The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

—Meghan O'Rourke

Portrait by Mark Leong

FAR FROM HERE Artist Kehinde Wiley in his studio in Beijing, with works from his recent Armory Show. He lives part time in China, where he is able to paint free from distractions.

Painter Kehinde Wiley, 35, has enjoyed the kind of meteoric career that led Andy Warhol to quip about 15 minutes of fame. When he was a child, his mother, a linguist, enrolled Wiley and his siblings in art and literary programs as a way to help keep them safe in the rough South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where they lived. Early on Wiley gravitated toward the visual arts; when he was 12, he went to the U.S.S.R. on an arts exchange program, thanks to a foundation grant funded by financier Michael Milken, which ignited his interest in global politics.

After Yale's MFA program, Wiley got a coveted residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where he started establishing himself as an art-world luminary. Drawn in by the "peacocking" of Harlem street life, he began making luxurious, Old Master–influenced portraits of young black men in street clothes. Subsequently, in his "The World Stage" series, he broadened his focus to include large-scale portraits of young men from regions around the globe. His work references Titian as easily as it does pop culture, and addresses stereotypes of race and class, power and history.

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COURTESY OF KEHINDE WILEY

Wiley (far right) with his father (lower left), stepmother and half-siblings in Nigeria.

Unlike other artists, Wiley is not interested in art for art's sake. His work shares his lively sense of humor, and he believes it's important for African-American kids to see pictures of people who look like them on museum walls. And he continues to break down boundaries. He collaborated with Givenchy's Riccardo Tisci on his latest project, "An Economy of Grace," which will open at New York City's Sean Kelly Gallery this month. The two chose paintings from the Louvre to serve as inspiration for a series of portraits of African-Americans in couture gowns they designed. Wiley's work, now more than ever, pushes the lines between design and high art, reinventing classical portraiture for a contemporary world.

I think the central narrative of my early childhood had to do with growing up in a family where my mother had to raise six kids alone and do graduate school, while figuring out how to keep us from becoming products of the environment that we were living in. I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the '80s, back when it just wasn't a cool scene. But my mother had the foresight to look for a number of projects that would keep us away from the streets.

One that was particularly fortuitous for me was called the Center for U.S./U.S.S.R. Initiatives. It was a program set up to create an educational exchange between American and Soviet youths, with the idea that there would be a sort of ping-pong politics style—so that perhaps Soviet children would become envious of our way of life. We had 50 American kids hanging out in the forest outside of St. Petersburg. We had to study Russian for the year, and we did art in the forest.

Most of the kids came from very well-heeled families. But my tuition for the program was covered by the Milken Family Foundation. Milken's contribution to my early development was seminal, in the sense that it opened the whole world up to me—the possibility of seeing other cultures, and envisioning a world beyond the confines of Los Angeles, certainly. It brought up race and different modes of language and expression.

When my mother was working her way through college, we kids helped her run her junk store. It was like "Sanford and Son." We'd go through the streets finding things, and people would donate things knowing that she would take them; we'd be pulling in old furniture and redoing it and selling it to people on the streets. Most of the clientele was Spanish and we learned to speak Spanish on the streets. A lot of the furniture had this really heightened, decorative, late–French Rococo, old-lady sensibility that was really annoying to me at the time. But I remember in later years feeling an affinity with the hyperdecorative because it had a sense of nostalgia, in a way.

I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture. So, for example, in my last book of photography, the lighting was inspired as much by Tiepolo ceiling frescoes in Venice as it was by Hype Williams's early-'90s hip-hop videos—both having a sense of rapture, both having a sense of this bling. One more sacred, one more profane.

My father is Nigerian; my mother is from Texas and African-American. My father was the first in his family to go to university. He flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles in the '70s to go to UCLA, where he met my mother. They broke up before I was born, and he returned to Nigeria. She destroyed all the photos, and I'd never met the guy. So, when I turned 20, being fatherless, and also being profoundly interested in portraiture and wanting to know what he looked like physically, I decided to hop on a plane. Without the experience in Russia, I don't know if I'd have had the guts to do it because it was just so outsize for my life experience. I had a very youthful sense of invincibility. There were warnings all over the Internet from the State Department not to go into Nigeria at that time.

I went looking for one man in the most populated nation in all of Africa. I think there was a sense of curiosity, a psychic necessity. Just who is that other thing? What's my other half? And to stare this other guy in the face and be like, wow, that's weird.

