The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Todd Heisler/The New York Times
The heirs of Malevich sought to recover paintings, including the ones displayed above center and right.

By DOREEN CARVAJAL

The lending and borrowing of famous artworks is the essence of cultural exchange between museums in the United States and abroad. So routine is the practice, and so universally valued, that the American government has traditionally protected it with a law that shields a lent work from being seized by anyone with a claim to legal ownership while the art is on display here.

In recent years, though, American museum directors have come to fear that this safeguard has eroded, and that foreign museums, dreading entanglement in costly ownership battles, are more hesitant to make loans. So they have asked Congress to increase the security for global art swaps.

But a nonpartisan effort to do so, which sailed through the House of Representatives on a voice vote in March, has slowed in the Senate amid an unexpected storm of protest from those who say it goes too far in blocking efforts by owners to recover looted treasures. The bill would prevent all claims, except those filed by families whose valuables were taken by the Nazis in World War II. But even they will find the process harder if the bill becomes law, opponents say. Other scholars and legal experts question why the Holocaust alone, among atrocities affecting ownership, is being afforded special treatment.

“This is a master attempt to put away all the legal claims,” said Marc Masurovsky, a historian and co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project. “How can you excuse 28 different kinds of plunder and only outlaw one subset of one subset? What is the point here? The only people who have anything to gain are the museum directors. So we’re basically saying it’s fine to plunder?”

The driving force in favor of the stronger legislation, known as the Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act, has indeed been the Association of Art Museum Directors. The organization is concerned that it is no longer enough for museums to arrange for a special waiver from the State Department to shield a work from seizure while it’s on loan for an exhibition in the United States.

In Paris, the International Council of Museums was initially in favor of the new legislation, but, given the criticism, is now encouraging “further consultation,” according to Julien Anfruns, director general of that organization, which offers mediation as an alternative to court.

The issue is particularly important in the United States because victims of looted art consider this country a legal refuge where they can press claims against powerful state institutions in Eastern Europe and Russia.

  But concern on the part of American museum directors has grown since a federal court ruling in a 2005 case said that although the waivers can prevent outright seizures, they do not block claimants from filing lawsuits to recover artworks.

The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by the heirs of the abstract painter Kazimir Malevich, who sought to recover paintings from the Stedelijk in Amsterdam while they were on loan for an American exhibition. The Dutch museum believed its State Department waiver protected the works from seizure. But the judge ruled that the family could still sue.

The new bill, sponsored by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, would in effect overturn the judge’s decision and bar lawsuits, except those related to art looted by the Nazis or their agents. The bill would cover loans from the state-owned foreign museums like the Louvre or the Prado, but not private ones.

“If lenders perceive a potential risk, it can prevent artifacts from traveling and therefore potentially deny people in our community the opportunity to learn about cultures,” said Elizabeth Pierce, a spokeswoman for the Cincinnati Museum Center in Ohio, the home state of Representative Steve Chabot, who introduced the legislation in the House.

Russia, for example, has banned art loans to the United States, fearing that works could be seized because of a continuing legal battle in the United States with the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement over 40,000 books and manuscripts that are in Russian government possession. (To reduce tensions, the movement has promised not to sue, but the ban remains in place.)

In sponsoring the legislation, Senator Feinstein cited exhibitions in her state that “may have been endangered,” including one last year at the de Young Museum in San Francisco featuring loans from the Picasso Museum in Paris. A spokeswoman for the Picasso museum, Emilie Augier-Bernard, said she was not aware that anyone had raised claims regarding any of those works.

Despite the efforts to exempt Holocaust-era claims, the fiercest opposition to the bill has come from those who maintain that the exception is too narrowly drawn because it covers only people who lost art directly to the Nazis or their agents.

Experts say many Jewish families lost art, not directly to the Nazis, but because they were pressured to abandon it as they fled or had to sell pieces quickly for a fraction of their worth. Opponents of the bill, like the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a New York organization that seeks restitution for Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, contend that the bill would prevent even these heirs from suing. Some opponents said that they believed that the bill was fast-tracked without a hearing in the House not because Congressional officials did not anticipate opposition, but because museums wanted to be discreet about pushing legislation that would block people from reclaiming looted art.

“Clearly, this is an effort to get the bill passed in the middle of the night,” said Charles Goldstein, a New York lawyer for the Commission for Art Recovery, which works on Holocaust restitution cases. Mr. Chabot’s office said the bill moved swiftly because support was bipartisan and because there was no opposition at the time of the House vote.

Dan Monroe, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, defended the legislation’s special handling of art looted by the Nazis, as opposed to works that might have been taken during, say, the Cambodian civil war or the Bolshevik Revolution. He described the Holocaust as “so massive and egregious that there are few if any other situations that rise to the same level of injustice.”

“To assure the ability to present art and culture to the American public from sources around the world,” he continued, “there are some inherent limits to how museums can act to redress all possible injustices.”

But others are uneasy about granting special treatment.

Derek Fincham, an assistant professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston who specializes in cultural heritage law, said the exclusion probably also reflected the notion that the bill would be difficult to pass without an exception for Holocaust-era claims.

“To put it bluntly, how many Cambodians donate to political campaigns?” he said. “All of this goes back to political influence on a money level, which is unfortunate.”

