By ANDREW JACOBS and CLARE PENNINGTON

Published: July 16, 2012

BEIJING — The frothy contemporary-art scene here has lost some of its ebullience in the three and a half months since a German art handler and a Chinese associate were detained on charges that they undervalued imported art to avoid customs duties.

Gallery openings are a bit more subdued, anxious art dealers have been keeping a low profile, and several wealthy collectors have been barred from leaving China while the investigation continues. Auction house giants like Sotheby’s and Christie’s have been asked to cooperate with the authorities in what has become a wide-ranging investigation.

“Lots of people here are not going into work, or they are only using junior staff at their offices and galleries,” said a Beijing gallery director who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the tension surrounding the issue. “They can’t arrest everybody, but everyone is still nervous.”

In the meantime Nils Jennrich and Lydia Chu, employees of the art-handling company Integrated Fine Art Solutions, languish in a Beijing jail on suspicion of smuggling, a crime normally associated with the illegal importation of drugs or arms. The charges carry a maximum of a life sentence.

Mr. Jennrich, 31, the company’s general manager and a German citizen, was taken away on the evening of March 30 during a raid of the business’s Beijing offices; hours later Ms. Chu, 29, its operations manager, was summoned for questioning. Mr. Jennrich’s family and colleagues have expressed concern for his health, saying he has been forced to share a cell with 11 others. During the first days of his detention, they added, he was interrogated for 36 hours straight, a violation of Chinese law.

“It’s a living nightmare,” said Mr. Jennrich’s fiancée, Jenny Dam, who said the couple had planned to marry in May.

No trial date has been set.

The detentions have put a spotlight on the mercurial Chinese legal system and raised questions among collectors and industry executives about the potential pitfalls of China’s fast-growing art and antiques market, which last year surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest, according to the European Fine Art Foundation. The crackdown, industry professionals have warned, could dissuade Chinese collectors from bringing home art purchased abroad.

Some have privately questioned the government’s motivation, noting that Integrated Fine Art Solutions has handled the work of Ai Weiwei, the maverick artist who has earned the government’s wrath for his criticism of the ruling Communist Party. Others have suggested that the case is aimed at taking down a foreign-owned company to clear the way for a well-connected domestic player that recently began lavishly investing in the art-handling business.

“China is supposed to be a lot more integrated with the world economy,” said Jonathan Schwartz, chief executive of Atelier 4, an art logistics company based in New York. “The decision to throw someone in jail tells you that China is not really playing by similar rules as the other large nations that are dealing with culture and transit.”

The Foreign Ministry has declined to comment on the case.

Speaking from Hong Kong, the chief executive of Integrated Fine Art Solutions, Torsten Hendricks, dismissed the allegations — that the accused tried to help buyers avoid $1.6 million in import duties — saying his company does not get involved in art valuation.

“We forward, store and install artwork, that is all,” said Mr. Hendricks, who was also questioned in Beijing by the authorities but was later allowed to leave the mainland. “Determination of value, the statement of this value, is not our responsibility.”

Legal experts said that art handling firms simply work with the values provided by their clients, but that Chinese law is murky on whether individuals employed by shipping companies can be held liable for undervaluing a work.

Nancy M. Murphy, a lawyer at the Beijing firm Jincheng, Tongda & Neal, who is advising Mr. Jennrich’s family, said she hoped that the authorities would take into consideration whether the accused personally profited from undervaluing the work in question.

Ms. Chu’s fiancé, Benoit Granier, said he found the accusations hard to fathom, given Ms. Chu’s modest life, including sharing an apartment with five others. “She’s just trying to find a way in her life,” he said.

Setting aside questions of Mr. Jennrich’s and Ms. Chu’s culpability, several industry experts say the practice of undervaluing art and antiques on Chinese customs forms is widespread. The International Convention of Exhibition and Fine Art Transporters, a trade organization, noted the problem last year in a newsletter and suggested that the practice was harmful to all involved. “There is no way around these regulations without breaking the law,” it wrote.

In China imported art is often levied with duties that can reach 35 percent of an object’s value. Many industry veterans complain of a customs process that is notoriously onerous.

International art experts acknowledge the difficulty of valuing contemporary art, noting that a wild jump in price at auction after a piece passes through customs does not necessarily suggest undervaluing at the border.

Ms. Murphy, the lawyer, said it took an experienced appraiser to know the difference between fraud and the vagaries of a white-hot art market.

She suggested that the arrests were aimed at sending a message to bigger players in the international art scene. “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey,” as she put it.

The crackdown has touched other companies and individuals. Officials have detained three Chinese citizens, including the editor of an art magazine and the chairman of an art investment company. A Chinese transport company, Noah Fine Art Shipping Agency, was forced to turn over a list of its clients, according to The Oriental Morning Post.

Given how lucrative the art market has become, Chinese authorities have a keen interest in reducing tax dodging. Last year China accounted for 41 percent of worldwide auction revenues and about 30 percent of the overall art and antiques market, according to artprice.com and the European Fine Art Foundation.

Karen Sanig, the head of art law at Mishcon de Reya, a firm based in London, said that customs authorities around the world often impose fines after accusations of undervaluing art but that they rarely use their full powers to detain suspects. “It is unusual for two agents from a shipping firm to be arrested,” she said.

Integrated Fine Art Solutions is a relatively small player in art shipping but it has high-profile clients, including the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art — one of China’s best-known museums — and it handles major international art fairs in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

A number of art professionals, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of drawing unwanted attention from the authorities, have suggested that the government may simply be trying to remove the competition as it prepares to enter the lucrative art-handling business.

