The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

The Estate of Francis Bacon/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, DACS, London

 

ARTIST Francis Bacon

TITLE 'Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror'

AUCTION HOUSE Sotheby's

ESTIMATE $30 million to $40 million

THE market hasn’t seen a record-breaking price for Bacon since the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich bought his 1976 “Triptych” for $86.3 million at Sotheby’s in May 2008. Since then prices have not come anywhere near that sum, but neither have the offerings. Now, on May 9, Sotheby’s is selling a 1976 canvas depicting a male figure who is thought to be the artist’s lover, George Dyer, who committed suicide in 1971.

The painting was the star of a 1977 exhibition of Bacon’s work at the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris. It was the cover image of the show’s catalog and hung alongside the record-breaking “Triptych.” “It was such a popular show they had to close off the street,” said Mr. Meyer, who added that this painting is creating considerable buzz. One reason is that it has not been on the market for 35 years. Another is the painting itself, with the hypnotic reflections of the man in the mirror and on the floor.

Mr. Forstmann bought the painting in 2001 from the Acquavella Galleries in New York.

Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

At the Nasher museum in Dallas, Rodin’s “Age of Bronze” sits in dappled light as glare streams through a patterned screen.

May 1, 2012

By ROBIN POGREBIN

DALLAS — Two things were supposed to happen when the Nasher Sculpture Center opened here in 2003. Famous works like Rodin’s “Age of Bronze” and Matisse’s “Madeleine I” were to be bathed in copious sunlight streaming through a glass roof. And new vigor was to come to the surrounding neighborhood.

The results exceeded expectations. And Dallas has a mess on its hands.

The center, designed by Renzo Piano and Peter Walker, was considered so appealing that a 42-story condominium called Museum Tower sprouted across the street. But the glass skin of the condo tower, still under construction, now reflects so much light that it is threatening artworks in the galleries, burning the plants in the center’s garden and blinding visitors with its glare.

No one quite knows what to do. The condo developer and museum officials are at loggerheads. Fingers are being pointed. Mr. Piano is furious. The developer’s architect is aggrieved. The mayor is involved. A former official in the George W. Bush administration has been asked to mediate.

Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

Glare from a condo tower is a problem for a nearby museum.

The situation has been characterized by some here as a David-and-Goliath battle between a beloved nonprofit and commercial interests. But the dispute has also raised the broader question of what can happen when, as is currently the rage, cultural institutions are cast as engines of economic development.

The Nasher was seen as an important spur to the renaissance of downtown Dallas, much the way Lincoln Center was viewed as something of a cure for urban blight on the West Side of Manhattan. But the forces unleashed in these situations can prompt a distinctly uneasy relationship between cultural organizations and the neighborhood changes they attract.

“These things start to bump into each other,” said the mayor of Dallas, Mike Rawlings. “How we as a civic society power through this is an important moment for us. You’ve got a high-growth engine that is trying to do right by Giacometti.”

Dallas’s interest in raising its cultural profile is palpable here: the city has been building its arts district over the last 20 years; Saturday Cowboys Stadium hosted a simulcast of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” by the Dallas Opera. The Nasher problem has the whole city concerned and watching.

“Typically, neighborhood disputes are not this dramatic — an offending sign or a barking dog,” said Veletta Forsythe Lill, the executive director of the Dallas Arts District. “This is a cultural, civic and commercial tragedy. The Nasher is a kind of a masterpiece, and the building and the garden were perfectly designed.”

Mr. Piano said he designed the Nasher with natural light in mind. The museum has an arched glass roof with a perforated aluminum screen in an egg-crate pattern that directs the sun into the galleries, which were laid out in anticipation of the sun’s daily arc from southeast to southwest.

Now, sun, magnified by reflection, shines into the galleries from the north and raises the temperature in the sculpture garden — designed by Mr. Walker — to levels that jeopardize the specially planted live oak trees and grass.

“By doing this, they destroy completely the logic of the building,” Mr. Piano said in an interview.

