PARIS — When London’s National Gallery mounted its blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci exhibition late last year, advance tickets sold out the first week, online scalpers pocketed up to $400 per ticket and crowds lined up around the block at dawn for the paltry number of tickets still for sale.

Now it may be Paris’s turn. On Thursday, the Louvre unveils a newly restored Leonardo masterpiece, “The Virgin and Child With St. Anne,” the centerpiece of a major exhibition running through June 25 of more than 130 works exploring the painting’s genesis, execution and legacy, as well as the cult of St. Anne in the late 15th century.

The new “St. Anne” dazzles with color and light. Gone is the heavy veil of yellow-brown and most of the dark stains left by aging varnish. New details have emerged: a rocky pool of water bathing the subjects’ feet; crisp lines in the imaginary landscape in pale blues; the right leg of the infant Jesus; the lamb’s tail and draping on the dresses that clearly show that Leonardo had not finished it when he died in 1519.

“It is a true resurrection of the ‘St. Anne,’” Vincent Delieuvin, the exhibition’s curator, said. “The painting has recovered a depth and a relief almost like sculpture, with an intense palette of lapis lazuli blue, lacquer red, grays and vibrant browns.”

Among the other works in “St. Anne: Leonardo da Vinci’s Ultimate Masterpiece,” as the exhibition is called, are preparatory studies by Leonardo; earlier versions of the work by his workshop; and other works influenced by it, the most important by Raphael and Michelangelo; a black-and-white study of the head of the Virgin lent by the Metropolitan Museum that resembles a photograph; and 22 Leonardo sketches lent by Queen Elizabeth.

The exhibition also brings together for the first time archival documents referring to the painting throughout history and two manuscripts by Leonardo on the science of painting.

Leonardo’s preparatory studies — including drawings, compositional sketches, landscape studies and the full-size cartoon tracing lent by The National Gallery of London — trace the transformation of the painting through three different versions. Infrared images and a full-scale photograph of the painting before restoration document the stages of the restoration.

Other Louvre treasures, including Leonardo’s “Madonna of the Rocks,” are part of the exhibition, although “Mona Lisa” has not been moved from her place of honor in another part of the museum.

The “St. Anne” was acquired by Francis I of France in 1517 and is regarded as perhaps second only to the Mona Lisa among Leonardo’s later works. The museum hopes that the public viewing of the 500-year-old canvas will end a battle that has raged within both the art community and the Louvre’s own restoration advisory committee over whether the cleaning has been too aggressive.

Out of caution, the Louvre left an extra layer of varnish on the subjects’ faces and decided to leave two major repaintings believed to have been added much later: a group of tree trunks on the right and the puffed fold on the back of the Virgin’s robe.

But Ségolène Bergeon Langle, a chemist and former director of conservation for the Louvre and France’s national museums who resigned from the advisory committee, told the Louvre’s in-house magazine that she remained unhappy about some aspects of the restoration. Most important for her was the removal of a white patch on the body of the infant Jesus, which she believes may have been painted by da Vinci himself. “In doubt,” she said, “I would not have wanted it.”

Herman Wouters for The New York Times

The European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht is expected to draw around 70,000 visitors and collectors. More Photos »

By GUY TREBAY

Published: March 23, 2012

Maastricht, the Netherlands

 

THE lady in pearls was shimmying under a table. Valentino skirt tucked primly around her knees, she lay on her back beaming a flashlight on a yellowed label, a scrap of paper that lent apparent weight to the proposition that the article on view was as old as its seller claimed.

This was at the European Fine Art Fair, where it is not at all unusual to see well-polished people getting intimate with French-waxed consoles, where old specimens can be seen squinting through loupes at granite busts of even older specimens and where for the past quarter-century the acquisitive rich have descended each spring in hordes. The early social arbiter Emily Post once characterized groups like this as the Worldys, the Oldnames and the Eminents...

 

Vinyl records are a totem of the past, a nostalgic symbol of a time when Americans seemed to share more — at least in the way of music: People of a certain age can still remember when, say, Carole King’s 1971 Tapestry sold 25 million copies and engulfed the nation.