Two weeks before the detentions, the state-owned Beijing Gehua Cultural Development Group presided over the groundbreaking for a free-trade zone in the capital that will include an advanced art-handling warehouse. According to the state news media, Gehua is investing $785 million in the venture.

There is little precedent for the case against Ms. Chu and Mr. Jennrich, although if the recent prosecution of a Belgian Sinologist accused of smuggling an ancient sarcophagus out of China is any indication, the punishment may be stiff. In 2008 the Belgian, Kurt de Raedemaeker, was convicted of illegally exporting the relic, despite his insistence that he had obtained the necessary government permits.

He received a life sentence, but after spending some time in prison he was allowed to serve his sentence in a Beijing hotel. The former Belgian ambassador, citing Mr. de Raedemaeker’s heart problems, called the punishment a “slow death sentence.” Mr. Raedemaeker, who was 48, died in March in his hotel room.

 

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: July 13, 2012

Two weeks after the unexpected departure of the chief curator from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, battle lines are being drawn over the direction of that influential but long-beleaguered institution.

 
John Baldessari, who’s leaving the museum’s board.

Jason Redmond/Reuters
 

 
Jeffrey Deitch, the museum’s director
Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

John Baldessari, a highly respected artist and a dean of the Los Angeles art world, announced on Thursday that he was leaving the museum’s board, partly as a result of the resignation of Paul Schimmel, the museum’s longtime chief curator and an architect of many of its most important shows.

Mr. Schimmel resigned under pressure in late June after months of increasing tension with the museum’s director, Jeffrey Deitch, a former New York gallery owner who took over in 2010 with a more pop-culture-oriented vision of the museum’s mission and a mandate to expand its audience.

Mr. Deitch was chosen as the museum was emerging from financial turmoil. And his selection was seen in the art world as an ideological shift: a demonstration of the increasingly blurry line between the commercial and museum worlds, of a growing desire among some museums to experiment with more populist programming, and of changing views about how younger audiences define art.

The first show that Mr. Deitch conceived after he arrived, a rapidly organized survey of the work of the actor Dennis Hopper, who was dying of cancer at the time, established a critical dynamic that has often been replayed. Christopher Knight, in a review in The Los Angeles Times, called the Hopper show mediocre, filled with the kind of “mostly listless art” that would not help to dig a serious institution out of its troubles.

“Art in the Streets,” a historical survey of graffiti and street art organized by Mr. Deitch, fared better critically and attracted more than 200,000 visitors during its run of almost five months in 2011, helping the museum to double its attendance that year to more than 400,000. And other shows initiated by Mr. Deitch have cut against a straightforward perception of him as showy impresario, including a current well-received exhibition of the Los Angeles artist Amanda Ross-Ho.

But four other board members have preceded Mr. Baldessari in leaving the board this year, and, in a letter to The Los Angeles Times this week, four nonvoting board members wrote that what they called Mr. Deitch’s “celebrity-driven program” was not the right way to make the museum relevant.

In a phone interview Mr. Baldessari said he had decided to step down from the board, which he had been little involved with since Mr. Deitch’s appointment, because he saw it as being pervaded by a “kind of entertainment mentality — this way of putting something up the flagpole to see who salutes.”

As an example of what he called an embrace of pop culture with too little critical distance, he mentioned a large exhibition being planned by Mr. Deitch that will explore the influence of disco culture on the visual arts and performance art.

Mr. Schimmel’s departure was a tipping point, he said, in which “MOCA was going to become something else, whether I liked it or not.” Of the museum’s overall direction, he added: “It also makes me think that I’m a dinosaur, and Jeffrey Deitch and his ideas may be the future. But I don’t like it.”

Mr. Deitch, who declined to comment about Mr. Baldessari’s stepping down, appears to have the continued strong support of the museum’s leadership. Maria Arena Bell and David G. Johnson, who are the board’s chairwoman and chairman, issued a statement on Friday, saying, “There is a paradigm shift happening today, and both art and its audience are changing.”

Mr. Deitch, they wrote, “came here to bring us into this new era, and we are 100 percent behind him and his vision for that.” Ms. Bell and Mr. Johnson added that they saw Mr. Deitch’s overall vision as a “balanced program,” with historical exhibitions, projects with established and emerging contemporary artists and “innovative exhibitions that engage the public in a dynamic way.”

Eli Broad, the collector and philanthropist whose foundation stepped in to save the museum from insolvency in 2008 after its endowment was used to pay operating expenses, continues to exert considerable influence over the museum’s decisions and has consistently supported Mr. Deitch.

But many curators and others in the art world have regarded Mr. Broad’s measure of museum success or failure with a degree of alarm. In an opinion piece in The Los Angeles Times after Mr. Schimmel’s departure, Mr. Broad wrote that over the museum’s history it had mounted a number of shows that cost too much and were attended by too few — a problem he described in precise accounting terms, citing exhibitions “exceeding $100 per visitor.”

Maxwell L. Anderson, the director of the Dallas Museum of Art, cautioned in an online forum recently that such a box office view of art patronage threatened to narrow the ambitions of museums.

“We have to change course to a research, education and experiential impact focus and away from obsessing about ‘the gate’ — which represents less than 5 percent of our revenue nationally,” Mr. Anderson wrote. “It’s up to museum professionals to change the topic and measure what we know matters, not what’s easy to measure.”

 

 

Librado Romero/The New York Times
Yayoi Kusama A retrospective of this Japanese artist’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art includes
paintings from 2009 and 2010.

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: July 12, 2012

“American” is an expandable category at the Whitney Museum of American Art, elastic enough to accommodate a retrospective of Yayoi Kusama, 83, an artist who, apart from a decade-plus stay in the United States many years ago, has spent all of her long life in Japan, where she was born.