For the museumgoer, the sculptures in the galleries and the garden can be obscured or distorted by distracting light patterns or glare. The museum was forced to install light-blocking panels inside the roof for a recent exhibition of works by Elliott Hundley because the reflections from the tower exceeded the acceptable light levels for the art.

Scott Johnson, the Los Angeles architect who designed Museum Tower, said he was willing to consider remedies but that the Nasher also had to be open-minded. “My responsibility is to fully vet solutions vis-à-vis Museum Tower — that’s my building,” he said. “But I can’t say sitting here now that the Nasher may not need to do something on their end.”

Museum Tower’s owners said in a statement, “All parties desire resolution to these issues as quickly as possible.”

Glare problems, of course, can cut both ways. In Los Angeles a few years ago, the architect Frank Gehry had to sandblast portions of his stainless-steel-clad Disney Concert Hall because the reflected sunlight was creating problems for residents in a nearby apartment building.

Mr. Piano, for his part, said it would be “impossible” for the museum building to make adjustments to offset the glare.

“What do you do — put a roof on the garden? You destroy everything,” he said. “They must solve the problem because they created the problem.”

Architecture experts say the owners of Museum Tower could cover its glass facade with a solar shading system that cuts the glare, at potentially considerable expense.

A regulation that set a strict limit on the reflectivity of buildings on the site expired in 2008 and was revised with more lenient restrictions, though the tower’s opponents say the building still exceeds them. Mr. Johnson said that he learned of such rules only recently through the local news media and that he hoped the conflict “ignites a larger conversation about urban communities and neighbors.”

Not everyone here, of course, views the dispute as a cataclysm. Writing in The Dallas Observer last month, the columnist Jim Schutze made light of it.

“Nothing takes our minds off this misery we call middle-class survival in America like a rich kids art fight,” he wrote. “It’s like our own little hometown Brangelina.”

Since the building that overlooks the sculpture center and its garden is using the Nasher as a selling point — prices stretch into the millions — those involved say its owners should want to keep the Nasher healthy.

“By doing this, they kill what they use to sell it,” Mr. Piano said.

The Dallas Arts District — which now includes the AT&T , Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center and the Dallas Museum of Art — always also hoped to attract commercial projects.

“I want Museum Tower to be very successful — I want people living in that building and loving to live in that building,” said Deedie Rose, a Dallas arts philanthropist who was active in establishing the arts district. “But the Nasher has to be protected.”

The sculpture center was created by Raymond D. Nasher, a real estate developer and banker who, along with his wife, Patsy, amassed one of the world’s leading collections of Modern and contemporary sculpture. Although several cities courted the collection, Mr. Nasher, who died in 2007, decided to build and personally finance the $70 million center in Dallas, where he made his fortune.

“He gave a tremendous gift to the city,” Mayor Rawlings said, “a gift we’ve got to be good stewards of.”

Complicating matters is that the $200 million Museum Tower is owned by the Dallas Police & Fire Pension System, on whose board sit four members of the City Council.

Mayor Rawlings stepped in after the two sides failed to come to terms on their own. He appointed a “facilitator,” Tom Luce, a prominent local lawyer who served under President George W. Bush as an assistant secretary of education. The first meeting with Mr. Luce is this month.

Construction of the tower continues. And the Nasher had to remove Picasso’s “Nude Man and Woman,” an oil on canvas, to get it out of dangerous direct sunlight. (The artist James Turrell also insisted that the Nasher shut down his installation “Tending, (Blue)” because its roof aperture was meant to reveal open sky, not a skyscraper.)

Vel Hawes, a Dallas architect who served as Mr. Nasher’s representative for the design and construction of the museum, said the founder would not be happy. “I assure you,” Mr. Hawes said, “he’s not resting easy in his grave right now.”

By LEE ROSENBAUMUniversity of Iowa Museum of Art, Gift of Peggy Guggenheim

"Mural" (1943) by Jackson Pollock

Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock
Hood Museum of Art
Through Jun 17
Then travels to the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.