Simultaneously, vinyl records are up to the moment. Young hipster collectors now snatch them up both for the sheer physicality of playing a vinyl record and the artistry involved in record covers. DJs like the sound of vinyl: as local legend DJ Le Spam (Andrew Yeomanson) says, an MP3 download is like “a fax of a song.”

Visual artists have long put vinyl to their own uses, and the exhibition at the Miami Art Museum, The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl has a bit of everything: outsider artists, emerging artists and established icons like Ed Ruscha. Within the show, vinyl records are photographed, melted and deconstructed for other ends: most of the work has little to do with music directly, and remain conceptual works of art.

The Record — encompassing 99 pieces by 41 artists — originated at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, N.C. According to Nasher curator Trevor Schoonmaker, the show’s strength lies in its adherence to a mission of remaining serious contemporary art. “Some of the work refers to pop culture, but we don’t have any music ephemera, posters or whatever.”The intersection of pop culture and high art is tricky terrain, but it can be done right. In 2008, MOCA’s Sympathy For The Devil: Art and Rock & Roll Since 1967 revealed the not-so-quiet artistry of rock. Last year, at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, the show Artist Unknown/The Free World created a compelling portrait of contemporary life using countless Facebook images of ordinary people.

At MAM, the first exhibition room of The Record strikes just the right note. In the middle of the room is a thoughtful sculptural installation by William Cordova, a Peru-born Miami artist who was exhibited – along with locals Adler Guerrier and Bert Rodriguez — in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. The piece, Greatest Hits (para Micaela Bastidas, Tom Wilson, y Anna Mae Aquash) 2008 consists of a stack of 3,000 vinyl records, Peruvian gourds, a VHS tape and candles. Focusing on the ideas of transition and displacement, the monolithic work refers to three icons: Bastidas, a 18th century Peruvian independence martyr; Aquash, a 1970s leader in the American Indian movement; Wilson, a 1960s record producer known for his work with Bob Dylan.

The first exhibition room also has Laurie Anderson’s 1977 Viophonograph — a hybrid-creation between a record player and violin that Anderson played in concert — and David Bryne’s 1978 photo-montage for the album cover of Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food. Created with a Polaroid Big Shot camera, the 90-inch-by-90 inch piece is a life-size rendering of the band, pieced together with countless close-up photos.

A smaller project space, covered in plywood and photos contains an installation by the New York-based artist Xaviera Simmons, Thundersnow Road, North Carolina, 2010. Simmons, also a DJ, created a character of a folk rock singer posing for moody circa 1973 album liner photos in rural North Carolina. She then asked friends in music groups — Rain Machine, Midnight Masses, etc. — to compose songs based on the photos, ultimately making an entire vinyl album. This is perfectly-realized conceptual art, a world onto itself, filled with humor and loss, “Once we all listen to music with chips planted in our brains,” Simmons says, “maybe the first quaint iPods will inspire art shows.”

 

ON Tuesday, the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands held a hearing on Frank Gehry’s controversial design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower memorial. National memorials are managed by the National Park Service, which is why the Congressional subcommittee involved itself, even though reviewing architectural design, as Representative Raúl M. Grijalva observed, involves “something well outside our purview.”

What has fueled the Eisenhower memorial controversy in the media are the public pronouncements of two of the president’s granddaughters, Susan and Anne Eisenhower, who have proclaimed themselves dissatisfied with the design. Understandably, their position is being taken seriously. Yet I am concerned that the growing public brouhaha will ultimately weaken the memorial design.

The Eisenhower memorial is to be located on a parcel of land just south of the National Mall, between the National Air and Space Museum and the Department of Education building. It covers four acres, slightly more than the area of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The proposed memorial would not sprawl over the entire site, as some critics have maintained. What Mr. Gehry has done is to place the memorial to the 34th president in what is effectively a new public park.

The dominant feature of the memorial, and one of the design elements to which the Eisenhower family objects, is the 80-foot-high colonnade that rings the site. The design has been described, somewhat pejoratively, as “Gehryesque,” as if it were an alien presence.

