited her for its board last year. At her company's headquarters, which sits in the same San Francisco building as Twitter and Yammer, the Givenchy-and-Balenciaga-clad Ms. Pincus described going to last year's TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., with a mission: to convince friend and fellow art collector David Krane, a general partner at Google Ventures, GOOG +0.60%to join the museum's board.

She succeeded.

Ms. Pincus, whose husband, Mark, is founder and CEO of the social-gaming company Zynga, ZNGA +1.63%also lends the museum her expertise. The 38-year-old mother of two is helping revamp the museum store, where the home page now showcases little more than a small mezuza. The shop needs "bespoke products," a sleeker website and items not limited to Jewish themes, she said.

As art and tech circles overlap more frequently, a cottage industry of dealers and specialized consultants has sprung up to offer advice. San Francisco art adviser Sabrina Buell is a Stanford graduate and former New York gallery director who helps tech honchos—some of them old college pals—begin collecting art.

The 36-year-old San Francisco native meets clients in her downtown office, with its high ceilings and exposed ductwork, first asking them broad questions about their tastes—abstract or figurative? color or muted? Then she goes analog, loading them up with resource books and catalogs. "I like people to look at a thousand things before they buy one," said Ms. Buell.

Her clients tend to avoid status symbols. "If you're young and you walk into someone's house and see a Picasso, it would be like, 'Whoa'—just because you have the capacity, you don't have to buy the most expensive things," she said. Still, her clients often get blue-ribbon treatment, with galleries and auction houses sending art directly to their homes so they can see the art up close while mulling a purchase.

Ms. Buell, whose great uncle is Napa vintner Robert Mondavi, bought her first work of art when she was 15, a Michael Kenna photograph she had written about for an English class. Today she fills the loft she shares with her partner, industrial designer Yves Behar, with edgy contemporary works. Ms. Buell and her colleague, Mary Zlot, trade in discretion: Zlot Buell + Associates doesn't even have a website.

Despite the stepped-up activity, some art dealers still bemoan what they call the indifference of the tech world and write off tech billionaires as glorified engineering nerds who skipped art history to play with their computers.

Others see a shift happening, thanks in part to the booming art market. "It once was a very culturally vapid community, but it's become incredibly rich lately," said Adam Sheffer, a partner at the New York gallery Cheim & Read. "I think people are coming to realize fine art has come to be worth something."

Dealers who work with tech clients are protective of them, wary of a culture clash with snooty art climbers. When a tech entrepreneur who favors Patagonia jackets and sneakers told San Francisco dealer Claudia Altman-Siegel he was headed to the Swiss art fair Art Basel, she had some advice: "I was like, 'No one's going to be nice to you if you're not dressed up,'" she said.

Then again, relative anonymity can be a plus. San Francisco tech investor Art Berliner, managing director of Walden Venture Capital, said when he walks into certain New York galleries he rarely gets the hard sell—or any sell at all—because most people don't know who he is.

Mr. Berliner, whose eclectic collection includes work by Israeli artist Michal Rovner, keeps some of his pieces in his office. He said his artwork helps set a creative tone and soothe nerves when entrepreneurs come to pitch their businesses: "Having art around does make the scene less intimidating."

Apple senior director Jeffrey Dauber owns a $50,000 video work by artist Lincoln Schatz that features layered video images of Mr. Dauber engaging in his morning ritual—including a shot of him pulling down his pants. The voyeurism resonates with a man whose industry helped redefine the idea of privacy.

"The thing about being in tech is, I have no illusions—I know we're being watched," said Mr. Dauber, who keeps his extensive art collection in its own house in San Francisco.

Dick Kramlich, an early pioneer in the tech venture capital scene, plans next year to open a private museum of new media art—which includes video, film and computer-assisted installations—in a Napa Valley building designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the architecture firm behind Beijing's Bird's Nest and the Tate Modern in London. The 77-year-old chairman and co-founder of New Enterprise Associates said the collection's tech orientation was his wife's idea: "She said, 'Look, you're going down to Silicon Valley every day, I think if I did something in this area it might be of interest to you,'" he said.