Hanover, N.H.

The late Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art, was a tough act to follow. Probably because no one can top his definitive 1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective, we have no major show in the U.S. this year to commemorate the centenary of that towering Abstract Expressionist's birth.

But there are aspects of Pollock's work from the years preceding the famous "drip" paintings that remain underexplored. Dartmouth College's Hood Museum of Art, under its new director, Michael Taylor (former curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art), has seized the moment by hastily assembling an absorbing dossier exhibition focusing on a crucial period in Pollock's trajectory from representational landscapes, heavily influenced by his teacher Thomas Hart Benton, to his signature abstract masterpieces that, according to popular and Hollywood legend, seemed to spring out of nowhere.

The Hood's "Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock," organized by Sarah Powers of the Hood with Pollock expert Helen Harrison, reveals that many of the pictorial strategies employed by Pollock in his celebrated monumental canvases of the late 1940s to early 1950s can be traced to his intensely charged easel-size paintings from the brief period, 1938-41, when this quintessentially American artist was haunted by Orozco's macabre visions of skeletons and ritual sacrifice. Pollock had seen the Mexican's murals in 1930 at Pomona College in California and, six years later, at Dartmouth. While there are plenty of pyrotechnics in the works of both artists, "Men of Fire" might have been more aptly (if less appealingly) titled "Men of Skulls and Bones."

Pollock owed his enthusiasm for the visceral impact of monumentality to Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and, above all, Orozco. In his first oversize horizontal canvas, a 20-foot-wide 1943 composition, "Mural," commissioned by his patron Peggy Guggenheim (on view at the Des Moines Art Center through July 15), Pollock was influenced not only by Orozco's larger-than-life scale but also by the swirling energy of his brushstrokes and dramatic use of black to define curving contours. Orozco's archetypal images of snakes, skulls and flames, which must have resonated with the American's Jungian sensibility, are abundantly present in Pollock's works at the Hood.

Gallery: 'Men of Fire'

View Slideshow

2012 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. .

'Untitled (Bald Woman and Skeleton)' by Jackson Pollock

To appreciate "Men of Fire," you need to start not in Dartmouth's art museum but in its Baker Library. That's where the 24-year-old Pollock made pilgrimage in 1936 to see Orozco's 24-panel mural "The Epic of American Civilization" (1932-34), a sweeping history of the Mexican people. Its darkly symbolic and ritualistic content made a strong impression on the younger artist. Dartmouth also owns Orozco's studies for the mural, included in the Hood's show.

Nowhere is the connection between Dartmouth's mural and Pollock's work clearer than in his "Untitled (Bald Woman with Skeleton)" (c. 1938-41), acquired by the Hood six years ago. With a lumpish, crouched female at its center, it quotes the image of a skeletal ribcage and extended limb from Orozco's fiercely satiric panel "Gods of the Modern World." That work had stirred an uproar at Dartmouth over its depiction of a ghoulish cadre of skeletal professors in caps and gowns, overseeing a female skeleton as she gives birth to a skeletal baby with a mortarboard on its head (representing "stillborn knowledge").

Like many of the Pollocks in the show, "Bald Woman" is densely composed and difficult to read. Only close scrutiny can unpack the contorted anatomy of the drooping woman and the many images derived from Orozco's mural—winding serpents, orange flames and the jumble of tiny, sickly green skulls surrounding the central figure. Pollock had transmuted Orozco's politically charged imagery into psychological totems. The morbid scene is redolent with death and despair.

Pollock's use of semiabstraction and his partial concealment of representational images point ahead to the layered complexities of the drip paintings, where representation seems to disappear. The Museum of Modern Art's "Flame" (c. 1934-38), for example, is a precursor to all-over abstraction, with its jagged orange, black and white slashes that represent a raging fire. Without help from the label text, you might miss the ribcage—parallel light and dark lines. Lying near the bottom of the canvas, amid the conflagration, the bones suggest that this is a sacrificial pyre.