But this is precisely what it is not. As my former colleague on the United States Commission of Fine Arts, Michael McKinnell, pointed out when the commission reviewed the design (we unanimously approved the general concept), this is, in effect, a roofless building; more specifically, it is a roofless classical temple — in a city replete with classical monuments. Moreover, it provides a sense of cohesion to this city’s currently fragmented urban space.

The colonnade supports a metal screen that carries images of the Kansas landscape in which Eisenhower grew up. When first confronted with this idea, I was concerned that mechanically imprinted screens, which the architect insisted on calling “tapestries,” would resemble large billboards.

Since then Mr. Gehry and his collaborators have developed hand-weaving techniques so that the screens really do resemble tapestries. Having seen full-size mock-ups of the screens on the site, I am convinced that their size will not be out of scale with the surroundings.

Another target of the critics is the proposal to include a statue of the president as a youth, recalling that he sometimes referred to himself as a “Kansas farm boy.” Some consider this an affront to a man who was a victorious five-star general as well as a successful two-term president; others find it a touching reminder of Eisenhower’s modest Midwestern roots.

I fall in the second camp, but in either case, it is important to recognize that the statue, whose design has not been finalized, will not be the only, or the largest, representation of the president on the site. The design, as it currently stands, includes two very large bas-reliefs of Eisenhower, one as military leader and one as president, as well as inscribed quotations. In this context, the small statue will have the effect of a footnote.

Still, the debates over the memorial give the impression that Mr. Gehry is effectively being forced on the family, the city and the president’s legacy. But that’s simply not true.

The four finalists who prepared designs for the memorial were picked, by a jury that included Eisenhower’s grandson David, from a list compiled by a panel of leading architects, who in turn chose from among 44 firms that submitted their names to the memorial commission. Ever since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition was won by Maya Lin, then a college student, it is taken for granted that the best memorial designs are the result of open competitions, in which hundreds of (largely unqualified) individuals compete.

But the accepted wisdom is wrong — the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is an exception. It’s worth remembering that the Lincoln Memorial was the result of a competition between only two young architects — Henry Bacon and John Russell Pope — and the loser, Pope, was later invited to design the Jefferson Memorial; no one else was considered.

What’s more, both the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial were the objects of criticism when they were proposed: why was Lincoln portrayed as a tired rather than a triumphant leader; why was Jefferson housed in a Roman temple? Today, of course, these memorials are among the country’s most beloved structures.

Presidential memorials take a long time to come to fruition — the Lincoln Memorial took more than 12 years — and the design team will continue refining its design for the Eisenhower memorial. Mr. Gehry, our finest living architect, has already shown himself willing to listen to critical suggestions.

But in this case, too many cooks will definitely spoil the broth. Compromise and consensus are important when devising legislation, but they are a poor recipe for creating a memorial.

Witold Rybczynski is a member of the United States Commission of Fine Arts and the author, most recently, of “The Biography of a Building.”

Kehinde Wiley is one such artist. After earning a Master of Fine Arts degree at Yale in 2001, Mr. Wiley, then in his mid-20s, began exhibiting his large, figurative oil-on-canvas portraits of young black men in hip-hop apparel.

With an emphasis on bright, acid colors and ghetto-fabulous outfits, Mr. Wiley’s paintings borrowed heavily from the work of an earlier Yale M.F.A., Barkley Hendricks, whose portraits coincided with the Black Power movement and the ’70s heyday of photorealist painting.

Mr. Wiley’s contribution was to push things in a more bombastic direction. Hijacking — or appropriating, to use the art world-approved term — the format of old master altarpieces and three-quarter-length portraits, he likened the notorious opulence of successful hip-hop artists to that of European aristocrats. And since most of his subjects were actually disenfranchised black and brown youths — that is, hip-hop fans rather than stars — he effectively transformed his subjects into aristocrats, at least in the world of the picture.