I found him. But it was tough. All I knew was his first and last name and what he'd studied—architecture. I went from architecture department to architecture department looking for this guy. Finally, I took the ethnic route and went to the area where his last name comes from, to the major university there. His name's on the door of the architecture building. He heads the department.

I began a series of portraits of him. Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it. I studied how art-making practices have evolved in Africa, and how they've influenced art-making practices in the States and in Europe, specifically with people like Braque and Picasso, who were experiencing this feeling of the uncanny when looking at African art objects, which has a lot to do with historical European notions of the black body. And, conversely, I started going back to Africans thinking of themselves through the mirror of how someone else thinks of them.

All of those different perspectives and shattered ways of thinking were incredibly helpful to me. Later on when I was studying art theory, first in San Francisco and then at Yale, this sort of postcolonial postmodern condition of shattered identities and fractured selves, I didn't have to look very far. You know? This is not conceptual; this is actual life lived. In terms of how I started putting one foot in front of the other in my own art-making process, I didn't—my job was always to absorb and learn as much as possible and then just be in the world.

I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem and became the artist in residence there, and began this process of street-casting. And so in terms of designing a practice or designing a life, I've always had certain goals in mind: find the father, build the studio in this country, or what have you. But then you just let go and you allow radical contingency to take place, and that's where the magic sort of happens. You think you know what you're going to do when you hit the ground, but then the actualities show themselves.

The work is also about the power of letting go. So much of portraiture has to do with powerful people: powerful white men in powerful poses in big, powerful museums. So what happens when portraiture is about chance? Absolute chance? Someone who just happens to be trying to get to the subway one day now ends up in the painting that goes to one of the large museums throughout the world!

For the new project, Riccardo Tisci and I pulled some connections and got a private audience at the Louvre. The poses of the women, all of whom came from the New York metropolitan area, were taken from specific paintings that we saw in the Louvre, as were the gowns that we designed together. Couture is a symbol of wealth and excess, and that's what art has been. There's a certain guilt associated with it—desire and guilt—it's always more sexy when you feel slightly guilty about it.

I think one of the things that must happen in the work is for it to become class-conscious. You'll never be able to exist within this marketplace without recognizing that paintings are perhaps the most expensive objects in the art world. It's not going to change anyone's life. But what it does function as is a catalyst for a different way of thinking. The very act of walking into the Los Angeles County Museum and seeing Kerry James Marshall as a kid gave me a sense of, Damn, maybe I can do this. And, so, symbols matter. One of my interests is in having the work in as many public collections as possible. When I go to the Brooklyn Museum or the Metropolitan Museum and see my stuff, I'm aware that there are other young kids who don't have access to anything like it.

—Edited from Meghan O'Rourke's interview with Kehinde Wiley

By Tom Austin
Special to the Miami Herald
April 29, 2012, Page 3M in print edition

Jillian Mayer

At Miami Beach’s Bass museum of Art, the Miami-based Jillian Mayer - a bright young thing in local video art circles - is showing Erasey Page.  Mayer is adept at new media forums like YouTube: her short film I am Your Grandmother, with Mayer donning bizarre costumes, had more than a million views on the site.  Scenic Jogging, a video that entailed Mayer chasing projected screensavers in Wynwood, was in the Guggenheim show YouTube Play. 

Erasey Page, done in collaboration with graphic designer Eric Schoenborn, is contained in a small alcove by the rear entrance of the Bass.  In the interactive installation, Mayer bites the hand that feeds her.  She casts herself on a wall-mounted screen as an Infomercial star (“… Do you dislike the idea of space and cyber?”) and encourages viewers to type in any web address on the keyboard that’s part of the installation.  The respective web page comes up and then seems to fade away.

Despite all of the jokes, Mayer is taking on a seriously outsize ambition, the role of virtual - as opposed to real - life in the modern world.  The piece ends with Mayer’s salute to gallery-goers for casting off the yoke of the Internet, though Mayer, interviewed via telephone, is interested in “technological singularity, this whole movement to Internet immersion, where no lines are drawn between off-line and on-line life.  I have a natural fear of all that, but I like the idea of human upgrades.”