Pollock's use of disguised and obscured representation, although later difficult to detect, persisted into his abstract masterpieces of the late '40s and early '50s. As noted in the catalog for MoMA's show, close analysis of Pollock's signature "drip" paintings (informed by Hans Namuth's famous images of Pollock at work) reveals their structural underpinnings of veiled and hidden figures.

The link between the proto-Pollocks seen at Dartmouth and the mature abstract masterpieces is the groundbreaking, ex-Peggy Guggenheim "Mural" of 1943. Designed for her apartment's entrance hall, that dazzling achievement, said to have been largely executed in one day, is not only the first but also the biggest of the mural-size Pollocks.

A frenzy of black verticals and whorls, enlivened with touches of pink, yellow and turquoise, "Mural," under sustained scrutiny, comes into focus as a cross-canvas parade of upright, abstracted figures, with outlines strongly reminiscent of the black-defined curves of the marching Aztecs' muscled flesh in the "Migration" panel that begins Dartmouth's Orozco mural. Tightly focused on the brief period when Pollock was most strongly influenced by Orozco, the show doesn't include (or illustrate) works like "Mural" that marked the next step toward Pollocks signature style. But the black swirls that animate Orozco's and Pollock's murals also figure prominently in a painting displayed at the entrance to the Hood's show, the Tate Gallery's powerful "Naked Man with Knife" (c. 1938-1940), a chaotic jumble of three fiercely grappling nudes.

Comparing the little-known Pollocks at the Hood with the paintings that later became touchstones of international veneration reveals that we might not have had the latter without the foundation laid by the former. Contradicting the myth of the sudden epiphany, Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, once noted that there were "no sharp breaks" from the works of the pre-"drip" period to the mature masterpieces, "but rather a continuing development of the same themes and obsessions."

You can see the truth of that in Hanover.

Christo Crocker

Tour participants displaying their tan lines at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, in Sydney, as they view Robert Owens’s “Sunrise #3.”

By MARK WHITTAKER

Published: May 1, 2012

SYDNEY, Australia — The people gathering for a tour of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia on Friday evening smiled awkwardly in the way of strangers who had to undress in front of one another. Which is what they were about to do.

Christo Crocker

Stuart Ringholt

The artist leading the tour, Stuart Ringholt, wearing scruffy black clothes and a misshapen porkpie hat, stepped forward.

“Who’s from the naturist community?” he asked.

A bunch of older, rounder men put up their hands.

“Who’s nervous?”

A dozen or so others, including this reporter, barely managed to raise their hands to half-mast. The Museum of Contemporary Art has enjoyed a surge in attendance since it reopened on March 29 after being closed for an 18-month, $56 million refurbishment, but these particular visitors would have the place all to themselves. They were here, after hours, for a tour of museum works that was itself billed as an artwork and had this as its title: “Preceded by a tour of the show by artist Stuart Ringholt, 6-8pm (the artist will be naked. Those who wish to join the tour must also be naked. Adults only).”

Mr. Ringholt, 40, is a Conceptual and performance artist who was recently named one of Australia’s 10 “artists who matter” in the Australian newspaper The Age. He has led tours of this kind in three other Australian cities in the last year, and was able to offer some insight about the experience to come.

“It’s very beautiful,” he told his audience. “We are sexualized with our clothes on — with them off, we are not.”

Not everyone, he explained, was going to be naked. “A couple of M.C.A. staff members will come with us for security reasons, but they will be clothed,” he said. But many employees, he added, “if they have to do the tour two days in a row, often take off their clothes on the second day because they feel very uncomfortable being clothed around so much flesh.” He apologized that security cameras would be recording the group, joking that “the footage will be kept for three months, for the enjoyment of the security staff.”

Mr. Ringholt then led the 32 men and 16 women into a brightly lighted conference room, where the clothes just seemed to fall away.