It was during that American sojourn, however, when she lived as an immigrant in Manhattan, that she did her best-known work: eyelet-patterned abstract paintings, furniture bristling with soft-sculpture phalluses, and polka-dot designs suitable to any and every surface. So closely has her reputation rested on that New York stay that the last Kusama survey hereabouts, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998, never strayed beyond it.

So it’s been left to the Whitney to give a synoptic, transcultural take on her output, one that changes our view of its shape. By including material from the 1940s through the present, the show — which originated at the Tate Modern in London — demonstrates that Ms. Kusama made some of her most complex and personal art before she left Japan in 1957 and after she returned there, in a state of psychological crisis, in 1973, the future of her career uncertain.

As any account of that career will tell you, including those Ms. Kusama gives, crisis mode was the source of her art. She was born in the city of Matsumoto, a few hundred miles northwest of Tokyo, to an affluent family that owned a large plant nursery and seed farm. Her father, by her account, was distant, cool and a serial philanderer; her mother, embittered by marriage, was perversely abusive.

For whatever reason, she had hallucinations from a young age. She claimed that flowers spoke to her; that fabric patterns came to life, multiplied endlessly and threatened to engulf and expunge her. These neurotic fears were compounded by the grueling realities of World War II, when she was in her teens and had begun drawing and painting with ferocious concentration, clinging to art as a lifeline.

Her grip on it was more than firm: it was unrelenting and propulsive. With a boldness unusual in a young woman of her day, she left home, under a cloud of disapproval, for art school in Kyoto. There she customized academic styles to her own subversive ends. In the show’s earliest painting, “Lingering Dream” from 1949, she translates the traditional theme of a floral still life into a nightmare of withered limbs and vaginas dentata set in a blasted landscape.

Two dozen small drawings from the early 1950s that follow in the next gallery are among the exhibition’s highlights. Done in ink, watercolor, pastel and collage, they include references to vegetal, animal and cellular forms. At the same time, each work is abstract, the sum of repeated, labor-intensive details: fields of minute dots, clusters of radiant lines, networks of slug-shaped strokes.

Despite the micromanaged intricacy of the drawings, she turned them out fast and in bulk, establishing a rhythm of productivity she still maintains. She established other habits too, like having herself routinely photographed with new work. And the Whitney installation, overseen by the curator David Kiehl, opens with snapshots taken over several decades.

In New York in the 1960s her preference for documenting her art this way earned her a reputation as a narcissistic self-brander, though it might equally be taken as gesture of self-affirmation on the part of someone who suffered the threat of psychic obliteration. However you see the matter — and some people consider Ms. Kusama’s self-proclaimed psychosis little more than savvy self-mythologizing — the photographic image of her grave, guarded but oddly affectless gaze is integral to her art.

By the end of the 1950s she felt she had done what she could do in her homeland. And she knew that America was the place for an ambitious artist to go. In 1957 she flew to Seattle, where she stayed for a year before moving on to her ultimate goal, New York City. When she arrived, Action Painting and misogyny still dominated the scene. And Ms. Kusama, who had an instinct for undermining authority on its own terms, tackled both head on.

Right off the bat she produced abstract paintings on a king-size scale, but with gestures that, far from swaggeringly expressive, were all the same: tiny, linked curves of thick white paint laid down, one after the other, on a dark-stained ground. Four of these paintings add up to the show’s most compelling installation. From a distance they look like soiled blank walls. Up close they’re like sheets of openwork lace or rippling water or a raked garden.

She called them Infinity Net paintings and they were a hit with smart young artists and critics like Donald Judd, who saw in them something new being forged from something old, high art being conflated with craft, masculinity with femininity, individuality with multiplicity. As for Ms. Kusama, who at this point had little money, scant English and a visa about to expire, she posed for her customary photographs and moved on.

In the early 1960s she turned from paintings that looked like stitchwork to stitching sculptures — small, phallus shaped — from cotton-stuffed cloth. She attached hundreds of these tuber-size objects to ordinary furniture and everyday clothes to create bristling, smothering domestic environments — “Accumulations” was her term — that, among other things, mocked the possession-crammed, father-knows-best home that had become an American postwar ideal.

Yet in the same America, a bit later in the 1960s, she aligned herself and her art with a different set of ideals, those embodied in the call for peace, sexual revolution and tolerance for eccentricity of all kinds issued by the burgeoning hippie counterculture.

The counterculture was bent on shattering ethical givens to create a new order. Ms. Kusama’s work had always been made from individual elements joined together into a whole. As if in response to a dramatically breaking-apart time, she now made one visual element in her repertory, the polka dot, a kind of universal binder that united everything it touched — paintings, collages, films, fashions, political protests, orgiastic public performances — in a personal utopia, a Kusamaworld, with the impresario-artist its center.

In the New York City of the mid-’60s she and her art were everywhere. Newspapers clamored for photographs of her wearing dots, painting dots, mingling with the dot-covered nude dancers in street performances that were part protest, part circus.

The affirming visibility she had always craved was hers; at the same time she was vanishing into her art, becoming one with it. In pictures we see a rare sight: Ms. Kusama smiling.

Then, like the Summer of Love, it was all over. The social climate changed. Peace and love wilted under a blast of national anger and violence. Polka dots, like paper dresses, went out of style. Ms. Kusama, disoriented, went into retreat. Her art experienced the equivalent of a nervous breakdown, and she tried to find her way to a safe place.