Corinne Hershkovitch, a lawyer in Paris who specializes in recovering plundered art, said she questioned whether a bill that tried to distinguish between the severity of atrocities was sound. “There should be a common system for all looted art,” she said. “If you offer protections just for one group, it will seem illegitimate.”

Allan Gerson, a specialist in international law who has a client trying to recover paintings seized by the Bolsheviks, agreed. “Why are Nazi storm troopers looting art any different from Bolshevik storm troopers?” he said.

In California in 2009, a federal appeals court struck down a state law that sought to extend the statute of limitations in lawsuits filed there against museums and galleries by people who had art taken from them during the Holocaust. The ruling did not focus on the special nature of the protection, but on constitutional flaws in the statute. When California enacted amended legislation in 2010, it covered artworks lost in all periods.

Jo Backer Laird, a lawyer who specializes in art law, said the pending Senate bill was founded on the view “that the Holocaust is simply different.”

“It is a view,” she continued, “that has a compelling philosophical and moral basis — but one that may be more difficult to justify and implement as a matter of law.”

Posted on Fri, May. 18, 2012 By John Coppola Edouard Duval Carrié "The Messenger,'' by Edouard Duval Carrié, from his exhibition at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, May 2012. “This is my life as a tree, says Edouard Duval Carrié as he singles out an eight-foot-square work that is the centerpiece of his current exhibition at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery. Purple Lace Tree, a backlit mixed media work on water-jet cut aluminum, depicts a single tree, its serpentine roots not anchored in the ground, its beleafed and flowering branches sprawling above. He describes the lone tree as “standing erect, keeping its dignity, yet rootless.” The peripatetic artist was born in Haiti in 1954, immigrated as a child with his family to Puerto Rico, studied in Montreal and Paris before moving to Miami a dozen years ago. Here, he says, he found his anchor: “I’m very happy in Miami. I won’t move!” Duval Carrié also cites the trees as a metaphor for the ecological problems in his native Haiti, which has been severely deforested, as well as symbols of family and history. He has made the images even more concrete by incorporating actual tree branches in his mixed media sculpture, Grand Bois. Many of the works in his current gallery show, The Three Dimensional God and Goddesses Met Their Cousins The Trees, are back-lighted stencils. Duval Carrié says this Haitinizes stained-glass windows by incorporating the technique used in the oil drum metal cutouts. Gallerist Bernice Steinbaum recalls asking the artist which vodou god he would like to be. “He chose the god of light,” she says, “and in this show he plays with light.” Both in his gallery show and in an installation at Davie’s new Young at Art Museum building, Duval Carrié has eschewed the tropical lighting in favor of a dark stillness that conjures up a spirit realm that is simultaneously relaxing and ominous. The subdued lighting and almost cave-like layout of his Spirit of Haiti at YAA contrasts dramatically with the other brightly lit A Knight Foundation Challenge grant to YAA provides free admission for 2,500 low-income children to experience The Spirit of Haiti exhibition and family workshops created and conducted by Duval Carrié. “The museum came to me several years ago,” he says, “and asked me to create an environment for kids to learn in. At the time, I was interested in stenciling and mold making.” Both found their way into his exhibition, which is an assemblage of stenciled cubes, oil drum sculpture, sequined vodou flags and even an altar that form what YAA calls “a story-filled realm of folklore and oral tradition.” Visitors to Duval Carrié’s installation can trace designs from stencils of the artist’s work and build metal sculptures from magnetized squares and circles. This summer the artist will conduct a workshop teaching children how to make molds and resin casts “It’s important for us to have an artist like Edouard Duval Carrié representing the cultural life of our community,” says Sandra Trinidad, YAA’s marketing manager. In fact, the artist represents Haitian and Caribbean art to the Miami community as much as he represents Miami to them. Duval Carrié is Miami’s best-known Haitian artist, but he is also a relentless promoter of other artists from his native country and elsewhere in the Caribbean. Immediately after the opening of the Young at Arts Museum, Duval Carrié was off to Martinque to oversee the installation of Global Caribbean, the first of a series of exhibitions he organized for the Little Haiti Cultural Center in 2010. Martinque is the last stop of a tour that took it to France and Puerto Rico. The third iteration of Global Caribbean will open at LHCC next year. “Miami is placing itself very strongly in the art market, but Caribbean artists are very seldom seen in Miami,” says Duval Carrié, explaining why he embarked on the series of Global Caribbean exhibitions. “I wish Haitian artists were better in tune with the market here and there were more exchanges between Haiti and Miami.” From his studio right across the street, Duval Carrié has been a driving force in the creation and operations of the Little Haiti Cultural Center. “Edouard is a dynamo in our community as an organizer/curator and, of course, as a highly regarded artist,’’ says Miami mosaic artist George Fishman . Duval Carrie is curating an exhibition in conjunction with the symposium at the Little Haiti Cultural Center that was held May 18 and 19 to looked inter-university and professional collaborations aimed at promoting and advancing Haitian culture and society. Next month, Duval Carrié will also be participating in a collaborative exhibition, Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, organized by three New York City museums — El Museo del Barrio, the Queens Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. It features more than 400 works spanning two centuries On the horizon for Duval Carrié is an exhibition of Haitian photography that he will curate next year for the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art. Works by 10 contemporary Haitian photographers and ten from outside the country will be on display, offering contrasting visions of how Haitians and foreigners see the country.