Internet entrepreneur Mr. Traina, who recently launched a new startup called IfOnly.com, now has 300 master works of photography on the six floors of his mansion in San Francisco's Pacific Heights. During a recent tour, walking by a room wallpapered in peacock feathers, he pointed out classics by Diane Arbus (Mr. Traina bought one of her iconic photographs of identical twins for just under $500,000 at Sotheby's in 2004) and contemporary works like a Doug Rickard photograph of a computer screen showing a Google Street View of a depressed city neighborhood.

Raised in a moneyed family among art lovers—his father had a world-class collection of Fabergé cigarette cases—Mr. Traina promotes the art world to his tech buddies. He organized the Mid-Winter Gala for the Fine Arts Museums in part to lure a "farm team" of young donors and future board members. Trustees now include Zachary Bogue, a tech investor married to Yahoo's Ms. Mayer, an SFMOMA board member.

The institution returns the favor by opening up singular experiences to Mr. Traina, who recalls a trip to the Netherlands he once took with fellow board members. Early one morning, he was allowed to visit an Amsterdam museum while it was still closed. "This very nice woman left me alone in a room with five Vermeers," he said. "I realized the power great art can have."

Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com

From oil on canvas to beeswax on walls might seem an aesthetic stretch to some, but the Phillips Collection doesn't see it that way.

The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C./Lee Stalsworth

Wolfgang Laib's 'Wax Room,' opening Saturday at the Phillips Collection.

This internationally known and respected boutique institution, the first modern art museum in America, is about to unveil its first permanent installation in more than 50 years. And the pervasive feeling in-house is that the new arrival—a beeswax chamber designed by conceptual artist Wolfgang Laib, opening Saturday—couldn't be more true to the vision of Duncan Phillips (1886-1966) when he opened his private collection to the public in 1921.

"Duncan wanted the museum to be an intimate experience and have a spirit of experimentation," says Dorothy Kosinski, director of the Phillips. "A wax chamber by Wolfgang would be the biggest, most powerful expression of that spirit."

The German-born Mr. Laib has been creating beeswax chambers—small spaces lined with beeswax, gently lighted by a single hanging bulb—for more than 25 years. He uses hundreds of pounds of pure melted beeswax much like plaster, smoothly coating walls and ceilings until they almost resemble yellow marble—except with a warm glow.

The spaces offer room for perhaps two people comfortably but are said to be best visited alone. (The room at the Phillips, a former storage closet, is 6 feet wide by 7 feet deep and 10 feet high.) "There's a feeling you get inside the space that can't really described," says Mr. Laib, a diminutive, almost fragile-looking man with a voice barely above a whisper. "But it moves you."

The aroma of the beeswax is "totally seductive," Ms. Kosinski says, employing the kind of sensual language most often used to describe Mr. Laib's chambers. The intense color of the wax and its close proximity to your own skin in an austere space have also been cited as evoking a curiously visceral experience that is also meditative and spiritual. "It's really a new way of entering the artist's world," says Susan Behrends Frank, associate curator of research for the museum.

Mr. Laib's installations—involving other natural substances, such as pollen and rice, as well as beeswax—have been displayed at prominent museums and galleries around the world, including New York's Museum of Modern Art. Ms. Kosinski fully expects that visitors may not know what to make of the chamber when they see it. "But people being slightly perplexed is maybe not a bad thing," she adds.

Duncan Phillips might well agree. Though initially his collection consisted largely of Impressionist paintings, hardly controversial by the time he acquired them, he soon became known for bucking mainstream taste. He was one of the earliest patrons of the American modernists John Marin and Arthur Dove, and he bought the late work of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) in depth after World War II, a period when it was dismissed as emptily decorative. And Phillips's admiration for Abstract Expressionism, when that was still a suspect style, is evident in pieces by Richard Diebenkorn and Willem de Kooning, among others.