IF YOU GO:

When: 12pm-5pm, Wed-Su, through Aug. 12.
Where: Bass Museum of Art, 2100 Collins Ave., Miami Beach, FL
How Much: Adults, $8; students & seniors, $6
Info: 305-673-7530; www.bassmuseum.org 

By HELEN CHISLETT

Photograph by Henry Bourne

WORK THIS WAY Designer Tom Dixon outside his studio on Portobello Dock, with some of the pieces he launched at April's Salone del Mobile in Milan.

In a Venn diagram of superstar British designer Tom Dixon, he would occupy the space where design, industry, craft and technology all intersect. That intersection is most apparent at his mini empire at Portobello Dock, a converted Victorian wharf, which he moved into three years ago.

This deceptively peaceful spot, with tall windows overlooking the glittering Grand Union Canal, brings under one roof all that Dixon loves. There's a tea shop, Tart, where we sit on a sunny spring day to chat about his 30-year career over old-fashioned English tea, complete with vintage china teapots, loose-leaf tea and homemade cakes.

The Dock also houses Dixon's design studio and his eponymous shop, where he sells the lighting and furniture he makes next door. Then there is the restaurant, Dock Kitchen, which he co-owns with rising-star chef Stevie Parle, 26, who trained at the River Cafe and Moro. The eclectic menu is also a merging of worlds, drawing on traditional English cuisine, as well as food from Sri Lanka, the Middle East and Japan.

As for Tart, it is his first Dixon & Daughter enterprise, run by his elder daughter, Florence, and her business partner, Aoibheann Callely. I put it to Dixon that with his love of food, texture and music, he is something of a sensualist. "A sensibilist?" he recoils. "Absolutely not!"

Courtesy of Tom Dixon

The intricately patterned Etch light

You can blame that miscommunication on a mouthful of Tart's delicious meringue, but there is truth to the idea that Dixon prefers tangible pleasures to purely conceptual ones. Successful designers often inhabit a rarefied world, far removed from industry. Dixon, by contrast, is hands on. He may no longer weld the furniture himself—the process that first brought him to the design world's attention—but he visits every factory he uses and familiarizes himself with every stage of production.

There is nothing in his fashion sense—rumpled tweed jacket and jeans—to suggest his significance on the world stage of design, either. His whole demeanor is understated, as though he wished he could remain quietly anonymous. It is something of a wonder that Florence is now part of the Portobello Dock landscape; for years Dixon refused to say a thing about his home life. It goes without saying that he doesn't much enjoy the spotlight of an interview, but he is generous with his time when you do pin him down. The fact is, he is someone who would much prefer to be doing than talking.

Part French, part Latvian, but mainly British, Dixon, 53, was born in Tunisia but has lived in West London since he was a toddler. The home he shares with his wife, Claudia, and two daughters is not far from the Dock.

At 20, Dixon enrolled in an art-foundation course at Chelsea College of Art & Design but hated it. "Art was too conceptual for me," Dixon says. "I liked making things." Six months later a motorbike accident brought his formal education to an abrupt end and also resulted in a gold tooth that glitters when he laughs. When he recovered, Dixon went out to work—first as a technician, later as a junior animator—before embarking on a brief flirtation with the music business as the bass player in an early-'80s lineup called Funkapolitan (one album and three singles).

As strange a detour as it might seem in hindsight, Funkapolitan taught him more than Chelsea ever did. "There is a do-it-yourself attitude in the music business that I love," he says. "You learn that you don't really need any skill. You can teach yourself an instrument, promote yourself through leaflets, do your own production. All you really need is an attitude." In a funny twist of kismet, Portobello Dock is the former headquarters of Virgin Records, and Dixon's shop was once a studio where the Sex Pistols, Spice Girls and Rolling Stones strutted their stuff.

In 1983, Dixon began to express his own attitude by "tooling around" with welded, salvaged furniture. Soon the raw, rusty work began to attract the eye of the then tiny design community in London. "For me it was alchemy," he recalls. "I was amazed that I could take something that was regarded as rubbish and turn it into cash by the end of the day. I wasn't making much money, but there was a satisfaction and a joy to the work."

London gallerist David Gill remembers going to Dixon's first-ever show, "Creative Salvage," held above a hairdressing salon on Kensington Church Street. "To be honest, I thought it would be a waste of time, but it was so fresh I was really impressed," says Gill. "There was all this furniture made out of reusable metal pieces—old pots, pans and cooking utensils—but I remember thinking it reminded me of Roman shields. It had its own language and identity from the very first."