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Cari Vuong

ART AND THE MAN | Paul Kasmin

TURNING GOOD TASTE INTO A BUSINESS is a tricky thing. London-born, New York-based contemporary art dealer Paul Kasmin stands out—not just as one of Manhattan’s snappiest dressers, but as an example of the special success that can come from following one’s eye. Since opening his Chelsea gallery in 1989, Mr. Kasmin has consistently championed the work of artists slightly outside the familiar, people not yet well known enough to be thought of as an “investment,” often creating a market where there was none before. The careers of Walton Ford, James Nares and Ivan Navarro have benefited from Mr. Kasmin’s irreverent connoisseurship and willingness to take a chance on the art he loves.

This month at Paul Kasmin Gallery is a celebration of the work of Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, the husband-and-wife sculpture and decorative arts team whose fame has been quietly growing since the ’70s. Mr. Kasmin was the first to show the Lalannes’ work in the United States. To accompany the exhibition (which ends June 16), and as a tribute to François-Xavier, who died in 2008, Mr. Kasmin has produced a book of his own photographs of the Lalannes’ home and studio. Eight years of collaboration and friendship are chronicled, and the result is a tender love letter to an eccentric and beguiling body of work.

Paul Kasmin Gallery

Ai Weiwei exhibit at Paul Kasmin Gallery

Mr. Kasmin, 52, lives with his two daughters in a townhouse apartment near Central Park. His home is filled with paintings and objects from any and all periods—”ancient to medieval to contemporary,” he explained—but most of the furniture is by the zany and joyful Mattia Bonetti, whom Mr. Kasmin represents. Downtown, business is booming. Last year, he opened a second gallery space on 27th Street, in the building that formerly housed the nightclub Bungalow 8.

My dream artist to represent—living or dead—is Walton Ford. Dreams can come true, I guess.

My advice to novice collectors is to just buy what interests you. Fear of being wrong is the single greatest obstacle to educating yourself and building a good collection.

The biggest influences on my personal style are my father—an art dealer who definitely knew how to dress—and my old friend Jasper Conran. Growing up in England, I didn’t like wearing a uniform at school, but it did make me appreciate the beauty of good clothes.

My 21st birthday was at One Fifth, a restaurant that figured largely on the scene in the New York of the 1980s. I did go out a lot then, to Limelight, to Area—but I wasn’t out of control.

Paul Kasmin Gallery

‘Babouin’ fireplace by François-Xavier Lalanne

In my childhood, the most exciting thing was my first visit to New York with my dad, in 1970. Even though I was only around 10, he took me with him to see all the artists and hip people he was visiting. We went to the Factory. Coming from England, nothing prepared me for how much I would be blown away by New York. And here I am.

If I could own any work by the Lalannes it would be two—the “Babouin” fireplace by François-Xavier, and the “Choupatte” by Claude. And if I could build a museum for the Lalannes’ work, Markus Dochantschi of Studio MDA is the architect I would choose.

A collector whose taste I admire is Tom Ford. Nobody tells him what to think. He has very sophisticated and individual taste. Everybody would say that about him as a fashion designer, but I mean as an art collector. He and I commissioned Claude [Lalanne] to make a crocodile desk.

An art collection I covet is the Beyeler Foundation.

It’s a coincidence that two of my favorite artists, Walton Ford and the Lalannes, are known for animals. I love animals, but I was drawn to these artists for different reasons.

The best designed hotel is the Hotel Americano right here in Chelsea.

Everett Collection

Poster for ’ Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday’

Between Café de Flore and Deux Magots, it’s definitely the Flore for me.

My favorite movie is “Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday,” by Jacques Tati—for the music, the sounds, the inventiveness, the brilliant humor, the depiction of France as it was in that period.

My glasses are from Cutler and Gross.

 

Marvis toothpaste

T he toothpaste I use is called Marvis, which comes from Florence in a very interesting looking rococo-style tube.

I have my own take on the English thing where you’re supposed to be in love with a country house, your garden and all that—I rent what is basically a shed in Millbrook. It’s a little like a painter’s studio, with two little bedrooms for my daughters and a lot of etchings by Hogarth, for rogue effect.

I just got back from Burma, which was a marvelous trip because there are fewer and fewer places you can go now that are really uncorrupted by modern life. We spent a few days walking the hills, and the country, I found, was everything I wanted it to be.

—Edited from an interview by David Netto

 

A version of this article appeared May 19, 2012 in WSJ print edition.

By JOANNE LEE-YOUNG

Photographs by Philipp Englehorn for The Wall Street Journal

The living area

Hong Kong

After graduating from Cornell University's architecture school, friends Kevin Chin-Kwok Lim and Edward Yujoong Kim moved to Hong Kong, one of the priciest real estate markets on earth. Mr. Lim, 26, who grew up in the city, moved back in with his parents and grandmother. Mr. Kim, 27, stuffed himself and his girlfriend into a 180-square-foot apartment.

Fortunately the duo also hold the keys to a 3,900-square-foot warehouse loft that has evolved into an office, exhibition space and place to stretch out, entertain and relax.

This is not a fancy condo conversion. The loft is on the 19th floor of a working warehouse in an industrial part of Hong Kong. Visitors have to steer around stacked cartons and workers pushing bags of chemical powders into service elevators. It's dank and charmless until an aluminum door slides open to reveal a huge open space with white ceilings, walls and light tiled floors.