In 1960, six years before his death, Phillips added a permanent exhibit of four Mark Rothko oils to be housed in a dedicated room. No other artist had received such an honor there. While Phillips designed the Rothko Room, as it came to be known, the artist was directly involved with deciding which walls the color-field paintings should hang on, the kind of lighting and even furniture that should be in the room. "I think it's the only exhibit Rothko himself installed," Ms. Kosinski says.

Now, for only the second time in its history, the Phillips Collection is dedicating another space for permanent residence, and Rothko has a lot to do with it. Two years ago, while participating in the museum's "Conversations With Artists" series, Mr. Laib stepped into the Rothko Room for the first time and was transported by "a very emotional, deep feeling," he says. "Like being in another world." Not unlike the effect Mr. Laib seeks in beeswax chambers.

Until then, Mr. Laib had concentrated on pieces that could easily tour. But he says he had begun to think it was "important that some things should stay, be permanent." He thought a permanent wax chamber in the Phillips would be ideal for intertwining reasons: The compatibility he felt between the color-fields and his wax chambers, and the chance to dispel what Mr. Laib has long considered a facile comparison some have made between his work and Rothko's. Mr. Laib's pollen pieces consist of the brightly colorful substance, which he gathers from near his home in southern Germany and then feathers on a dark platform, prompting a reaction he says he has heard too often—"Rothko on the floor." (Mr. Laib's "Pollen From Hazelnut" installation is on display at MoMA through March 11.)

"I have a deeper, more complex relationship with Rothko," Mr. Laib says, "and a permanent room would demonstrate that." His room is in the center of the original Phillips mansion; the Rothko room is at the far end of the Sant Building, an extension added in 2006.

"My immediate reaction," says Ms. Kosinski, recalling when she learned of Mr. Laib's desire to install a permanent beeswax chamber in the Phillips, "was that he's right. It would make total sense to have it here."

The Phillips had been exhibiting contemporary art, but Ms. Kosinski saw an opportunity for "the perfect expression of the desire to experiment, to let viewers have encounters with art on their own terms," she says, thus reinvigorating a key component of the museum's original mission.

"Duncan Phillips started off as a kind of timid collector," Ms. Behrends Frank says. "But toward the end of his life he made a really bold move by creating the Rothko Room. And now the beeswax chamber is really bold."

"Besides," adds Ms. Kosinski, "it's just cool."

Mr. Triplett is a writer in Washington

By Anne Tschida

Special to the Miami Herald

The Cross-Dressing of Art and Couture

‘Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity,’ at the Met

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity Monet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” and a white cotton piqué day dress in this exhibition at the Met. More Photos »

By ROBERTA SMITH

In name, at least, “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity,” the thrilling, erudite show opening to the public on Tuesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sounds like a double dose of pandering. Impressionism and fashion? The pairing portends blockbuster-bundling and seems so excessive as to be unhealthy — possibly illegal — like 32-ounce sodas. Brace for “Van Gogh and Motorcycles,” “Rembrandt and Fabergé” and “Norman Rockwell and Tim Burton.”

But fear not. In reality, “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity” is neither your father’s Impressionist blockbuster nor a focus group’s. With its mixture of great paintings and lavish garments and accessories — everything 19th-century French or inspired thereby — it is certain to attract multiple demographics in great numbers. But its broad allure derives from its visual fireworks, historical clarity and pitch-perfect contextualizing. It builds webs of new information and viewpoints around some of the best-known, most beloved paintings of all time, quite a few of which don’t often travel to this country.

For starters, both of the surviving panels of Claude Monet’s colossal “Luncheon on the Grass” — cut into pieces when it wasn’t finished in time for the 1866 Salon — are being shown together in this hemisphere for the first time, lent by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where the show had its debut last fall and was thronged.