Not only was Gill among the earliest to commission pieces from the edgy, young talent, but he later collaborated with Dixon on a show at the Frankfurt Furniture fair called "Plastic Fantastic." Dixon transformed plastic salad bowls into geodesic domes and in doing so elevated them to high art.

By the late '80s, Dixon was no longer playing punk outsider to the big boys of design, but rather working with the Italian giant Cappellini, for whom he designed the iconic S-Chair in 1991. He founded his own company, Eurolounge, in 1994, and that same year cemented his position as an established designer with a stackable, four-pronged lighting piece called Jack, which he has described as "a sitting, stacking lighting thing."

The "thing" won him international renown. In 1998 he was appointed head of design at Habitat, then later creative director, staying on as a consultant even after founding his eponymous company in 2002 (he left Habitat in 2008). Ever the multitasker, he was also creative director of the renowned Finnish brand Artek from 2004 to 2009.

Dixon's own brand has yielded quite a few internationally lauded hits, among them the Mirror Ball light (2003), Fresh Fat Chair (2004) and Wingback Chair (2007). He enjoys stripping down forms, emphasizing silhouette or material, as with the voluptuous Plump sofa (2008), a streamlined, space-age version of the classic Chesterfield, or Bulb (2011), an overscaled, energy-efficient lightbulb designed to challenge the aesthetics of most CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) replacements.

His connection to Habitat has often prompted comparisons to Sir Terence Conran, who founded the homeware retailer and is famed for bringing modern design to the masses. And certainly Dixon is a democrat at heart. After all, this is a man who gave away 500 designer polystyrene chairs in Trafalgar Square six years ago. Known as the Great Chair Grab, it was sponsored by Expanded Polystyrene Packaging Group and floated the notion that furniture, like network television, was something you could give away by selling advertising.

He repeated the exercise this April with his metal Stamp Lamp during international design fair Salone del Mobile in Milan. It was there that Dixon orchestrated MOST, an ambitious multidisciplinary festival at the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia, which he called a "Glastonbury for design."

“I can see the irony of being driven to give away chairs when other people are selling them for a million dollars apiece”

The remarkable thing about this giveaway was that Dixon made all the Stamp pieces on site using radical laser technology, created with German company Trumpf. He is evangelical about the innovation's possibilities. "Stamp is the 2CV [Citroen's famously low-tech car] of design—very basic and crude—but I wanted to show the magic of designing, making and distributing all in one place," explains Dixon.

The Trumpf machinery allows a piece's size, shape and pattern to be changed to order, making mass customization possible. "It is like the rebirth of the medieval high street," explains Dixon. "In the future, people will tailor-make things for you at a local level and it won't cost that much." Indeed, it challenges the current acceptance of furniture being made halfway around the world and then shipped back at huge cost to the environment, and that's important. Though Dixon wears his eco credentials lightly, his crusade to make low-voltage lighting attractive is second to none, as illustrated by Luminosity, a collection of lamps, lights and shades that he also presented last month in Milan.

He is also well aware that we live on a planet full to bursting with consumer goods. "Each designer has to take his or her own stand on that," he says. "Back in the '60s, it was probably OK to design products that were about newness for the sake of it. I like to think my own work is more about durability and permanence, hence my experiment with cut-steel furniture, which came with a thousand-year guarantee. Or for that matter, the accretion-process chairs."

The latter is a reference to the fact that somewhere off a beach in the Bahamas, there is a colony of undersea chairs, not abandoned, but actually growing.

Dixon has harnessed a process known as mineral accretion—a tool of bioengineering—to subject the chairs to low-voltage charges of solar power that encourage the growth of limestone at something close to three times the usual rate. Once they have acquired a beautiful patina, he will fish them out and let us all share in the magic. He adds, "The scientist [Wolf Hilbertz] who developed this method intended to use it to develop bio concrete. You could literally grow cities in this way."

It's highly imaginative thinking for a designer who still feels some level of outsider status after all these years. He has always been half in and half out of the establishment, and is amused at times by how at odds his ideas are within the elitist field of limited-edition design. "I feel good about my own aesthetic, which is quite raw by comparison," he explains. "But I can see the irony of being driven to give away chairs when other people are selling them for a million dollars apiece."

He admits to never having had a master plan, "but things always seem to work out slightly better than I hoped they would." In truth, his optimism is founded. Backed by Swedish investment company Proventus, he has exported his name and designs to more than 60 countries worldwide. Dixon has weathered the recent stagnant economy, and even grown, increasing his retail presence in North America by roughly 50 percent over the past couple of years. And this month, while showing during New York Design week, from May 17 to 22, he will open a pop-up shop at 45 Bleecker Street, with online design hub Fab.com.