The safe place turned out to be Japan. In 1973 she moved back permanently; in 1977 she took up residency in a psychiatric hospital (where she still lives) and built a large studio nearby where she could work daily. During these years she also started making small, enigmatic paintings and collages, with luminous colors blooming against nightshade-colored grounds. In touch and mood they’re very much like what she was doing before she came to America.

The Whitney show has a dozen such pieces. Some of the titles are morbid — “I Who Committed Suicide,” “Graves of the Unknown Soldier” — but the work is imaginative and individually inflected.

It looks restoratively alive.

It would be gratifying to report that she continued to move in this intimate, diaristic direction, but such was not the case. Perhaps she felt that her conservative country needed some shaking up. She probably needed some attention.

She resumed making stuffed-cloth sculpture, larger than before, but also, for some reason, less steroidal, more abstract, more ordinary. She continued to paint, but now in high-colored acrylics on canvas, on an amped-up scale. The show’s final gallery is hung, floor to ceiling, with recent examples, some pretty good, some pretty bad. The abundance seems calculated to make distinctions less obvious.

And she has stayed on the polka-dot path, most recently in designs for a collection of dot-patterned clothes and accessories — skirts, handbags, sunglasses — commissioned by Marc Jacobs of Louis Vuitton. Her compatriot, Takashi Murakami, received a similar commission in 2008, and his brand of profuse, decorative, acid-edged Pop owes a clear debt to Ms. Kusama. But then, many movements, artists and designers do, and always have, from Andy Warhol and Op Art in America in the 1960s to international Minimalists and Conceptualists of different stripes over time, to Damien Hirst and Rei Kawakubo today.

If aspects of Ms. Kusama’s work now come across as dated and thin, there is no doubt about her heroic, barrier-crashing accomplishment over the long haul. Her Infinity Net paintings and Accumulation sculptures are deservedly classics of global stature; her Japanese work of the 1940s and early 1970s are treasures still underknown. They are things to seek out and dwell on.

“Yayoi Kusama” continues through Sept. 30 at the Whitney Museum of American Art; (212) 570-3600, whitney.org.

 

July 11, 2012

New York is, famously, a city whose seen-it-all citizens are above doing double takes when celebrities walk by. Neither, as it turns out, do some of them raise an eyebrow at a six-passenger, 35-foot-long twin-engine airplane spinning above their heads. How I Roll, which has been somersaulting above Fifth Avenue at 60th Street for a few weeks now, is a monumental kinetic sculpture by the Italian artist Paola Pivi and, jaded New Yorkers notwithstanding, it’s remarkable.

The piece was commissioned by the Public Art Fund, and financed by several generous private donations, including my own. About two years ago, Public Art Fund curator Nicholas Baume and I created a small selection committee to commission a new artwork from a living artist. Joining us on the committee were independent curator Alison Gingeras and Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a former director of Public Art Fund. When Ms. Pivi’s name came up, we all knew we had a winner: she has never had a proper gallery show in New York and is mostly unknown in the U.S. In Europe, she has enjoyed considerable success for a unique style of conceptual art with a twist of absurdity: a leopard walking across a room of cappuccino cups, an alligator in a sea of shaving cream, a zebra standing in snow-covered mountains. Her decision to place a spinning airplane above Doris C. Freedman Plaza wasn’t altogether surprising, given her longstanding interest in large vehicles: she won early recognition in 1997 when she tipped over an 18-wheeler semi-trailer truck, but she has also posed helicopters upside down and leaned fighter jets against walls.

The time-and-money logistics of putting her airplane in place in New York were arduous and lengthy, and there were moments when it looked like the project would never happen. But Ms. Pivi has a magic touch: all the way from Anchorage, Alaska, where she’s lived for several years, she manages to convince people to realize her dreams. After more than two years of planning and engineering and the clearing of much red tape, the piece is finally installed for its two- month run (the piece was finished so late that it arrived four months into its six- month permit). Well, better late than never—I’m convinced it’s the most daring public artwork New York has witnessed in a very long time.

Shortly before she returned to Anchorage, I caught up with Ms. Pivi over lunch at Bergdorf’s. From the seventh-floor café’s windows, we had a bird’s-eye view of her extraordinary piece, and, after remarking that she loves the way a huge twirling plane that looks like it might easily fit in at an amusement park can also function as contemporary art, she recalled how she scraped together financing for her early projects, in the late 1990s. “My first major outdoor piece was a tractor-trailer tipped over on its side,” she said. Her day job as an aerobics instructor wasn’t sufficient to pay her art production bills. “I had to borrow the money from my uncle and my landlord. Fortunately the piece was a success and I managed to pay them back.”

In 2003, she got a show in New York—really, more of a micro-show, in the tiny Chelsea storefront that served as Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick’s Wrong Gallery. The display was short-lived. “I showed only a single piece, one of my bunches of pearls, but it was too heavy for the wall, and the landlord became afraid of the weight because it was hanging on the door to a boiler room, so they took it down after a single week.”

The idea for the spinning airplane came, she said, from “a vision I had.” As for its title, that came from her husband, Karma, a poet and musician who trained as a Tibetan monk. Ms. Pivi insists that “art has no specific meaning” and that she’s “not trying to say more than what you see,” but how, in a city like New York where everyone is always on the go in all manner of vehicle, could I not read into her artwork my own question, “where are we really going?”

“I am not commenting on New York,” she said. “I am commenting on man and machine, time and beauty. The piece is about transcending limits.” 

Isn’t it also about the failure of progress ? “No. … The making of the artwork is huge progress, a big move forward.”