Mr. Wiley’s work hasn’t changed much over the last decade, although his scope has gone global. A series called “The World Stage” has featured youth in Nigeria, Senegal, Brazil, China, India and Sri Lanka. Now “Kehinde Wiley/The World Stage: Israel,” at the Jewish Museum, takes on that country.

This latest leg of Mr. Wiley’s world tour starts with a portrait of a young Ethiopian-Israeli man, “Alios Itzhak” (2011), set against a pattern borrowed from a 19th-century Eastern European mizrah, a papercut made to be placed on a wall to indicate the direction of Jerusalem for purposes of worship. The portrait, acquired by the museum, is joined by 13 additional paintings of young men by Mr. Wiley, along with 11 historic papercuts and textile works he selected from the museum’s collection.

Like Alios Itzhak, most of the other portrait subjects are shown in their street clothes and painted against elaborate patterns from traditional Jewish art. T-shirts advertising YouTube or sportswear companies are juxtaposed with decorative motifs like lions, birds and arabesques that wrap around the figures, moving from background to foreground. The result is a fusion of Pattern and Decoration painting with figuration, a mash-up or sampling of historical styles and references.

One canvas, “Kalkidan Mashasha” (2011), does feature a hip-hop-reggae artist, who is painted in a light brown military shirt with patches depicting the Ethiopian flag and commemorating Haile Selassie, the last emperor of the Ethiopian monarchy and a deified figure in Rastafarian culture. Meanwhile, cases nearby quietly display intricately painted mizrahs and textiles from 19th-century Italy, Poland and Ukraine.

There are some good elements to this show, and some problems. On the positive side, the Jewish Museum has been in the vanguard of showing contemporary art. The exhibition provides an opportunity to exhibit the work of an African-American while celebrating the Jewish diaspora’s diversity and Israel as a “melting pot” (to quote the catalog).

And yet the show raises some difficult questions. For instance, what is the position of the Ethiopian Jew in Israeli society? The gallery installation gives the impression of Jewish culture as a seamless visual narrative, slipping faultlessly from old Europe to modern-day Tel Aviv. It also posits, particularly in a video accompanying the paintings, Israel as a haven for persecuted Ethiopian Jews.

In the catalog, however, Mr. Mashasha, who cites thinkers and activists like Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela and Marcus Garvey as influences, states, “I am struggling with the issue of not becoming what I criticize, not to be racist if others are, not to perceive things simply because I’m sensitive and I’m black.”

Another question is why Mr. Wiley’s work focuses solely on young men, when many of the textiles on view were made by women, and, as the catalog informs us, one of the best-known Israelis of Ethiopian descent is a female singer named Hagit Yaso, who won last year’s edition of an Israeli show similar to “American Idol.”

Part of the answer is that Mr. Wiley has generally painted preening young men, and there is a strong homoerotic element in his work that is glossed over here.

It’s not necessary to label him as a gay artist — or an African-American one — to understand or appreciate his work. And yet this omission speaks to the way Mr. Wiley has been packaged: as a slightly titillating but not too radical artist whose work nods toward racial and sexual taboos, but is safe enough to be shown just about anywhere. (This is reflected in the paintings themselves, which look particularly bland and factory-produced when viewed up close.)

Perhaps the greater problem is that Mr. Wiley’s work gains its currency by leaning on hip-hop for cultural authenticity, but veers away from what gives that medium its extraordinary power. In Mr. Wiley’s hands, one of the most vital and viral idioms of the last quarter-century becomes safe and palatable, a domestic product that has been successfully exported around the globe and re-enters American art as fashion or style, largely stripped of its political and emotional charge and dressed up with extraneous decorative motifs.

Just as music critics have complained of hip-hop’s becoming a corporatized global commodity, Mr. Wiley can be accused of using it to neutralize differences and difficulties like those cited by Mr. Mashasha in the catalog. And it is those very difficulties that we rely on art to broach.

“Kehinde Wiley/The World Stage: Israel” continues through July 29 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street; (212) 423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org.

Christieís Images, Ltd.

“Chinquapin, 1967” by Forrest Bess shows how he was influenced by his surroundings on the Gulf of Mexico.