Perhaps not having a plan is an ideal strategy in a field that's always in flux. Certainly, Dixon has seen considerable changes during his career. "On the plus side, it is now universally recognized as a valid, even glamorous, thing to do," he says. "On the minus side, it is not used by people in government to make real change. The planet is full of problems, and who better to harness problem-solving brilliance than designers?"

Corrections & Amplifications
An earlier version of this article gave the incorrect address for the pop-up shop at New York Design week.

posted on April 27th, 2012 in Arts, Celebrity, Parties by seth.Credits: Seth Browarnik

Miami Beach, FL – April 26, 2012 - Bass Museum of Art celebrated its annual fundraiser “A Night at the Museum” on Thursday, April 26 with a private preview of “Charles LeDray: Bass Museum of Art.” Guests explored the new exhibition while enjoying hors d’oeuvres by TiramesU; cocktails & refreshments from Mandarine Napoleon, Kanon Organic Vodka and Societe Perrier; desserts by Stella’s Sweet Shoppe; and beats by Vida’s house DJ. Attendees were also introduced to an innovative silent auction of custom art experiences, including a studio visit and catered lunch with artist Carlos Betancourt and a private tour of WSVN 7 studios and dinner with Deco Drive anchor, Louis Aguirre. Guests included a select group of the city’s leading arts patrons and philanthropists, such as Silvia Karmen Cubina, event co-chairs Criselda Breene and Christina Getty-Maerks, George Lindemann, and Tara Solomon.

 

See all the pics by World Red Eye here: bassmuseumpres.tumblr.com

By ELLEN GAMERMAN

The figure at the center of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" has gone by many names: a fetus, a worm, a tadpole, a skull. It has been dubbed "the portrait of a soul" and "the face that launched 1,000 therapists."

   

 

One of the best-known images in modern art comes up for auction for the first time ever next week, with an $80 million estimate. Ellen Gamerman has details on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.

Now, for the first time in history it is something else: an auction celebrity.

"The Scream" will be on the block at Sotheby's on May 2, the highlight of the Impressionist and modern evening sale in New York. Sotheby's experts anticipate the work will fetch more than $80 million, the highest presale figure the auction house has ever set.

The androgynous wraith grasping its cheeks in dread along an Oslo fiord, created by the Norwegian artist in 1895, is an unpredictable trophy with little precedent, famous as much for the pop-culture spinoffs and parodies it has generated as it is for its artistry. One of four versions of "The Scream" that Munch created, this is the only one not in an Oslo museum and the first to ever come up at auction. Sotheby's is betting big on the work: The auction house could either take credit for selling one of the most expensive artworks ever at auction, or risk embarrassment if its expectations prove too high.

In a rare move, Sotheby's sent the work to private homes in Asia, North America and Europe so key clients could test whether the haunting image clashed with the rest of their art collections. The piece has been removed from its frame for certain serious contenders who wanted to stare at the icon nose-to-nose. The picture recently flew to Hong Kong for 48 hours so a top collector could inspect it in person in a private room at Sotheby's offices.

Potential buyers include European executives, Asian big-spenders and Middle Eastern sheiks. Among the names most often mentioned: the royal family in Qatar, which is building a museum empire and reportedly purchased Paul Cézanne's "The Card Players" for at least $250 million not long ago. Simon Shaw, head of Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art department in New York, noted fascination with the work in Japan, where "The Scream" is a particularly resonant image, possibly because Munch was influenced by Japanese prints.

The Many Faces of Munch's "The Scream"

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The Simpsons TM and 2012 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

"The Scream" has inspired many pop-culture mash-ups. Here, Homer Simpson swirls with existential dread.

Sotheby's expert Philip Hook estimates a pool of about 10 collectors. His personal theory: Collectors don't tend to spend more than 1% of their net worth on an individual artwork. That leaves "Scream" bidders at people worth $8 billion and up.