In fresh, groundbreaking ways this show details the entwined rise of modern painting, modern fashion and modern (upper middle-class) life over some two dozen years of rapid change in Paris, 1862 to 1887. The period included the rise of department stores, illustrated fashion magazines and ready-to-wear clothing, but also the couturier fashion house, most notably that of Charles Frederick Worth. Black emerged even more emphatically from the weeds of widowhood to become emblematic of urban sophistication. And men and women strolled the widened sidewalks and radiating boulevards, browsing shop windows, seeing and being seen in Baron Haussmann’s new Paris, “the capital of the 19th century,” in Walter Benjamin’s inspiring phrase.

Painters and writers intent on bringing a new reality to their work were among the first to see fashion as a vital expression of modern life. Briefly in 1874, no less than the poet Stéphane Mallarmé published a fashion magazine, La Dernière Mode, and largely wrote it, too, using bylines like Mademoiselle Satin and Marguerite de Ponty.

The show tells its tale through a dazzling surround of visual culture high and low, small and large, flat and round. I recommend not missing a thing: not a pleat, ruche or lace parasol; not a painted background, glove or slipper toe; not a photograph or magazine; not a corset, fan or black choker, whether depicted or actual. Such attention reveals frequent similarities of garments (and poses) in the magazines, photographs, paintings and costumed mannequins. A result is an intense, almost hallucinatory swirl in which art and artifact continually change places, and a basic wisdom is demonstrated: any well-selected thing can illuminate any other.

The ratio of 14 dresses to 79 paintings is just right. A little goes a long way with mid-19th-century day dresses, ball gowns or summer muslins; they are as intricate as Gothic cathedrals.

Organized by the Art Institute of Chicago (where it will be seen in June), in collaboration with the Met and the Orsay, “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity” and its excellent catalog have been overseen by Gloria Groom, a curator of European art at the institute. The curator Susan Alyson Stein was in charge of the Met’s version, which has a completely different wardrobe from that of the Orsay show, but mostly the same paintings. These include, as a bonus, Courbet’s stunning forerunner, “Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine,” from 1856-57, with its precise rendering of the dresses and petticoats of its women of the street, flopped, exhausted, on the grass.

Ms. Stein’s crisp installation is aided by labels that excerpt the observations, both astute and nearsighted, of contemporary critics, and by vivid quotations that are sprinkled across the walls. One of the first and among the most giddy: “The Parisienne is not in fashion, she is fashion,” from Arsène Houssaye, writing in the magazine L’Artiste in 1869.

With sections titled “Refashioning Figure Painting,” “En Plein Air,” “The White Dress” and “The Black Dress,” this show limns the milieu in which the Impressionists, led by Manet and Degas, came into their own as painters of modern life, determined to portray their contemporaries and their world in a way that also radicalized their medium. Velázquez and the Spaniards served as models, but so did new means of mechanical reproduction, especially the hand-colored steel engravings, called fashion plates, often set into fashion magazines. No less than Cézanne, hardly known for his attention to haberdashery, is shown to have painted a small, nearly exact copy of one in 1871, just before his thick-handed early style exploded into separate brush marks.

Berthe Morisot uses a photograph of herself in a low-cut black evening dress, with slight changes, as the basis for her 1875 painting “Figure of a Woman (Before the Theater).” The labor required for such finery is barely hinted at, primarily in Degas’s soundless depictions of milliners and their shops.

The Impressionists shared their awareness of modern dress as an increasingly prominent expression of their times with far more conservative painters, non-Impressionists — quite abundant in this show — who wanted to paint modern life, but not in such modern ways. They sought the veracity and high finish of Ingres, but were rarely up to it. Fantin-Latour’s marvelous three-quarter portrait of Manet, the impeccably top-hatted, watch-fobbed gentleman of 1867, comes closest, in the one gallery devoted to male attire. (It leaves you wanting more.) A wide miss is Albert Bartholomé’s cloying 1881 “In the Conservatory (Madame Bartholomé),” the only painting to be shown with the actual garment it portrays.