The art of Forrest Bess (1911-77), like that of Vincent van Gogh, may be in danger of being overtaken by his life story. Especially now, when the work of this eccentric visionary painter — who spent the bulk of his maturity as a fisherman on the Gulf of Mexico, living on a spit of Texas beach — is having an especially intense New York moment.

An Eccentric World

The current Whitney Biennial includes a show within a show of 11 Bess paintings, organized by the sculptor Robert Gober; it proffers Bess as a kind of foundational artist of our time. And an additional 40 of his paintings can be seen in “A Tribute to Forrest Bess,” an exhibition at Christie’s that is occasioned by a private sale of those works for a single seller. (It makes for the rather uneasy sight of an auction house acting like a commercial gallery handling what is tantamount to an artist’s estate.)

The facts of Bess’s life are nothing if not sensational. They include isolation, poverty, recurring visions — Bess said that he merely copied motifs that had appeared to him in dreams since childhood — and even self-mutilation. In the late 1950s, convinced that uniting the male and female sides of his personality would guarantee immortality, Bess attempted to turn himself into what he called a “pseudo-hermaphrodite” through two acts of painful self-surgery that yielded a small vaginalike opening at the base of his penis.

 

Inside the show were walls of sceney photographs, a re-creation of one of Haring’s installations at Performance Space 122 and another blast of music (accompanying a slide show of his famous subway drawings). It looked as if the museum had simply repackaged the mythic Haring — club kid, Warhol protégé and maker of friendly street art — for a younger generation, glamorizing the permissive culture of downtown New York in the 1970s and ’80s.

It has done that, stopping well short of Haring’s death from AIDS-related complications in 1990, at 31. But within the exhibition’s party atmosphere other Harings emerge in early drawings, collages and journals, and, especially, on video. And each one is just as relevant, to young artists today, as the figure celebrated in shows like last year’s “Art in the Streets” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and on the reality television series “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.”

Organized by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and the Kunsthalle Wien in Austria, this show includes equal quantities of works on paper and rarely seen archival objects (about 300 pieces in all). Also here are seven videos, a medium Haring took up as a student at the School of Visual Arts but later abandoned.

He shouldn’t have. He was great at it from the get-go. In his first video, “Painting Myself Into a Corner” (1979), a spry and shirtless Haring bops along to Devo as he works on a large drawing at his feet. He’s simultaneously a Bruce Nauman testing the limits of a confined space and a Jackson Pollock hovering over the floor. In “Phonics” and “Lick Fat Boys,” both from 1980, he plays games with language: breaking words into phonemes and rearranging them, physically with letters on a wall and orally by recitation.

These works sound dry but aren’t. Neither is “Tribute to Gloria Vanderbilt,” in which Haring makes eyes at — and eventually makes out with — the camera while dancing spastically to a New Wave beat. One of the little gems of the exhibition, this piece does double duty as a dig at oversexed advertisements for designer jeans and an exuberant expression of queer identity.

The notebooks provide more evidence of Haring’s interest in linguistics and semiotics. The words from “Lick Fat Boys” reappear as poems, puzzles and anagrams, alongside studious jottings about Roland Barthes and the information theorist Abraham Moles.

In these books Haring also formulated his own theory of spatial relationships. “Shapes that contain no inner components of positive/negative relationships will function better with other shapes of the same nature,” a part of it reads.

And in his drawings he put those ideas into practice: first in a series of 25 individual Tetris-like shapes in red gouache, and later in his interlocking forms made from wriggling lines of Sumi ink on large scrolls of paper. The largest and most striking of the examples on view (“Matrix,” from 1983) generates unlikely synergies among pregnant women, U.F.O.’s, clocks, televisions, men with dog heads and crawling babies.

Some of the earlier works remind you that Haring started out, in Kutztown, Pa., as a cartoonist. In the silly series “Manhattan Penis Drawings” (1978), the World Trade Center appears as two phalluses. But other drawings from that same year evoke pre-Columbian art, Paul Klee, Stuart Davis and the Swiss outsider Adolf Wölfli.