Mr. Lim's father, William Lim, 54, a Hong Kong-based architect, artist and art collector, bought the loft in November 2010 for $1 million. He used to rent three separate spaces: an art studio, an apartment for storing his collection and another to show it off. When he saw this place, it was a chance to consolidate. He estimated spending about $142,000 to renovate.

There are few walls. A modern kitchen is at the left; a beige sofa and coffee table made from flatbed trolleys topped with acrylic carves out a living area. A large table, a few chairs and a giant, orange floor lamp in one corner marks the office. A long, glass-enclosed balcony seals out much of the noise from a massive pit below filled with cranes, dump trucks, cement mixers and bulldozers, constructing a new subway station.

Photos: Industrial Living in Hong Kong

On the 19th floor of a working warehouse, a vast loft serves as a multi-purpose hangout.

Philipp Engelhorn for The Wall Street Journal

After graduating from Cornell University's architecture school, friends Kevin Chin-Kwok Lim and Edward Yujoong Kim moved to Hong Kong, one of the priciest real estate markets on earth.

The loft's centerpiece and main sleeping area is a striking 20-by-13-foot rectangular structure. It's made up of 163 pieces of plywood fit together with tongue-and-groove notches and painted black. The result a grid of cubbyholes filled with art books and collectibles, like a polka dot paperweight by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. The books are laid flat, allowing light to flow through the structure. "The idea was to create a space without using walls," said the younger Mr. Lim, who designed the piece with Mr. Kim and Eddy Man Kim, their third partner who is planning to move to Hong Kong soon.

Within the structure is about 290 square feet of den-like space holding a sofa, small rugs and stacks of DVDs and books. Further into this space, wide, bleached-wood steps lead to a flat platform level that can be topped with cushions and used as beds.

If they are working late into the night, the young architects might toss a tatami mat or thick piece of foam on top of the structure and crash. There is another snoozing spot on the outside edge of the structure, and the men recently placed a thick piece of plywood in a top corner, giving the option of making a loft bed there too.

"When you wake up, it feels like you are on the sea," said Zhang Wei, a Guangzhou-based curator who was an overnight guest on a recent trip. She and her husband piled blankets and pillows onto the structure for a bed. "It's like being on an island because the space around is so huge."

On the far other side of the loft, the space turns into an art gallery. There is a sculpture in the shape of a plate folded in half, by mainland Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. An angular, metallic satellite-like mobile by Korean artist Lee Bul floats in the air. A portrait by U.K. artist Julian Opie hangs on one wall next to an oversized Chinese lantern. There is a gray concrete bathroom with rough bits of exposed brick. It has a communal sink, a shower unit and three toilet stalls.

Photographs by Philipp Englehorn for The Wall Street Journal

A mobile by Lee Bul and recliner by William Lim

Technically, lofts like this are zoned for commercial use. But real estate agents say more entrepreneurs, including artists, retailers and design companies, are combining work and living spaces into them. There is actually a loophole regulation that permits warehouse spaces to have one or two watch guards who may stay overnight. Nothing forbids them from dozing off, said the elder Mr. Lim.

Recently, the government said it can't regularly inspect all warehouses and will only act to enforce zoning regulations if there are complaints. Currently, a 6,700-square-foot warehouse loft in the same area, which comes renovated and with a rooftop terrace, is listed for $5.1 million.

The elder Mr. Lim sits on the board of the Asia Art Archive, which documents the history of contemporary art in Asia, and he is co-chair of Para/Site, a non-profit art space in Hong Kong. When he hosts presentations at the loft, attendees gather on wooden bleacher-like seating that spills off one side of the structure. This week, to coincide with the Hong Kong International Art Fair, he will preside over an open house at the loft to exhibit his art collection.

Right now, the young architects are keeping busy with their new design firm, called openUU. They are working on a penthouse, an art gallery and a private school cafeteria in Hong Kong. In Shanghai, they are designing a seafood retail shop. The loft will continue to serve the elder Mr. Lim's art interests, but, for now, it's also a home base for the younger architects to start their careers.

Says Mr. Kim: "The idea is to see how many different activities we can pack in here."

A version of this article appeared May 18, 2012, on page D6 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: To Doze, Design in Hong Kong.

By KELLY CROW

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Daniel Buren, 'Photo-souvenir: From Three Windows, 5 Colours for 252 Places, Work in Situ'

Hong Kong

"Expansion" is a six-foot-long, multicolored abstract created by Chinese painter Chu Teh-Chun in 2006. The painting's title could also sum up the ambition of Art HK: The Hong Kong International Art Fair, where the work sold Wednesday to a Chinese buyer for around $900,000.

   

 

Kelly Crow on Lunch Break reports from Hong Kong on that city's major contemporary art fair, Art HK, which Art Basel has bought a controlling stake in.

Since its kickoff five years ago, Art HK has grown into Asia's pre-eminent art fair, drawing over 60,000 people a year into a warren of booths that spread across a pair of vast halls in the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

European Pressphoto Agency

'I Didn't Notice What I Am Doing,' pictured here, by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu., on view at the fair.