The tension between the innovative and the staid — the Impressionists using clothes as occasions to explore paint; the loyal opposition focusing on them as things in themselves — is the show’s main engine. The artists from both sides of the aisle knew, borrowed from and competed with one another, formulating together a new combination of genre painting and portraiture, catching their subjects in the moment, yet often in a full-length, slightly larger-than-life scale.

The artists’ differences are announced by the face-off of paintings in the first gallery. The contrasts are especially apparent in Tissot’s zealously detailed 1866 “Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon,” a somewhat daring depiction of a lady of obvious high rank wearing a chic deep-pink dressing gown in the privacy of her well-appointed home, and Manet’s “Young Lady in 1866,” defined by the challenging gaze of an unnamed woman, clearly in the artist’s studio, whose even more chic dressing gown is also a pyramidal plane of robustly worked pale pink paint.

This gallery is presided over by a gray silk faille day dress from 1865-67, accessorized by the essential wool paisley shawl from India (which fell from fashion, once French manufacturers learned to make cheaper ones). The mannequin might have stepped out of Monet’s nearby 1868 portrait, “Madame Louis Joachim Gaudibert,” in which the train of the gown unravels in loose brushwork resembling jagged mountain ranges. It is illuminating to see what Monet was looking at and what he did with it.

Tissot, represented by 10 canvases, more than those of any other artist, appears in nearly every gallery, becoming a cautionary leitmotif about coarsening talent. His best work is his earliest: the ambiguous 1864 “Portrait of Mademoiselle L. L.,” a dark-eyed ingénue perched on a desk in a fashionable red bolero and dark soft skirt, evoking Corot as much as Ingres with a subtle eroticism that Balthus must have envied.

While sometimes a step ahead of his more adventuresome colleagues in subject matter, Tissot is soon in rapid descent, heading for the garishly tight, treacly paintings fit for chocolate-box covers found in the show’s final gallery, where a few too many other paintings tend in this direction.

As compensation there is the alluring Haussmannian vista of Gustave Caillebotte’s immense “Paris Street: Rainy Day” (1877) and two utterly astounding day dresses by Worth, their extreme architecture (bustles) echoed in paintings by Georges Seurat, Jacques-Émile Blanche and Henry Lerolle.

The best of the wall quotations comes from Degas: “Think of a treatise on ornament for women or by women, based on their manner of observing, of combining, of selecting their fashionable outfits and all things. On a daily basis they compare, more than men, a thousand visible things with one another.”

Of course “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity” is about much more than ornament, as were the women in Degas’s quotation. The show chronicles the circular flow of life and art. But its deep content may be the prominent roles women always play in culture, and it is worth noting that 10 of the 15 contributors to the catalog are women. As Elizabeth Wilson wrote in her pioneering 1985 book, “Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity,” which is curiously absent from the catalog’s extensive bibliography: “Dress is the frontier between the self and the not-self,” and fashionable dress “one of the ways in which women achieve self-expression.”

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

By KEN JOHNSON

Published: February 10, 2013

Richard Artschwager, a painter and sculptor whose witty, contradictory mixing of artistic genres made him one of the most critically admired artists to emerge in the 1960s, died early Saturday in Albany. He was 89.

His death, at a hospital, followed a recent stroke, his wife, Ann, said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Longtime art collectors Debra and Dennis Scholl have donated about 300 artworks to the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

By Hannah Sampson

hsampson@MiamiHerald.com

For museums and other institutions confronted with the sometimes onerous restrictions that donors place on major gifts, forever can be a very long time.

In Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum still keeps most of its galleries illuminated at the equivalent of candlelight because that’s how Mrs. Gardner wanted it when she died in 1924.

In Tennessee, Fisk University, facing possible closing, needed court permission to sell a stake in an art collection that the artist Georgia O’Keeffe had donated with the proviso that it never be sold.

And now the Brooklyn Museum is asking a judge to bypass the wishes of Col. Michael Friedsam, who ordered before he died in 1931 that his collection be kept together. Conservators there discovered that a quarter of his 926 works were not of museum quality, were misattributed or, in a few cases, were fakes. So now the museum is trying to unload those unwanted gifts as if they were a Christmas fruitcake.