Interspersed with the works on paper is plenty of archival material, which isn’t just there for ambience. It makes the point that Haring was a social-media savant in a Xerox and Polaroid age, distributing his art in the form of buttons, fliers and graffiti. (The Keith Haring Foundation is picking up where he left off, posting pages from Haring’s journals on its Tumblr account.)

In 1980, for instance, he photocopied and pasted around the city provocative collages made from cut-up and recombined New York Post headlines. One reads, “Reagan Slain by Hero Cop”; another, “Pope Killed for Freed Hostage.”

More famous are the chalk drawings he made in subway stations, on the sheets of black paper that covered old advertisements. The Brooklyn show ends with an entire gallery of them, though the accompanying slide show of photographs by Tseng Kwong Chi preserves more of the original, semi-illicit context.

At this point you will either have succumbed to the blaring punk and New Wave soundtrack — compiled by DJ Scott Ewalt and available as an iTunes playlist — or fled the galleries altogether. The show was organized by Raphaela Platow, the Contemporary Arts Center’s chief curator; the Brooklyn Museum’s nightclublike presentation has been supervised by its project curator, Tricia Laughlin Bloom, and Patrick Amsellem, a former associate curator of photography.

My advice: Go, and enjoy the party. Relive the Paradise Garage, if you are old enough to have been there; celebrate the progenitor of Banksy, if you weren’t. But keep an eye out for the other Harings: the theory head, the video whiz, the impresario, the cartoonist from Kutztown.

“Keith Haring: 1978-1982” continues through July 8 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.

 

Of all the important private art collections in Miami -- and there are many -- the Rubell Family Collection has long been one of the biggest and the best known. Founded by Don and Mera Rubell and today including son Jason in the collecting activities, the sprawling, 45,000-square-foot exhibition space was a Wynwood pioneer when it opened in 1993.

Thanks to the Rubells, Miamians have been exposed to some spectacular, world-class art that we otherwise might have missed. One of the best examples of this was the superb 30 Americans show that opened for Art Basel Miami Beach in 2009, which highlighted the works of 30 African-American artists, both emerging and established, in a unique, cohesive, informative survey. Those 30 moved on to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., where the president visited it, and opened on March 16 at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Va.

This year’s exhibit, American Exuberance, is much larger, and maybe as a consequence not as tight in its delivery and thematic thread, intended to convey the changing American condition over several decades. Many of the 190 artworks from 64 artists — both Americans and foreigners who live here — are recent acquisitions to the collection, with 40 of them made in 2011 alone. Rather than trying to follow the rather broad concept, it may be most worthwhile to concentrate on these new works, as where the Rubells go in collecting, others soon follow.

Another way to divvy up this large show would be to tour it under the theme “The Exuberance of Los Angeles Art,” as almost every other work seems to have been made by an artist who calls that West Coast hotspot home. (In fact, another great show of the Rubells from several years ago, called Red Eye, was all about L.A. artists.)

One of those is Richard Jackson, who has created the wild and colorful introductory installations to the exhibit. He has splashed the walls, floor — and in a great touch, even the drinking fountain — in the first room with bright yellow paint, while covering other surfaces with canvases in similarly vibrant primary colors. In the middle is a stainless steel sculpture, called “Upside Down Duck General,” which is, indeed, an upside-down duck.

In a second room, the color and light are outrageously intense; orange light floods in from windows and a door to a deep blue room, in which a mannequin woman, also drenched and dripping in blue, sits at a desk. Jackson made both these rooms for the show, and they make an immediate, sensational impression.

One room is dedicated to popular L.A. artist Sterling Ruby, who has four, gigantic spray-painted canvases, abstractions that nonetheless evoke layers of sediment, or horizons, in their horizontal composition. Gigantic is not an exaggeration; standing in front of one of these is simply engulfing.