“Everybody seemed to concentrate very much on what they were doing,” Lance Barton, a 57-year-old Sydney office worker making his debut as a nudist, recalled later. (“I have fantasized about it, but never done it,” he added. “Only a bit of midnight streaking by myself in the parklands around where I live.”)

The first stop on the tour was a 2007 work by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson, “Earth-Moon-Earth”: a player piano doing a version of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, complete with glitches picked up in the course of converting the music to Morse code, bouncing the signals off the Moon, then reconverting them to musical notes. Against this ghostly backdrop, Mr. Ringholt noted that modern museums strip back architecture, floor coverings, windows and adornments for the sake of foregrounding art, and that in the same way contemporary artists have since the 1980s taken to wearing black.

“There’s this process of reduction going on,” he said. “I asked the question of why the contemporary art community stopped at wearing black. Why didn’t they reduce further and strip back the clothing from the visitor?”

The next stop was an untitled Stephen Birch work from 2005, an installation in which Spider-Man faces off with a primitive, phallic figure. Mr. Ringholt spoke about fear, and most of the visitors agreed that their anxiety had subsided. He said that in his 20s, he was profoundly affected by experiences of extreme embarrassment, a subject now at the center of much of his work. One of these involved toilet paper hanging out of his pants as he walked on the field at an Australian football game with hundreds of people looking on.

“I was wrecked — I went home and explained it to my girlfriend, and she was killing herself laughing,” he said. “I was distraught for a whole week.”

Being a dabbler in performance, Mr. Ringholt turned shame into art. He went to Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and stood in front of a marble fountain for 20 minutes with toilet paper trailing from his trousers. He walked around for a day in Basel, Switzerland, wearing a prosthetic nose with a “gob” of fake mucus hanging from it.

“I tried to understand how fear manifests in the body and how it debilitates you,” he said. Knowing these acts of abjection were performances didn’t make them easier, he added: “It was just as bad. You get a panic attack. You get cold sweats. I realized it was the same fear I got when I rang up a woman to ask her on a date.”

Eventually, he said, he learned to conquer his fear by understanding it. He called the woman and got the date, and he took his fear workshops on the road. That led to the nude museum tours.

This tour finished with a glass of sparkling wine on an open terrace overlooking the Sydney Opera House. Asked if he had any plans to take his nude museum tours overseas, to the Metropolitan in New York, perhaps, Mr. Ringholt became animated.

“Imagine walking in there with all that armor” in that museum, he said. He loves the symbolism of masks, and a whole suit of medieval armor offered wonderful new metaphors.

As for the visitors, they seemed to be divided on the question of whether art was enhanced by viewing it naked.

“Not really,” Mr. Barton said.

But another participant, Tracey, who wouldn’t give her last name because she works for “a Christian organization,” said that “there was more focus on the art.”

“You’d think you’d turn up with all these other people without clothes and you’d be checking them out,” she said, “but I wasn’t looking at anyone.”

Afterward, as the visitors walked back to the changing room, glowing from the wine, a crowd on the street outside looked up at the parade of nakedness coming down the glassed-in stairs. But nobody in the group seemed to mind.

By KELLY CROW

Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York

Gilbert & George's 'Dead' (2001) is at New York's Lehmann Maupin gallery.

The London-based art duo known as Gilbert & George first rose to fame in the late 1960s by donning dapper suits and treating themselves like living sculptures. It turns out that they're also petty thieves.

About seven years ago, the pair began stealing the sandwich-board-style posters that London's newspapers often use to hail their latest headlines, typically tabloid fare like "Man Dies in Human Fireball Horror." On Thursday, the artists opened a new show of their work at New York's Lehmann Maupin and Sonnabend galleries featuring headlines from all 3,712 posters they amassed. Unlike the actual newspapers, these black-and-white posters aren't for sale, but "the images and stories they conjure are amazing," said one of the artists, Gilbert Proesch.