This year, at least 700 galleries applied for the fair's 266 slots, said fair director Magnus Renfrew. Several dealers, like Shanghai's Pearl Lam and Paris's Emmanuel Perrotin, waited until fair week to debut their new gallery outposts in Hong Kong. Luxury brands Veuve Clicquot and Shanghai Tang threw late-night parties to coincide with the event.

All of it dovetails with Hong Kong's long-term plans to become a year-round, art-selling hub to rival London or New York—an aspiration wedded to Asia's wealth boom.

There's still an unpredictable energy to Art HK, as Western galleries—who make up about half the fair's dealers—anxiously try to nail down the shifting tastes and spending habits of newer Asian collectors, who are the real power players here.

The mood has been mostly upbeat. Few booths are sold out entirely, but major galleries like Pace are reporting steady sales for works priced under $1 million, thanks mainly to buyers from Asia and Europe. Dealers said at least 300 Australian collectors signed up to attend, happy to have a fair comparatively close to home.

On the other hand, American collectors, who typically flock to major art fairs world-wide, have proven surprisingly scarce. Dealers reasoned that Americans might have gotten their fix at Frieze, a London fair that debuted its own New York edition two weeks ago. Others are also likely saving up for next month's Art Basel, the Swiss contemporary art fair whose owner MCH Group recently bought a majority ownership stake in Art HK. (Next spring, Art HK will be renamed Art Basel Hong Kong.) The fair closes Sunday.

On Wednesday, a reliable group of well-known collectors turned out for the fair's VIP preview, including François Pinault, Christie's owner; Uli Sigg, a former Swiss ambassador to China; Rudy Tseng, a former Walt Disney executive from Taiwan and Richard Chang, the Beijing director of investment firm Tira Holdings.

The galleries also worked to make first-timers feel comfortable. London's Annely Juda Gallery taped up a sign in Mandarin offering to divulge prices for its offerings—something dealers usually just whisper to prospective buyers on a case-by-case basis. Dealer David Juda also placed a small sticker shaped like a red dot beside David Hockney's $950,000 painting of a log, "Felled Totem, September 8th, 2009," to indicate that the work in that booth had already found a buyer. Mr. Juda doesn't apply stickers at other fairs, but he said, "I heard it was a good idea here to reassure people when works are sold."

Plenty of galleries dangled new works by Asian artists in their rosters. In one of the most elaborate displays, the Gagosian Gallery added a carpeted side room to its booth to showcase a pair of new pencil drawings of trees by Zeng Fanzhi, a Chinese painter who is better known for his colorful portraits of men wearing white masks. The gallery used the other walls of this antechamber to offer up paintings by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Claude Monet. The lofty comparison may have helped: Mr. Zeng's drawings sold on the first day for an undisclosed sum.

London dealer Stephane Custot, who sold the Chu Teh-Chun abstract, also brought a $2.2 million Picasso musketeer painting, 1969's "Bust of a Man." But so far, he said passersby had gravitated to their hometown favorite: "It's easier here to sell a Chu Teh-Chun than a Picasso."

Mr. Tseng, the Taiwanese collector, said he thinks the ongoing strength of this fair will lie in artistic mix of East and West. This time, he said he liked German painter Gerhard Richter's wall-size print "Stripe" at Marian Goodman's booth. He also raved about Beijing art duo Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's life-size sculptures of dinosaurs and rhinoceroses, which stood, like a scattered herd, in several fair booths. "See? Everything about this fair is getting bigger," he added.

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 18, 2012, on page D4 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Next Global Art Powerhouse.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The new Barnes Foundation, in a new shell in Philadelphia. More Photos »

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: May 17, 2012

PHILADELPHIA — The Barnes Foundation’s move from suburban Philadelphia to the center of the city caused art lovers lots of worry.

Multimedia

Slide Show

The New Barnes

Interactive Feature

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The west wall of the main room of the new Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, with Seurat’s “Models” over Cézanne’s “Card Players.” 

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Matisse’s Fauve masterpiece “Joie de Vivre,” in a new spot.

Devotees of this great polyglot collection, heavy with Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse, which the omnivore art shopper Albert C. Barnes amassed between 1912 and his death in 1951, were appalled by the idea. Barnes spent years obsessively arranging his installation cheek-by-jowl in the mansion in Lower Merion, Pa., that he built for the purpose and opened in 1925, and he stipulated that, after he died, it should remain exactly as it was.

In 2002 the foundation’s board — constrained by limits on attendance and public hours imposed by zoning restrictions — announced plans to relocate. Many people, including a group that sued to stop the move, were sure that it could only desecrate this singular institution.

Others, myself included, did not object to the move per se, but felt that faithfully reproducing the old Barnes in the new space, as promised by the trustees, was a terrible idea. To us it seemed time to at least loosen up Barnes’s straitjacketed displays, wonderful as they often were. And why go to the trouble of moving the collection to a more accessible location when the galleries were not going to be any bigger?

And yet the new Barnes proves all of us wrong. Against all odds, the museum that opens to the public on Saturday is still very much the old Barnes, only better.

It is easier to get to, more comfortable and user-friendly, and, above all, blessed with state-of-the-art lighting that makes the collection much, much easier to see. And Barnes’s exuberant vision of art as a relatively egalitarian aggregate of the fine, the decorative and the functional comes across more clearly, justifying its perpetuation with a new force.

As a result, his quirky institution is suddenly on the verge of becoming the prominent and influential national treasure that it has long deserved to be. It is also positioned to make an important contribution to the way we look at and think about art.

Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, who pulled off this feat — and somehow managed to avoid the feeling of plastic fakeness that Barnes purists and Barnes skeptics alike were anticipating — deserves our gratitude. The Merion building and its 24 galleries, and Barnes’s arrangements within them, have been recreated with amazing fidelity in terms of proportions, window placement and finishings, albeit in a slightly more modern style. The structure is oriented to the south, exactly as in Merion; the same mustard-colored burlap covers the walls; the same plain wood molding outlines doors and baseboards.

As for Barnes’s arrangements, almost nothing is out of place: not one of the hundreds of great French paintings, none of the pieces of Americana, nor any of the Greek or African sculptures, the small New Mexican wood-panel santos or the scores of wrought-iron hinges, locks, door handles and whatnot that dot the interstices like unusually tangible bits of wallpaper pattern, often subtly reiterating the compositions of the paintings.

The only change to the installation — a big improvement — is the removal of the colorful fantasy of nudes in a landscape that is Matisse’s great Fauve masterpiece, “Joie de Vivre,” from its humiliating position on the stairway landing to a large alcove on the balcony overlooking the main gallery.

At the same time, some major systemic improvements make everything breathe in a new way. Especially important is the lighting system, designed by Paul Marantz, which seamlessly mixes natural and artificial illumination into a diffuse, even light, and had early visitors asking if some of the paintings had been cleaned. (They hadn’t.) There is also the spatial largess: The recreated building is set within a larger structure that includes a raft of amenities, among them a cafe, an auditorium and a gracious garden court with lots of padded benches, as well as a 5,000-square-foot temporary exhibition gallery that pulses with curatorial possibility.

Barnes’s arrangements are as eye-opening, intoxicating and, at times, maddening as ever, maybe more so. They mix major and minor in relentlessly symmetrical patchworks that argue at once for the idea of artistic genius and the pervasiveness of talent. Nearly every room is an exhibition unto itself — a kind of art wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities — where you can spend hours parsing the echoes and divergences among the works in terms of color, composition, theme, surface and light.

In Room 4, two Chardins flank a (school of) El Greco beneath 16th-century carved-wood reliefs from France; almost all depict women engaged in various tasks. In Room 14, painted Chinese fans hover beside Matisse’s magnificent 1907 portrait of his wife in a red madras headdress, with a folkish Surrealist painting by Jean Hugo, great-grandson of Victor, positioned above. Several American Modernists make recurring appearances, including Charles Demuth, Maurice Prendergast and William Glackens, a former high school classmate of Barnes’s who turned him on to Modern art; so, to lesser extent, do artists who taught at the Barnes. In front of several Renoirs are wonderful pots by that painter’s son, the future filmmaker Jean.

The twin poles of Barnes’s world are Renoir, represented by 181 works (the largest concentration in the world), and Cézanne, represented by 69. Barnes never seemed to tire of playing these two giants off each other, alternating the fuzzy, sybaritic pinks of Renoir’s forms — whether female or floral — with Cézanne’s anxious, angular blues, greens and rusts, played out in landscapes, still lifes and numerous paintings of bathers, early and late, small and large.

Their back-and-forth dominates several galleries, and the Renoirs are so ubiquitous that at times they seem to become a kind of background noise. That is, until you come up against a great one, like “Leaving the Conservatory,” an imposing full-length grouping of several Parisians dressed in shades of gray that hangs above a predominantly gray-blue Pennsylvania Dutch blanket chest. These wonderful chests, of which there are several outstanding examples, as well as the numerous ceramics, affirm Barnes’s appreciation of painting as a free-range language expressed in various materials, not only oil on canvas.

There are also seemingly endless surprises, like the lone work by the postwar Italian artist Afro in Room 10, which also contains a veritable Matisse retrospective, including a small, early still life that you could swear is a Manet, and numerous works by Picasso and Modigliani.

And there are oddities everywhere that might not pass muster in a more conventional museum, like a European, possibly 15th-century, panel in Room 23, depicting a Flight Into Egypt. The colors are rich, the figures big and wonderfully drawn, but the real life of the picture emanates from the greenery, applied in loose splotches that bring to mind the brushy, sponged-on glazes of American redware ceramics. Looking at the slightly bizarre bits of green, you have no idea if they were part of the original picture or added later, but you don’t care, and perhaps Barnes did not, either. It made a point about continuities of human touch and technique, and he went for it.

In many ways the rebirth of the Barnes could not be better timed. It occurs at a point of intense public interest in art — witness the fact that since the project’s groundbreaking in November 2009, membership has jumped from 400 to nearly 20,000 — and it approaches art with an unfettered directness that is becoming rare among major American museums, of which the Barnes is now one.

At a moment when so many museums seem bent on turning themselves into entertainment and social centers, or frequently mount dry, overly academic exhibitions, the Barnes irrefutably foregrounds art and nonverbal visual experience. The galleries are devoid of text panels and even wall labels; most works have the artist’s last name or some other cultural identification nailed to their frames, and there are printed guides stored in benches in each gallery that identify the works on view.

Audio guides will be available, but really, there is nothing to do here but look at art and think for yourself. The dense clusters and juxtapositions provide more than enough to work with: a visual deluge of forms — in different mediums and materials, from widely spread times and places — that make looking and thinking reflexive, rapturous and liberating.