It is nice to stumble (although hopefully not literally) across the work from Mike Kelley, a member of the influential Cal Arts group that includes another major player in this exhibit, John Baldessari. Kelley’s piece consists of some colorful throw rugs and found stuffed animals. In a death that shocked the arts world, Kelley took his life this past Feb. 1. Nearby is sculptural installation from one of L.A.’s most controversial inhabitants, a familiar piece from Paul McCarthy. It’s of a father, a boy and a goat, and the disquieting proximity of the boy behind the goat gives it a McCarthy signature.

Of all the important private art collections in Miami -- and there are many -- the Rubell Family Collection has long been one of the biggest and the best known. Founded by Don and Mera Rubell and today including son Jason in the collecting activities, the sprawling, 45,000-square-foot exhibition space was a Wynwood pioneer when it opened in 1993.

Thanks to the Rubells, Miamians have been exposed to some spectacular, world-class art that we otherwise might have missed. One of the best examples of this was the superb 30 Americans show that opened for Art Basel Miami Beach in 2009, which highlighted the works of 30 African-American artists, both emerging and established, in a unique, cohesive, informative survey. Those 30 moved on to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., where the president visited it, and opened on March 16 at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Va.

This year’s exhibit, American Exuberance, is much larger, and maybe as a consequence not as tight in its delivery and thematic thread, intended to convey the changing American condition over several decades. Many of the 190 artworks from 64 artists — both Americans and foreigners who live here — are recent acquisitions to the collection, with 40 of them made in 2011 alone. Rather than trying to follow the rather broad concept, it may be most worthwhile to concentrate on these new works, as where the Rubells go in collecting, others soon follow.

Another way to divvy up this large show would be to tour it under the theme “The Exuberance of Los Angeles Art,” as almost every other work seems to have been made by an artist who calls that West Coast hotspot home. (In fact, another great show of the Rubells from several years ago, called Red Eye, was all about L.A. artists.)

One of those is Richard Jackson, who has created the wild and colorful introductory installations to the exhibit. He has splashed the walls, floor — and in a great touch, even the drinking fountain — in the first room with bright yellow paint, while covering other surfaces with canvases in similarly vibrant primary colors. In the middle is a stainless steel sculpture, called “Upside Down Duck General,” which is, indeed, an upside-down duck.

In a second room, the color and light are outrageously intense; orange light floods in from windows and a door to a deep blue room, in which a mannequin woman, also drenched and dripping in blue, sits at a desk. Jackson made both these rooms for the show, and they make an immediate, sensational impression.

One room is dedicated to popular L.A. artist Sterling Ruby, who has four, gigantic spray-painted canvases, abstractions that nonetheless evoke layers of sediment, or horizons, in their horizontal composition. Gigantic is not an exaggeration; standing in front of one of these is simply engulfing.

It is nice to stumble (although hopefully not literally) across the work from Mike Kelley, a member of the influential Cal Arts group that includes another major player in this exhibit, John Baldessari. Kelley’s piece consists of some colorful throw rugs and found stuffed animals. In a death that shocked the arts world, Kelley took his life this past Feb. 1. Nearby is sculptural installation from one of L.A.’s most controversial inhabitants, a familiar piece from Paul McCarthy. It’s of a father, a boy and a goat, and the disquieting proximity of the boy behind the goat gives it a McCarthy signature.

PARIS — These days, the early 17th-century arches of Place des Vosges, the first planned square in Paris and one of King Henri IV’s pet projects, have been elegantly restored, and the linden trees in the garden neatly pruned. Yet when Maria Pergay opened a store there in 1960 to sell the furniture and silverware she had designed, it looked very different.

Philippe Pons

Maria Pergay’s career spans 55 years.

Enlarge This Image

Maria Pergay and Demisch Danant

Flying Carpet Daybed, designed by Maria Pergay in 1968.

Enlarge This Image

Maria Pergay and Demisch Danant

Chaise Anneaux (Ring Chair), designed by Maria Pergay in 1968.

“There were only four street lamps to light the entire square, and the pavements were so dirty,” she recalled. “Antiquarian book dealers sold books from wooden stalls in the arcades. There were three or four antique shops, and little workshops making jewelery. When I told my friends that I was opening a store on Place des Vosges, they said: ‘But why? No one goes there.’ But I loved this place so much.”