While she wouldn’t divulge to me what inspired the suspended airplane, Ms. Pivi did agree that, as a civilization, we are not exactly moving forward. “Western society overall is indeed going in the wrong direction,” she said. “For example, they don’t stop trashing the ocean. Think about all the trash; where I live in Alaska we pay only $65 a month for garbage removal, but that’s not the real price. The real price would take into account the impact this has on the planet. This garbage will stay for years; no one thinks to calculate the real long-term cost this has to the planet.”

Bernice Steinbaum — sporting giant, playfully baroque Prada eyeglasses and Chinese-inspired couture — is not her usual wisecracking self this afternoon. In a few days, she’ll shut down her two-story gallery, wedged between Wynwood and its chugging art scene and the increasingly tonyDesign District, now with Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Bulgari and Hermés on the way.

“I’m old, baby. I’m 70. I’ve been having lots of second thoughts about closing. But it’s time to recreate myself. And you only live once. And I suspect if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it,’’ she says about her decision to retire from full-time art dealing.

The still young gallery scene in Wynwood has had its casualties. For all of the buzz about the neighborhood’s rebirth as an art hub, there is no denying Miami still has a way to go before it catches up with deeper, more established art markets. The 10-year-old Art Basel Miami Beach, the most important contemporary art fair in the country, has done plenty to bolster the city’s cultural evolution. But sustaining year-round enthusiasm for art buying has been a struggle for both serious galleries and the upstarts. And recently, a few local artists, among them rising star Jen Stark, and the internationally-successful Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III of the collaborative FriendsWithYou, decided to bail for the more mature, lucrative art capital of Los Angeles.

But Steinbaum says her gallery has remained prosperous and that her decision to sell the property, which she bought in 1998 for $290,000 according to property records (assessed value in 2011 was nearly $1 million,) had nothing to do with the ups and downs of Miami’s art scene.

Two years ago, she lost her husband Harold, a retired physician. And for Steinbaum, that changed everything.

“Our marriage was 49 years in duration. I’m still reaching out to his pillow,” she says. “I had a wonderful life with him. In my naiveté, I thought this would go on forever. How silly. When someone so close to you dies, you are reminded of your own mortality. I want to spend more time with my grandchildren. I want to go to the mall. I want to watch Days of Our Lives – is that what that soap opera is called?”

In 2000, when Steinbaum opened her gallery on the corner of 36th Street and North Miami Avenue after a successful 23-year run in Manhattan, there wasn’t much but dust flying off a neighboring 56-acre rail yard that no one imagined would one day sprout into the happening Midtown Miami. The Design District was a desolate if historic collection of low-slung buildings, some housing furniture and fixture showrooms, others waiting out the tumbleweeds. Wynwood, now home to more than 60 galleries and private collection spaces plus an ever-expanding compilation of murals by some of the world’s most important graffiti artists, was nothing but a rough patch of the city known for its early 1990s race riots.

But the New York-born Steinbaum, who moved to Miami to live near her three children who had landed careers here, saw only possibility.

“When I bought the building it was crack-infested,’’ she says. “There were no other galleries here yet. And while I understood that a gallery has to be in an area where other galleries exist, you have to be able to do more than sell. You have to have exchanges with artists. And there were already artists who had studios nearby. I was guaranteed they would come. Artists have an insatiable curiosity. ‘’

Continue...See full article via miamiherald.com

Photographs courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, at the Guggenheim Museum, with portraits here from Belgium, Croatia, England, Poland and Ukraine, as well as New York and South Carolina. More Photos »

 

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: July 5, 2012

Rineke Dijkstra has enormous faith in the power of two things: youth and the camera. In her best work this 53-year-old Dutch artist uses photography and sometimes video to coax out the emotional subtleties and raw energy that are special to children, adolescents and young adults, with grave, revelatory and sometimes ecstatic results.

 

At other times her portraits are more opaque, which can yield another kind of magnetism: We see pictures of resistance to photography in which Ms. Dijkstra’s subjects hold on to their secrets, showing us a more armored youthful vulnerability.

Both kinds of images can be found in Ms. Dijkstra’s richly affecting 20-year midcareer survey at the Guggenheim Museum. Organized jointly with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — and overseen by the curators Sandra S. Phillips of that museum and Jennifer Blessing of the Guggenheim — it brings together more than 70 color photographs and 5 video works. They create an engrossing meditation on the anxieties, pride and tumult of youth and the emergence of the self, and also on the degree to which the camera can capture these rites of passage.

Ms. Dijkstra studied photography at art school in Amsterdam and spent a few years working commercially, taking corporate portraits and images for annual reports — activity that left her frustrated. She felt that her subjects remained hidden behind social and professional masks and habits of self-presentation, while she sought a greater emotional intensity.

A serious injury gave Ms. Dijkstra needed time to think: five months in bed followed by physical therapy that culminated in swimming. One day in June 1991, toward the end of her recovery, she photographed herself immediately after swimming a grueling 30 laps. She thought that fatigue would lend the photograph an emotional immediacy. It did.

That self-portrait, which shows the artist in a dripping bathing suit, looking winded and slightly bowed but staring defiantly at the camera, is in the show. Drawing from traditional portraiture and postmodern setup photography, it signals the beginning of Ms. Dijkstra’s work as an artist, in particular her tendency to photograph the young, who are less practiced at self-presentation.

Echoing the swimming pool image, she began photographing teenagers in similar moments of physical exposure, in swimsuits on the beach. She then sought out situations of genuine stress or momentous change, as in her large head shots of young Portuguese toreros just after emerging from the bullring, their faces bloodied and garments torn, their eyes glowing with triumph and relief; or her full-length photographs of dazed young mothers standing naked with their newborns in their arms, like no-frills, modern-day Madonnas.