Handling what is known in the philanthropic world as donor intent is vexing for many institutions. How do you adhere to a donor’s wishes when they seem to interfere with the best interests of the institution?

“A respect for donor intent is essential for philanthropic integrity,” said Adam Meyerson, president of the Philanthropy Roundtable, an association dedicated to protecting benefactors’ interests. However, he added, “You’re not serving donor intent if you go bankrupt.”

The tension between contributors and institutions is hardly new, but it has gained a higher profile in recent years. The weak economy has shrunk museum budgets, while technology or evolving tastes have led curators to reassess once venerable works. Institutions, which need money or space as artworks fill their basements, often look to sell items donated with the stipulation that they never be relinquished.

When it came to the Clyfford Still Museum, the City of Denver in effect argued that it had to violate the Stills’ wishes in order to fulfill them. Still’s wife, Patricia, gave Denver 2,400 of her husband’s works after his death with the understanding that the city would build a museum dedicated solely to his work and never sell or lend any of the art. But in 2011, six years after Ms. Still died, when fund-raising for the museum slowed, Denver received court permission to auction four of the paintings.

Amid cases like these, consultants and nonprofit organizations have stepped up efforts to help benefactors generate donations and wills that better ensure that their wishes are honored long after their deaths.

“I’m certainly getting more phone calls” about donor intent, said Jeffrey J. Cain, in 2008 a founder of the consulting firm American Philanthropic. Mr. Cain, who wrote a free guidebook in 2011 titled “Securing Your Legacy: What Every Philanthropist Needs to Know About Preserving Donor Intent,” said the issue had “really captured the attention of conservative-minded donors, especially those giving gifts to the academy who worry about how those gifts would be managed over time.”

Philanthropy experts say that donors across the political spectrum are concerned about preserving their vision. But examples of foundations that have leaned left after being created by die-hard capitalists, like the carmaker Henry Ford and the oil magnate J. Howard Pew, have prompted several conservatives to speak out more loudly about the importance of donor intent.

“The Pews would spin in their graves,” states one of several case studies featured in the Philanthropy Roundtable’s library, which details the liberal organizations and causes, from radical environmentalists to campaign finance reform, that are financed by the bequests of conservative capitalists. “It hurts the growth of philanthropy if the foundations that donors set up proceed to ignore or violate the most cherished principles of their founders,” Mr. Meyerson of the Roundtable said.

Some philanthropy veterans said the interest in creating foundations with a limited life span could stem from growing concerns about donor intent. “Any perpetual foundation is going to be liable to drift,” said James Piereson, president of the William E. Simon Foundation.

Mr. Piereson was once executive director of the conservative John M. Olin Foundation, which was devised to spend all of its assets within a generation of Mr. Olin’s death in order to prevent mission drift.

“Donor intent cannot realistically be guaranteed beyond a generation,” Mr. Piereson said.

Museum administrators say they do their best, but that violating a donor’s wishes is sometimes unavoidable.

In perhaps the most famous of these cases, the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania convinced a judge a few years ago that its very survival depended on breaking the terms of its founder’s trust so it could move his magnificent art collection from suburban Merion to downtown Philadelphia.

Mr. Meyerson said the Barnes case illustrated how some restrictions could sabotage a donor’s desires. He pointed to a requirement that the Barnes invest in only Treasury bonds, which hamstrung the foundation’s finances. Even now, several months after the new Barnes opened its doors, the case remains a rallying point among an assortment of advocates in the philanthropy, legal and arts worlds who have campaigned for tighter compliance with donors’ wishes.

For the Brooklyn Museum, the issue is also financial. Colonel Friedsam’s will stipulated that his collection of paintings, porcelains, historical weapons and costumes never be split up. But although the inferior objects will not be displayed, museum administrators say they will, nonetheless, cost tens of thousands of dollars to store because the museum is running out of space.