The pair said that they would usually wait until dinnertime before canvassing the newsstands in their East London neighborhood. Then one of the artists would try to distract the shopkeeper by buying a candy bar or chewing gum while the other slipped the poster out of its wire casing. A few times they would have to wait until the owner "went to the lavatory," said George Passmore. "Then we'd tuck the poster into our coats and try to walk away, looking normal."

To transform the posters into art, the artists grouped headlines by common terms—say, murder—and arranged them into grids that sit atop eerie photographs of brick walls, tilted windows and alleyways. The artist's faces also pop up throughout the images, Big Brother-style. The portrait of society that emerges from the posters is accordingly grim. "We found very few happy terms," Mr. Proesch said. "That's the invisible part of our lives, the happy part."

"Gilbert & George: London Pictures" will be on view at the galleries through June 23.

An Extended Q&A with Gilbert & George

On Thursday, the London art duo Gilbert & George opened a new show of their work at New York's Lehmann Maupin and Sonnabend galleries featuring headlines from 3,712 newspaper posters they collected in London over a six-year period.

Recently, the artists agreed to discuss the project that became "Gilbert & George: London Pictures," up at the galleries through June 23. Here's an edited excerpt.

George: Ten years ago we took our first images of some newspaper posters for a group of pictures called the Bomb pictures, which were based on bomb attacks in Mumbai and London and around the world. Those were shown at the Tate Modern. We didn't think of them as "poster" pictures, but after a while, we realized there were so many subjects we could address—hangings, hate—in a way that could feel very different from simply using a pencil or a brush. With the posters, we could also do that.

Gilbert: All these extraordinary modern subject matters, we don't have to make them up. They were all there, and they began to create in our minds an amazing, modern, Western townscape."

George: In some pockets of the world, there's no free press, and in those areas you won't see sex stories wind up as newspaper headlines. Maybe these posters are actually a celebration of the freedoms of the press in the West.

Gilbert: We worked on it for six years. Every day we had to steal roughly three posters, and finally we had 3,712.

George: We'd steal them on the way to dinner. We always walk through East and North London to go to dinner, and it's very difficult because we didn't want to get caught.

Gilbert: The shopkeepers will stop you if they can.

George: Gil can be pretty devious. He would usually go into the shop to buy some chewing gum or a Mars bar, and then I'd use that time to steal the poster. We became very professional. We were both very good. If it was a difficult shop, we'd wait and wait until the shopkeeper went to the lavatory. Then we'd tuck them into our coats and try to walk away, looking normal. When it was raining, we'd steal the posters wet.

Gilbert: Then after six years, we said, "That's it. We have enough." So we began to divide up the pile into categories based on the words in the headlines, like "murder," "sex" or "money."

George: Those were the three words that popped up most often, and you don't have to go to university to understand why. But we were still really fascinated by our collective fascination with dying and killing. It's extraordinary. We also saw very early on the two levels these posters work on: Obviously they're used to sell newspapers, but they also dwell so heavily on shame and human disaster.

Gilbert:The images and stories these words conjure are amazing: "Man Found Hanging in Graveyard," "Pal Dies in Copycat Hanging." What a story is caught up in that combination of words.

George: They're like haikus.

Gilbert:The relentless mantra of messiness. We wound up making 292 pictures using all the posters.

George: We like that we're celebrating something – the newspaper poster – that might not exist at the end of our lifetimes. People are finding different ways of selling papers now. Online. But when we first moved to London, we had trouble losing our country backgrounds. Reading the local papers was one of the first ways we became citified. The London Evening Standard for many years employed a man who drew the poster headlines on tin every day, and then a new owner came in and they started printing them with a standard typeface. But when we started stealing these posters, we could tell whenever he went on holiday, because those days were the only ones that used a standard typeface instead of his own hand-drawn versions. Just once a year he went away.

Gilbert:Besides the shopkeepers, we might have been the only people to notice that man's holiday. Most people don't notice much. In that way, life always seems invisible—unless you slap people and make them look. That's why art stops time. It makes them stop and look. That's why we want powerful imagery in our art—we want them to remember it.