At the same time, the relocation of the Barnes, with all its mixings and juxtapositions, comes at a time when curators of all kinds — from museum professionals to artists organizing gallery group shows — are increasingly interested in cross-cultural, cross-medium presentations of artworks. In this regard the Barnes looks utterly prescient.

And let’s not overlook the implications of that temporary gallery, which is opening with an exhibition about Barnes’s life and the history of the foundation. This space creates the possibility of a new flexibility with regard to the meticulous re-creation of the Merion galleries. They suggest that the Barnes may be able to have its cake and eat it too, hold on to its past and also forge a new future.

Barnes purists may consider this heresy, but Barnes’s installation should sometimes change and move a little. There are moments, especially in the upstairs galleries among the plethora of drawings and Greek and African objects, where the presentation palls and oppresses a bit, even now. The symmetrical patchwork doesn’t always come across as meticulously assembled; it can seem arbitrary and maniacally crowded. More generally, there is simply too much there for everything to remain in perpetual lockdown.

The Barnes curators need to come up with creative ways — say for two or three months, every other year — to extract certain works from the gallery collection, walk them across the garden court and put them on view in the temporary-exhibition galleries for less encumbered viewing. Set out all the African works, for example. Give us a Cézanne or a Matisse retrospective. Or a survey of the Pennsylvania Dutch blanket chests and related Americana whose hues and surfaces Barnes was so alive to.

Barnes did so much, more than he was capable of knowing. We can know how much only if his orchestrations are taken apart and rearranged ever so slightly and briefly, once in a while. It is great that Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the architects, adhered to his vision so sensitively, providing a kind of unwaveringly accurate baseline. But every so often the pieces of even his most revelatory ensembles should be freed from his matrix, just as his amazing achievement has been liberated from Merion.

The Barnes Foundation is at 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia; (215) 278-7000. It is open Wednesday through Monday from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., except Friday, when it stays open until 10 p.m. For reservations and information, go tobarnesfoundation.org.

Albert Vecerka / Esto

Aerial view of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's new Visitor Center, designed by Weiss/Manfredi architects.

The firm's virtuosity and elastic approach to design are on full display at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center, which opens this Wednesday. A sinuously shaped structure, half-bermed into a hillside with a green roof of crew-cut grasses, the center combines architecture and landscape (plus some heavy-duty engineering) with the mobile harmony of a ballet.

Which is also to say that it doesn't photograph easily or lend itself to a single impression or "take." Seen from its Washington Avenue side, the Visitor Center presents a modestly elegant concrete-and-glass façade with a twice-pitching copper roof to blend in with other Brooklyn Botanic Garden buildings along the street, such as the rather grand McKim Mead & White Administration Building. On the parking-lot side, the Visitor Center drops any notion of formality with the curvaceous glass walls of two pavilions adjacent but not touching—like two swirling eddies—luring the visitor along a glass-covered path wending inexorably into the gardens.

The 480-foot-long larger pavilion contains orientation exhibits, offices, a catering kitchen and a leaf-shaped event space. Aerial views clarify its tadpole-like shape and the way it undulates along and merges with the hillside, while the smaller, more rectangular-shaped pavilion containing the gift shop faces the street.

The experience of strolling through the entire center is seductively baffling, and never more so than when climbing an exterior stair that runs up the larger pavilion to an overlook on the garden side. It's a climactic moment because at the entrance plaza the building seems to be a one-story structure, but from the top of the stairs you find yourself on an unexpected terrace passing under the green roof and meandering toward terraced gardens on the hilltop itself with far-flung views of the entire 52-acre garden.

When did visitor centers become such orchestrated events? Time was when a ticket-taker, turnstile and stack of brochures with maps—pretty much what greeted visitors at this spot in years past—were sufficient to the task of welcoming the uninitiated. Today's increasingly ubiquitous visitor centers serve a much more ambitious purpose: to demonstrate with instant legibility the DNA of the host institution. Architecture, graphics, program announcements, the gifts in the gift shop and even the tiles in the bathroom—here colored with pixelated plant images—must all telegraph the same core message.

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden, entering its second century, is hardly a novice at branding, but at the new Visitor Center it is exercised with comprehensive aplomb. On the entry plaza, even before one buys a ticket, the sustainable landscape lessons begin with two planting beds—sprouting black gum trees, wild hyacinth and water-loving grasses—that are sunk into the pavement and operate as storm-water basins channeling overflow to the nearby Japanese garden pond rather than into New York's sewer system. Similarly, the green roof (designed, as were the rain gardens and other landscape elements, by HM White) is no small engineering feat. With a pitch of up to 27 degrees, it requires complicated networks of special soils held in place with cleats and geo-nets involving drip irrigation systems woven into capillary fabrics, and other impressive techniques with specialized vocabularies known only to au courant gardeners. It almost goes without saying that such a state-of-the-landscape building is heated and cooled geothermally.

The $28 million Visitor Center is one of three entrances to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where some 725,000 people visit a year. It makes no grand architectural statement, preferring to realize in every possible detail the message and the mission of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden—even the paneling inside was harvested from a Ginko on the site. And that calls for a collaborative partnership of the highest order.