Buzz around potential buyers has included international collectors who have successfully stalked masterpieces in the past, like Geneva-based billionaire Lily Safra, who spent $104.3 million for Alberto Giacometti's sculpture, "Walking Man I," or American cosmetics executive Ronald Lauder, who paid $135 million in the private acquisition of Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" for his New York museum. Instead of a large pool of Munch aficionados, art-industry insiders anticipate that a prized work like "The Scream" would more likely draw interest from collectors with broad tastes in blockbuster art, a list that includes Russian industrialist Roman Abramovich and the Greek shipping heir Philip Niarchos. Representatives for the collectors declined to comment.

This month, more than 7,500 people viewed the piece over five days at Sotheby's in London. The artwork sat under glass about 7 feet behind stanchions, watched by security guards. About 350 collectors saw it more intimately at a reception, though Sotheby's took the cautious step of confiscating their Champagne before allowing them to approach the work.

Popperfoto/Getty Images

When he created 'The Scream,' Edvard Munch was in a state of despair: He was turning 30, had no money and was reeling from a disastrous love affair.

Top clients have visited the picture privately at Sotheby's in New York, sitting in high-backed chairs set a short distance from the work inside a locked room. "One of the world's great collectors said, 'I could sell all my pictures, put this on my wall, put my chair here with a cup of coffee and stare at it for the rest of my life and be happy,'" says Mr. Shaw.

The picture goes on wider display to Sotheby's clients in New York starting Friday. The auction house hired a design firm to create a spot-lit installation for the work in a 10th-floor space, covering up the skylights and curtains on nearby windows and allowing the picture to glow as if lighted from within. Though Munch wanted viewers of his work to act as if in church, reverent with hats in hands, plenty of people who have seen "The Scream" haven't been able to resist slapping both cheeks and opening their mouths in a silent "O."

Monaco art dealer David Nahmad says he might bid on "The Scream" if the action stays around $80 million, though not if it soars higher. It's a fraught investment, he says, arguing that the name "Munch" is not as instantly recognizable as others and the resale value is not guaranteed: "If I have the choice to buy a Picasso or a Munch, I would prefer to buy a Picasso," he says. "Everybody knows everything about Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Monet. If you go to somebody in South America and say there's a Munch to buy, he'll say, 'Who's he?'"

The version of the "The Scream" up for sale at Sotheby's is a bright mix of 12 different colors, with the skeletal character in the foreground sporting one blue nostril and one brown one. The third in a series created between 1893 and 1910, the work was created with pastel on rough board. Some art dealers view the pastel as a mark against the work, though others say the lines and colors are more electric than even those found in the painted versions. The picture offers another standout feature: its frame, inscribed with the original 1892 poem Munch wrote that is said to have inspired the work. In it, he describes walking along that fiord, "trembling with anxiety" and sensing "an infinite scream passing through nature."

Ahead of the sale, the auction house printed limited-edition hardcover books for top clients. It produced two videos promoting "The Scream" at auction, one shot on New York's Roosevelt Island to evoke the work's waterside setting, the other a promo with sped-up images of clouds in a blood-red sky set to a throbbing synthesizer score.

Munch wouldn't have necessarily minded such a mass-media campaign. The artist, whose work once was deemed so subversive parents were warned it could give their children chickenpox, was a master of savvy marketing. The Norwegian nicknamed "Bizzarro" early in his career was one of the first artists to charge admission to view his early works. He made the move in 1892 after the Kaiser gave a speech against his paintings in Germany. Munch wasn't making money off sales, but at least he could pocket the entrance fees.

When Munch created the first version of the "The Scream," the alcoholic and chain-smoking artist was in a state of despair: He was turning 30, had no money, was reeling from a disastrous love affair and was terrified that he would succumb to the mental illness that ran in his family, says Munch scholar Sue Prideaux. The artist placed his amoeba-like figure at a popular suicide spot on Oslo's U-shaped bay where passersby could hear screams from a nearby slaughterhouse and insane asylum, Ms. Prideaux says, adding that Munch's sister, diagnosed with schizophrenia, was housed in that asylum. One possible misperception about the work is the scream itself: many art historians say the character is not howling, but blocking out the sound of screams around him.

Art historians call "The Scream" Munch's reaction to Impressionism, which seemed to bore him—he complained it just showed people knitting or reading—and heralded in an era of Expressionism in which artists attempted to dissect their own psychological cores. Before creating "The Scream," Munch had been reading many of the same books and attending the same Paris hospital lectures as Sigmund Freud, says Ms. Prideaux. In the years before "The Scream," Nietzsche had famously philosophized that "God is dead," paving the way for modern explorations of alienation.