Ms. Dijkstra is member of a prominent generation of European photographers that includes Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff, all Germans. But it is often said, and it is true, that her work is less glamorous and more human and frankly expressive than theirs.

Moreover, Ms. Dijkstra uses photography in a way that few of her contemporaries do: as a kind of pivot between portrait painting and reality — that is, between completely hand-formed and therefore fictive pictures of real people and real people themselves. Her photographs adopt some formal aspects of painting, but their subjects are also much more present and unmediated in realistic detail and emotional mood.

The pivoting nature of Ms. Dijkstra’s images is clear in the first gallery of the Guggenheim show, which is distributed somewhat awkwardly through four of the museum’s tower galleries adjoining the rotunda. It begins with an imposing selection of the beach portraits (1992-94) that established Ms. Dijkstra’s reputation: the full-length, nearly life-size color photographs of teenagers and slightly younger children taken at ocean’s edge in the United States, Poland, Britain, Ukraine and Croatia.

The monumental isolation of the figures is enhanced by low-angle shots, along with frontal poses and the austere, slightly abstract background bands of beach, water and sky, all of which echo the full-length portraits of Goya, Hals and Manet. This sense of form and formality contrasts markedly with the pictures’ contemporary casualness — the exposed flesh and intimations of fun and sun — even as it is confirmed by the prevailing seriousness and subtle anticipatory anxiety.

Some subjects, like a Ukrainian youth in a red Speedo-type swimsuit, are rawboned and angular; they have not grown into their bodies. A tall, lanky girl on a Polish beach has full hips but a flat chest; her pale green bathing suit is wet only up to the waist, suggesting the upward progress of puberty. A more mature blond girl in a silky orange two-piece in Hilton Head Island, S.C., has mustered makeup, jewelry and an elaborate hairdo worthy of a local teenage beauty contest.

Speaking about the beach portraits in an interview, Ms. Dijkstra hit the nail on the head when she said, “They showed what we don’t want to show anymore but still feel.” Looking at these pictures, we understand that the emotional vulnerability of youth is not so much outgrown as hidden.

Time, change and the lack of change are among Ms. Dijkstra’s themes, which she often emphasizes by photographing the same person over time. In a series of seven half-length portraits shot over three years, we track the maturation of a teenager named Olivier, starting with two images from July 21, 2000, the day he joins the French Foreign Legion, has his head shaved and dons fatigues. Over the next five images, as he appears in uniforms or sweaty T-shirts, his expression remains amazingly, almost frighteningly, constant and, in a way, young, even as he hardens and fills out, progressing from boy to man.

A fuller transformation is revealed in the same gallery by a series of 11 images taken between 1994 and 2008 that follow a young Bosnian refugee named Almerisa into adolescence and beyond, to motherhood. Always shown seated in a chair, Almerisa becomes tall and gangly, then womanly and, according to some writers, more assimilated.

More transfixing, however, are the subtle and not so subtle changes in her face and, it seems, her attitude. As she tries out different makeup and hair colors, her visage gains a palpable brittleness, becoming slightly common. In the final image she is shown with her infant; corny as it may sound, her face has regained some of the softness apparent in the first images from her childhood.

In Ms. Dijkstra’s videos the passage of time is, as might be expected, even more present, but in remarkably different ways. At one end of the spectrum is the near motionless quiet of “Ruth Drawing Picasso,” a wonderful six-minute portrait that may be as close to still photography as video can get but is much more revealing.

It shows a young schoolgirl seated on the floor of the Tate Liverpool completely absorbed in copying a Picasso painting (that is never shown) into her sketchbook. In her subtle shiftings of gaze, expression and position, Ruth comes across as an immensely likable, self-sufficient child whose existence brightens your view of the future.

In contrast to Ruth’s stillness is the sometimes ecstatic energy found in Ms. Dijkstra’s videos of teenagers in dance clubs: a two-channel projection from 1996-97, “Buzz Club, Liverpool, UK/Mystery World, Zaandam, NL,” and the four-channel installation “The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee), Liverpool, UK,” from 2009.

In both Ms. Dijkstra once more presents her subjects in formally controlled circumstances, against white seamless backgrounds and shot mostly at three-quarter length. In “Buzz Club” the subjects mostly hang out: They smoke, chew gum and drink beer (often simultaneously) while swaying to the music and largely ignoring the camera. But one young woman in a white dress that reveals her midriff is an exception; as the music’s beat becomes irresistible, she locks eyes with the camera and dances her heart out, to riveting effect.

Her generous performance may have inspired the “Krazyhouse” video, for which Ms. Dijkstra invited selected clubgoers to dance before her camera to their favorite music. Again, their performances vary greatly in generosity or, put another way, in the degree to which the music (and the camera) is resisted or surrendered to. But when they cut loose, as do Simon and Dee, it is hard not to be enthralled, and grateful to Ms. Dijkstra for capturing such powerful flashes of human potential.

“Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective” continues through Oct. 8 at the Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street; (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org.

 A version of this review appeared in print on July 6, 2012, on page C19 of the New York edition with the headline: What’s Hiding In Plain Sight.

By TED LOOS

Published: June 28, 2012

SOME time in the mid 1970s Dorothy Lichtenstein stopped by her husband’s studio on the Bowery one day after lunch, expecting to find him at work on a new painting.

 But instead of creating, the Pop master Roy Lichtenstein was intent on an act of destruction.

Using a matte knife, Lichtenstein — who had long been a household name for his Benday dot paintings of the 1960s — was slashing away at several earlier works, small and colorful abstractions dating to the late ’50s.