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

Karen Kilimnik’s Teenage Dream

May 16, 2012

I’ve always favored macho art, art that packs a solid dose of testosterone. My art collecting alter ego, whom I’ve dubbed Duc Jean des Esseintes, and who has curated the inaugural exhibition at my new gallery, Venus Over Manhattan, also preferred big, bold statements—large outdoor sculptures, super-sized paintings, almost anything oversized and impractical. Des Esseintes’s exhibition, called “À Rebours,” is named for and based on a 19th-century novel that describes Des Esseintes’s strange life of art collecting and indulgence, as well as his obsessions with poetry, absinthe and decadence. In his/my show, artworks by French 19th-century symbolist masters are intermingled with those of contemporary artists young and old, in ways both tasteful and tasteless.

Neither Jean nor I ever liked girly art, those petite paintings in fancy frames and fussy works on paper, so it’s no wonder that the work of Karen Kilimnik was never very interesting to us. All I could see in it were frilly pictures of castles and bunnies, and a silly and bad portrait of Paris Hilton dressed as Cinderella. Why, I asked myself, would any painter make work that is willfully wan and whimsical, and that comes across as badly painted, even feeble? The work looked to me almost as though it were designed for failure.

Then, in the summer of 2005, I had a Kilimnik epiphany in the Bevilacqua la Masa Foundation, a palace in Venice that serves as an art venue during the Biennale. Ms. Kilimnik had been invited to take over the entire building with an installation, and the magic she created inside that beautiful but decrepit old palace changed my understanding of her work. I remember walking in and hearing the sound of birds chirping and espying, in the corners, little nests with plastic eggs and fake fuzzy bunnies. She’d strung the chandeliers with pastel colored ribbons, and made paintings of handsome princes and princesses arrayed in 18th-century splendor, surrounded by horses and gardens, castles and lavish interiors, all in the style of some bad painter who worked in a 19th-century mode and mixed present-day celebrities with ancien régime fairy tale whimsy. Ms. Kilimnik’s mad visions cast Leonardo DiCaprio as a prince, Kate Moss as a Park Avenue princess; she brought in Emma Peel, Scarlet Johansen, Nureyev. Hers was a fully kitsch-ified, candy coated world that looked saccharine at first, but that revealed itself, on closer inspection, to be dark and disturbing.

In fact, Ms. Kilimnik is not a traditional painter at all, she is an installation artist, much like her contemporary, the revered and cultish Cady Noland. This has caused much confusion in parts of the art world, especially when we consider a much younger painter, Elizabeth Peyton, whose masterful portraits of celebrities and art world characters have often been compared to the historical or celebrity-derived works of Ms. Kilimnik. In this comparison Ms. Kilimnik invariably loses because she can’t compete with the masterful brightness and ice cream smoothness of Ms. Peyton’s canvases. But dig a little past the surface and you’ll find this comparison is myopic and non-sensical. Ms. Kilimnik’s paintings must be seen as part of her installations. They are images from an imagination that never reached puberty, and they are not competing with the classic portraiture by the likes of Ms. Peyton, even if, occasionally, their subject matter overlaps.

And so the brand new Kilimnik exhibition at the Brant Foundation in Greenwich Connecticut is a welcome and timely one because it convincingly presents the full range of her oeuvre. Seeing a single painting reproduced in an auction catalog or hanging in an art fair has never done justice to her work, and almost all the gallery shows I have seen are chock full of sellable paintings but lack the chandeliers, the music and empty perfume bottles that are needed to complete her storytelling.

Mr. Brant’s support and patronage are significant in this regard. He is a seasoned collector who as a young man in the 1960s bought paintings from Andy Warhol and learned about connoisseurship from Bruno Bischofberger, the fabled Zurich-based dealer/investor/collector. A man of many talents, Mr Brant excels at squash and tennis, but in sports he is best known for his polo team White Birch Farm, which dominated US polo for over a decade (I did, however, manage to beat him a couple of times). The patrons of this show are a powerful businessman/art collector and his iconic supermodel wife (Stephanie Seymour); the setting is a beautiful old stone barn abutting polo grounds that have hosted the world’s best and most famous players—there is, in other words, arguably no better fantasy context in which to see Ms. Kilimnik’s work.

The show, which encompasses the entire Brant Foundation, includes an indoor garden as well as chandeliers, birds, landscapes paintings, the requisite portraits and several installations. It’s the first time since Venice that I’ve seen the full spectrum of Kilimnik’s creative output in one place. As such, it is a wonderful testament to her singular dream—or neurosis, depending on how you choose to read it. I came to love the work when I stopped focusing on the pictures and started thinking about the ideas. We are all to some extent locked in our childhood fantasies, whether fond memories of youth or the prison of those painful teenage years, and the effects of formative experiences stay with us, through nostalgia, or longing and melancholy. There is sadness in Ms. Kilimnik’s work, but I also see the childish joys and excitements of adolescent fantasy, even if it is filtered through the mind of a 56-year-old woman.

In my eyes Ms. Kilimnik’s oeuvre is a world unto itself, a strange, kitschy parenthetical expression in contemporary art. I don’t bother comparing her to her art star peers. For most of us, our private fantasies exist in the further reaches of our consciousness. Karen Kilimnik’s are right on the surface: like Peter Pan, she never grew up, and she never will. This show is a tour de force, so “Brava” to you, Ms. Kilimnik, I hope lots of people make the effort to get up to Greenwich to see just how good it all looks.