The image quickly caught the attention of the freethinking art crowd in Europe. To make the most of the excitement, Munch created black-and-white lithographs so the image could be printed in European magazines and sold individually. He refused to explain the work, further fueling public fascination.

Few Americans have seen "The Scream" in person: The version being sold at Sotheby's was last in the U.S. at Washington's National Gallery of Art in the early 1990s.

In recent decades, the skeletal figure has been reproduced everywhere from ice-cube trays to political posters. A symbol of universal angst, it graced the front of Time magazine's 1961 "Guilt and Anxiety" issue. In more recent years, it has found new life as an ironic mash-up, suggested in the "Home Alone" scream and copied in a cartoon of Homer Simpson as the tortured Nordic soul.

Director Wes Craven says he was first drawn to the howling ghost-face mask that became the star of his "Scream" movies because it reminded him of the Munch image, one of his favorite artworks. "It's a classic reference to just the pure horror of parts of the 20th century, or perhaps just human existence," he says.

Such global exposure has made the work a target. London bookies have offered 20/1 odds on this work getting stolen before the auction. Two other versions of "The Scream" were stolen from Oslo museums. In 1994, thieves brought a ladder to a window at the National Gallery on the first day of the Olympics in Lillehammer and took the work, leaving a note in its place thanking the museum for its lousy security. A decade later, masked gunmen entered the Munch Museum and nabbed "The Scream" and another Munch work. (Mars Inc., which used "The Scream" in advertising for dark-chocolate M&Ms, offered two million M&Ms for the work's return, though that candy reward has not yet been delivered per instructions by Norwegian authorities, according to the company.) Both works were eventually recovered.

Sotheby's has long been laying the groundwork for the Munch market, engineering eight of the top 10 Munch sales in recent years. "We have quite consciously and strategically attempted to build his profile and build a global marketplace," says Mr. Shaw. In 2008, Sotheby's sold "Vampire," a moody painting of a flame-haired woman kissing a man's neck, for $38 million, the artist's auction record. It went to an American after a contest against Russians and others, according to people familiar with the bidding.

But because so few Munchs have come up for auction, collectors don't have much of a sales history to rely on, which could hurt bidder confidence. "Fertility," a Munch pastoral scene that adorned a 2010 Christie's catalog cover, failed to sell at all.

New York art dealer David Nash, who ran Sotheby's international Impressionist and modern department for many years, says that though he expects the work to fetch a high price, he's still surprised by the auction house's "Scream" strategy. "There doesn't seem to be much justification for such a high estimate," he says. "They'd be better off to put a more realistic estimate and let the market determine what the final price is going to be."

Others are more bullish: Skate's Art Market Research, a global art market analyst, estimates the work will sell between $92.5 million and $123.4 million, a figure it arrived at in part by looking at sales of other famous works by artists such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. The standing record for a piece at auction was set in 2010, when Picasso's "Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust" fetched $106.5 million at Christie's. Auction houses keep raising the stakes: This spring, Christie's and Sotheby's Impressionist, modern and contemporary sales are sprinkled with works priced to sell for more than $20 million, estimates rarely ventured a decade ago.

The owner of "The Scream," Petter Olsen, a Norwegian real-estate developer and shipping heir, is trying to win big with the sale. He waived a price guarantee—an arrangement often used in the sale of high-profile items where the auction house assures the seller a minimum sum in exchange for a larger commission.

Mr. Olsen, who through Sotheby's declined to be interviewed, grew up with the work in the living room of his childhood home. It belonged to his father, Thomas Olsen, a patron and neighbor of Munch's in the tiny Norwegian town of Hvitsten. During World War II, Thomas Olsen hid this "Scream" and dozens of other Munch works in a remote hay barn to protect them from the Nazis, who were torching art they declared degenerate.

Over its lifetime, the picture has belonged to just three families. It was originally owned by a German coffee magnate, who probably commissioned the work. Mr. Olsen has said he is selling it in order to fund a museum of Munch's work in Hvitsten to open next year.

In recent years, the international spotlight has shown brightly on the artist. A Munch exhibit drew more than 486,000 visitors to the Centre Pompidou in Paris last year and opens at London's Tate Modern in time for the summer Olympics. Next year marks the 150th anniversary of Munch's birth, an occasion commemorated by a major joint Norwegian museum exhibition (the event has its own Twitter feed).