In most states the attorney general is responsible for monitoring donations to charitable organizations, and in New York the attorney general has entered the case in support of the museum. The court has said that if the museum wants to split the collection, it must first try to find out whether any of Colonel Friedsam’s alternate heirs are still alive.

Since donations are often a museum’s lifeblood, most go to great lengths to fulfill a donor’s desires faithfully. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example, had to part with two beloved van Gogh drawings in 1998 because the donor, one of the museum’s founders, directed that they be sold after 50 years, on the assumption that they would no longer be sufficiently modern.

And visitors to the Gardner Museum in Boston, where nothing in the darkly lighted galleries ever changes position, can see the frames and the ragged edges of 13 paintings that were cut out and taken during a brazen 1990 theft. Because Mrs. Gardner’s trust ordered that nothing be moved, curators have chosen to leave the frames rather than empty space on the wall. Many museum administrators agree that Mrs. Gardner’s carefully detailed instructions have created an unusual gem of a museum.

Nonetheless, most would no doubt prefer that donors leave the decision-making to them, emulating the stance of John D. MacArthur, who once told a trustee of his foundation: “I figured out how to make the money. You fellows will have to figure out how to spend it.”

By PATRICIA COHEN

Posted By George Lindemann - The George Lindemann Journal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wendell Castle’s installation “A New Environment” is on view at Friedman Benda in Chelsea.The cantilevered staircase at right leads to a treehouse-like pod.

The American designer Wendell Castle is known for his idiosyncratic, organic and slightly surreal furniture, which he has been producing in laminated wood, plastic and other materials since the 1960s, and which is highly collectible. Castle, who turned 80 in 2012, showed his work at Design Miami last month, and today his exhibition “A New Environment” opens at Friedman Benda in Chelsea. (Another Castle show, “Volumes and Voids,” is on view just upstairs from Friedman Benda at the Barry Friedman Gallery through Jan. 26.)

The exhibition’s centerpiece is a massive, arresting environment of stack-laminated, carved wood that is rasp-finished and stained black. It comprises a modular platform, three sculptural chairs, a totemlike structure studded with LEDs and a cantilevered spiral stair that leads to a podlike chamber, lined in flokati carpet, which offers snug lounge seating for one, complete with reading light, shelf and several openings to let in light and air. It’s kind of a treehouse for grown-ups — rich ones, that is. At this writing, the price of the environment had not been set, but Castle said that it would likely be in the vicinity of a $1 million.

This is Castle’s largest work to date. It is a follow-up of sorts to his 1969 piece “Environment for Contemplation,” which also featured a pod but which was set on the floor. “I wanted to put something in the air,” he said. A steel structure reinforces the central column and stair treads; as the designer explains, this is necessary to support the pod, which weighs about 1,000 pounds.

From left: the pod, which is lined in flokati carpet, has built-in lounge seating for one; three additional pieces in the exhibition include “The Light of Darkness,” which combines a cantilevered chair, a table and a light.

On the fringes of the environment are three other pieces — a settee, a desk and a chair with its own table and light — with the same biomorphic forms or, as Castle calls them, “ellipsoids, kind of mushed together.” He cites the artists Henry Moore, Joan Miro, Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi as early influences, but it’s clear that they’ve stayed with him. “I loved the idea of a ‘soft’ vocabulary, and still do,” he said. Castle enjoys chewing over ideas that have provoked him for years, but now he’s doing it with the aid of a robot, which he said will help to “carve some crazy-shaped voids,” since it can work in smaller spaces than traditional woodworking tools.

Next on the horizon is an exhibition in the fall at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Paris. There will be at least one bronze piece in the show, and Castle is experimenting with even rougher textures. For now, however, he was busy putting the finishing touches on the environment before the opening party. And when told that the piece’s outsized scale really called for its own, specially designed space, Castle replied, “I’ve thought about how to do that room.”

“A New Environment” is on view at Friedman Benda, 515 West 26th Street, through Feb. 9.