“He had dug them out of somewhere and was just cutting them up,” Ms. Lichtenstein recalled recently. “So his assistant and I yelled, ‘Stop!’ ”

They managed to grab a few of the paintings and tucked them away. Now three of them, lent by Ms. Lichtenstein from her large trove of her husband’s works, are appearing in “Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective,” a major exhibition of work by the artist, who died in 1997, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago until Sept 3.

“In a way I’m hesitant to lend them since Roy was destroying them,” Ms. Lichtenstein, 72, said, seated in the living area of the large West Village complex, created from several buildings, that serves as her New York residence and also houses her husband’s last studio and the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, which she started to preserve the legacy of her husband, whom she married in 1968.

Ms. Lichtenstein added that she assumed he simply wasn’t happy with the early pieces, but that they may round out the public’s perception of his work.

“I think it’s good to have them there,” she said. “He wasn’t someone who suddenly emerged fully formed in 1961. He had a somewhat tortured career as an artist before that. He used to describe putting his works on the roof of his old car, driving in from Ohio and going from gallery to gallery.”

Merely by saving them in the first place, Ms. Lichtenstein helped shape the Chicago show, which features more than 170 works and will eventually travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Tate Modern in London and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

But her influence is felt more pervasively too, since she lent dozens more works for the exhibition from her personal holdings, which number in the hundreds. And the foundation, of which Ms. Lichtenstein is the president, also lent pieces to the show.

Flipping through the catalog and referring to the lender identifications, she said cheerily, “Where it just says ‘private collection,’ that’s usually me.”

The organizers of the retrospective said that Ms. Lichtenstein’s participation was crucial.

“The biggest thing for us in the beginning is that she blessed this project,” said James Rondeau, chairman of the contemporary department at the Art Institute, who organized the show with Sheena Wagstaff, chairwoman of modern and contemporary work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “We wouldn’t have been able to move ahead without it.”

“A lot of people have come to her and wanted to do this,” he added. “Sometimes she has encouraged smaller shows, but nothing on this scale.”

Ms. Lichtenstein, who spends much of her year in Florida and the Hamptons, confirmed that there is no shortage of requests to lend crossing her desk. She often parts with one or two pieces here and there.

But she had been feeling that her husband was due for a “really major show”; his last full-on retrospective was in 1993, at the Guggenheim Museum, when Lichtenstein was still alive.

The Chicago show has many of the Pop paintings that audiences may already know, like “Drowning Girl” (1963), but Mr. Rondeau said that he was particularly pleased to feature nearly 50 works on paper, a medium that was not included in the 1993 show.

Ms. Lichtenstein encouraged Mr. Rondeau to pore through 70 boxes of works on paper that are kept in storage. “She had never given access to those before,” he said.

The focus on drawings pleased Ms. Lichtenstein, she said, because they “show Roy’s hand more” and make clear that he wasn’t just an artist who appropriated from comic books, but a master of composition in his own right.

But she stressed that she never tries to guide the hand of curators in terms of content. “I always love to see somebody else’s ideas and interpretations,” she said. “I’ll see things in a new light.”

On special occasions, however, she will get involved behind the scenes, if she knows works that the curators want to include are in other hands. For “Picasso and American Art,” a 2006 show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she wrote two letters to collectors who own major Lichtensteins, encouraging them to lend. “I knew how important Picasso was to Roy,” she said. One letter did the trick; the other was a no-go.

For the Chicago show Ms. Lichtenstein went a step further. She knew that Agnes Gund, the renowned collector and president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, was being asked to lend one of the most famous works of the Pop era, “Masterpiece” (1962), in which a blonde tells a square-jawed artist, “Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece!”

Ms. Lichtenstein said that she surprised Ms. Gund, a friend, by offering another Lichtenstein work of the same size and shape so that she wouldn’t have a blank space on her wall for the run of the exhibition. “Masterpiece” did end up in the Chicago show.

Mr. Rondeau said that such diplomacy and effectiveness were typical of Ms. Lichtenstein’s efforts.

“She’s dedicated a huge amount of her life to protecting Roy’s legacy,” he said. “Not all artists’ spouses choose to manage and maintain that mantle. She feels it acutely and acts on it. She sees this as her job.”

 

Sotheby’s
David Hockney’s ‘‘Swimming Pool,’’  painted in 1965, went for £2.5  million at Sotheby’s in London, up from  its 2007 price of £1.19 million.

LONDON — The market for contemporary art is holding up remarkably well in the midst of the deepening concerns that are engulfing the global economy.

If Sotheby’s sale on Tuesday evening might have left a different impression, it is because brazen speculation no longer flies as easily as it did until recently. The 69 lots of the 79 that came up nonetheless sold quite well, allowing Sotheby’s to post a £69.3 million, or $108 million, score.

The auction house even achieved a world auction record. Glenn Brown’s monumental canvas “The Tragic Conversion of Salvador Dalí (After John Martin)” ascended to £5.19 million, more than two-thirds above expectations. For a picture that has a touch of spoofery about it, this is not bad. As the title indicates, the apocalyptic scenery with fire burning and lava flowing reinterprets John Martin’s “Great Day of His Wrath” done in the late 1840s, and it looks a bit like a movie poster of the 1950s.

Several other works showed that big money continues to pour into contemporary art.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Warrior,” dated 1982, commanded an even higher price, £5.58 million. But that was under the low estimate, and the difference with Mr. Brown’s painting is that it did not trigger competition.

A glance at the prices previously paid for “Warrior,” done in the late artist’s street graffiti style, helps explain its failure to arouse enthusiasm. Five years ago, it sold for £2.82 million, also at Sotheby’s. Buyers apparently felt that allowing the clever consignor to cash in almost double his 2007 outlay was generous enough.