There may be a physiological reason for the visceral reaction to that figure with its cartoonish skull and gaping mouth. Harvard neurobiology professor Margaret Livingstone found in her research on macaque monkeys that neurons in the brain respond to exaggerated features—huge eyes or tiny noses—more than to common ones. "That's why I think a caricature of an emotion works so well," she says. "It's what our nerve cells are tuned to."

Munch enthusiasts see a simpler explanation for the picture's grip: "A scream is a very human thing," says Karen Nikgol, a co-founder of the Oslo contemporary art space NoPlace. "The inner sorrow or the inner anguish and inner pain, that's timeless."

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

A version of this article appeared April 27, 2012, on page D1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Selling 'The Scream'.

An installation view of “Frank Stella: Black, Aluminum, Copper Paintings,” at L&M Arts through June 2.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: April 26, 2012

The handsome show of Frank Stella’s early paintings at L&M Artscould not be better timed. Abstract art, especially of a Minimalist mien, is on the uptick right now, with a few too many young artists acting as if they have invented the wheel, especially where brushy or severely simplified monochromes are concerned.

 Perhaps this is to be expected. Art is not a science; it does not proceed in a neat, linear progression. Artists often circle back, picking up ideas that their predecessors left undeveloped and trying to push them further. Still, a blast from the past never hurts: the artistic present can never know too much about what has come before.

The rare museum-quality exhibition that is “Frank Stella: Black, Aluminum, Copper Paintings” is just that kind of blast. It features 13 of the adamant, quietly pulsing, exceedingly frontal paintings that Mr. Stella made in New York in the three and a half years after he arrived here in the summer of 1958, fresh out of Princeton.

This amounts to more early Stellas than have been exhibited in New York since the survey of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. They provide a heady sense of the first few fastest-moving years of his development, when he helped bring the Abstract Expressionist chapter of New York School painting to a close and lay the foundation for Minimalism.

On view are examples of the Black Paintings series, with which he announced himself to the New York art world in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1959 “Sixteen Americans” exhibition, as well as works from his Aluminum and Copper series, unveiled in his first and second solo shows at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1960 and 1962. All the paintings feature repeating bands or stripes of a single color applied to canvases that start out rectangular and end up emphatically shaped, resembling big letters. Also included is “Delta,” a wonderfully shaggy, black-over-dark-red predecessor of these more classic stripe paintings.

These works represent the cornerstone of Mr. Stella’s reputation, the Stellas whose historical importance, as with Picasso’s Cubist paintings, is most widely, if somewhat predictably, accepted. And just as the decimated forms of Cubism introduce an integration between image and surface, the Stellas here progressively articulate a new agreement between painting as image and as object. They hark back to a time when flatness was abstract painting’s primary goal, and the physical facts of the medium were starting to be endlessly parsed — beginning with shaped canvases — in a process that continues today. No artist’s work embodied these pursuits as rigorously as Mr. Stella’s; in the paintings at L&M he laid down the tracks that others followed.

But in this show you also see a young painter edging his way, with some setbacks, toward his first mature statements, making progress that is at times as much physical and technical as anything else. The unevenness and general handmade roughness of the Black Paintings is especially striking. Greatly influenced by Jasper Johns’s flag paintings, Mr. Stella sought an even more rigorous logic between physical and visual by using parallel bands of black that either reiterate or run diagonally to the edges of the canvas.

But the Frank Stella of the Black Paintings was not yet the Frank Stella who famously said, in 1966, “What you see is what you see” — the epitome of a literal, nothing-but-the-facts approach to the medium. Beyond their apparent logic, these early works are also broodingly Romantic, their mood underscored by titles that flirt with darkness, chaos and otherness.

“Bethlehem’s Hospital” takes it name from the London mental institution sometimes known as Bedlam. “Die Fahne hoch!” (“The Flag on High”) echoes a phrase from a Nazi marching song. The most famous title is “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Makes You Free”), the words that were splayed demonically above the gates to Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

Some of the Black Paintings are much stronger than others, with “Bethlehem’s Hospital” and “Arbeit Macht Frei” being especially murky. Their stripes, painted over black washes, are sometimes barely discernible; in certain areas they seem all but monochromatic, which gives them a youthful awkwardness and a reliclike, not-quite-alive aspect.

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“Frank Stella: Black, Aluminum, Copper Paintings” runs through June 2 at L&M Arts, 45 East 78th Street, Manhattan; (212) 861-0020, lmgallery.com.