Earlier in the sale, bidders had been more willing to compete over another composition by Basquiat, “Saxaphone,” painted in 1986, two years before his death. Did they like it better because it is covered with inscriptions? Or were they more tolerant of profit-making when spread over a 15-year period? In 1997, the consignor had bought “Saxaphone” at Sotheby’s New York for $244,500. This week, it fetched £2.72 million, about $4.25 million.

After deduction of the sale charge to the buyer, more than 12 percent, which the auction house cashes in, and of another charge payable by the vendor at a privately negotiated rate, this leaves the consignor a profit of $3 million.

Other clever financial coups were made. David Hockney painted “Swimming Pool” in 1965 in a manner that suggests admiration for Magritte’s faux-naif style with a faint avant-garde whiff. In 2007, its owner, Magnus Künow, acquired the Hockney at Sotheby’s for £1.19 million. This week, it realized £2.5 million.

Francis Bacon’s 1980 “Study for Self-Portrait” also proved to have been a judicious bet. Bought in 2001 at Sotheby’s New York for $2.76 million, the Bacon sold this week for £4.52 million, more than $7 million. From a vendor’s perspective, this is brilliant.

Sadly for Sotheby’s, the sale did not look brilliant at all — quite the contrary, if one merely considered the wild estimate, £5 million to £7 million, plus the sale charge. The attendance glumly watched the Bacon being knocked down to a lone bidder who paid £1 million less than the low estimate.

In this dull atmosphere, the auctioneer Tobias Meyer appeared to be extracting bids from a reticent room when these actually resulted in large prices.

Bidders occasionally displayed some zest. Piero Manzoni’s crumpled canvases coated in white kaolin, with not much else to identify them as art, were vigorously chased. “Achrome,” done in 1959-1960, sold for £2.61 million, matching the ambitious middle estimate.

The problem on Tuesday was not that buyers lacked the wherewithal or the will to spend it. They simply declined to be held to ransom by consignors playing around with estimates and assorted reserves designed to ensure huge profits. If Sotheby’s specialists went along with their vendors’ whims, this means that they had no other way to cajole them into consigning their goods.

Christie’s experienced no such trouble. Its Wednesday evening sale, definitely more substantial, put the market back into perspective. With 60 lots adding up to £132.81 million, Christie’s almost doubled the score achieved by Sotheby’s.

The mood in the room was very different. This was partly because the session included several works seen as hugely desirable by those who follow contemporary art. But the fact that estimates had been set more closely to what the market is prepared to accept played a role in turning the Christie’s session into the success story of the week.

The sale, conducted by Jussy Pylkkanen, president of Christie’s Europe, quickly took off.

The third lot consisted of two fluorescent light tubes by Dan Flavin. It was “number two from an edition of three,” Sotheby’s noted. The fluorescent tubes fetched £205,250, well above the high estimate. Next, a bunch of empty mussel shells spread over a panel coated with resin, plus a “plastic bag filled with mussels,” went up to £433,250. It took the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaelers eight years to put the finishing touches to his “work,” completed two years before his death in 1976.

A vast canvas inscribed “Cy Twombly, Roma, 1962” came on its heels. Blobs of paint squished out of tubes are crushed at wide intervals on the off-white ground and a few gray lines are trailed across, with no obvious purpose. But Twombly, who died last year, has been reestablished as a blue chip among the postwar artists. The “Untitled” picture realized a price of £2.16 million.

Moments later, a delirious reaction was triggered by Yves Klein’s monumental “Le Rose du Bleu (RE22).” Sponges and gravel are stuck on board, held by synthetic resin painted pink. The French artist executed this work two years before his death in 1962. In order to enlighten viewers who might fail to grasp the meaning of the pink sponges and gravel, Christie’s quoted the late French art critic Pierre Restany, according to whom “madder rose represents the Holy Spirit before the gold of the Father and the blue of the Son.” Restany even spoke of Klein’s “Cosmological Trilogy of personal transmutation of colors.”

What is clear is that the sponges and gravel transmuted into gold: At £23.56 million, the work set a world auction record for the artist.

As the sale went on, it became evident that the key to success was not the artists’ aesthetic orientation. If non-representational works like the Klein soared sky high, so did figural art in all its trends.

Francis Bacon’s “Study for Self-Portrait,” done in 1964 in an Expressionist vein, soared to an astronomical £21.54 million.

An untitled Basquiat done in 1981 in the late American artist’s distinctive style also pleased bidders. They sent it climbing to £12.92 million, setting a world auction record for Basquiat’s work.

While the ease with which the Bacon and the Basquiat both surpassed expectations could be accounted for by their instant punch, the bland, more naturalistic Lucian Freud was again favorably received. A small “Head of a Greek Man,” portrayed in October 1946, exceeded the estimate by half at £3.4 million. It was followed by “Naked Portrait II,” painted in the mid-1970s in a style that might be seen as looking back to the work of Manet. That work went for £4.29 million.

Pop art indebted to comic books as a source of inspiration also went down well. Roy Lichtenstein’s “Reflections on Jessica Helms,” painted in 1990 in a belated throwback to the American artist’s early work in the 1960s, found a taker at £4.01 million.

Add “Structure (2),” a superb abstract composition done in 1989 by the German artist Gerhard Richter, which sold for £12.69 million, the fourth-highest price on Wednesday, and few would question the eclecticism of bidders. Names seemed to be the determining criteria of desirability, sparing buyers the ordeal of having to make a decision based on the art itself. When these criteria were met, money flowed as easily as ever.

The message this week is clear: The market for contemporary art is full of vitality. But buyers will no longer put up with speculators playing games at their expense.