George: It's a freezing moment.

Gilbert: That's what the posters want to do too, which is why arresting words like "sex" and "death" pop up so often. We found very few happy terms. That's the invisible part of our lives, the happy part. Maybe that part can also feel fake, no?

George: Just look at the countries that only produce happy art—most of those places are totalitarian, like North Korea. The art there feels artificially happy.

A version of this article appeared April 28, 2012, on page C14 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Stealing Headlines for Art's Sake.

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Pier Paolo Calzolari, for whom two New York galleries will be as one, in front of "Untitled."

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: April 27, 2012

The big-money contemporary art world has grown so large that it often seems to have achieved nation-state status, while the galleries it comprises operate like feuding medieval principalities, constantly jousting for turf (Chelsea real estate), prestige (A-list artists) and money (from collectors’ pockets).So when Marianne Boesky, who owns a gallery on West 24th Street, approached the Pace Gallery, her much more powerful back-door neighbors on West 25th Street, with a proposal for a kind of concordat, she admits that she didn’t do so with great affection.

Her ambivalence turned out to be justified: not long after, she said, Pace “poached” one of her most prominent artists, Yoshitomo Nara. “There are some very interesting and, I guess, difficult dynamics between us,” Ms. Boesky said.

But beginning on Saturday, the two galleries will breach the walls between them not only metaphorically, but physically as well, cutting a doorway through the abutting bricks to join their warehouselike spaces for the sake of a single artist who has not shown in the United States for more than 20 years.

For a month the two galleries will join forces to show a large selection of work by Pier Paolo Calzolari, a semi-reclusive 69-year-old Italian who is something of a revered mythical figure, even in Europe.

Among the original members of the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s — literally translated as “poor art,” partly because the work sometimes employed humble, even ephemeral materials — Mr. Calzolari, who trained as a painter, distinguished himself through his deep suspicion of the avant-garde’s reflexive rejection of the past.

While his work shared many similarities with that of his fellow so-called poveristi, it veered in a much more eccentric direction, bringing in elements of Renaissance painting, of the quasi-animism of St. Francis and of the Romantic movement, in pieces that looked positively florid beside much postmodern art of the era.

He has used materials like salt, running water, open flame, moss, roses, feathers, eggs and tobacco leaves. His calling card, a kind of visual obsession, is frost, which he makes by connecting small, humming refrigeration units to some of his works with a thin copper tube, causing the art to turn bright white as it freezes on the wall.

The fascination is not with ice, he has explained, but with a kind of pure whiteness he saw as a young man in Venice, when sunlight washed over marble walls along the Riva degli Schiavoni, a color he felt it would be wrong to try to replicate in paint.

“Calzolari, it seems to me, is always searching for the absolute, expressed through natural elements, like moss and lead, or natural phenomena, like fire and ice,” said James Rondeau, chairman of contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago, which has one of the rare Calzolari works in an American public collection. “His works so often engage in a kind of alchemy, linking him to older, European traditions.”

Mr. Calzolari exhibited actively in Europe and in the United States for more than two decades, but in the late 1980s he retreated to Fossombrone, a small town in the Marche region of central Italy, and he has spent much of the last 25 years working there, mostly out of the public eye, in what he calls a process of “getting to know myself better.”

Ms. Boesky knew of his work only slightly. But a few years ago a young artist she represents, Jay Heikes, who had seen several Calzolari pieces while working as an art handler at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, sang Mr. Calzolari’s praises. And after delving into his career, Ms. Boesky set out to track him down. Instead of sending an e-mail, she wrote him an old-fashioned letter, saying that she was determined to show his work in America again.

“A month or two later,” she recalled, “I got a letter back that said, ‘Why?’ Not ‘Do you want to talk?’ or anything like that, but just ‘Why?’ ”

Eventually, like a coy lover, he invited her to Italy. But when she and an assistant arrived at his rural studio in Fossombrone after a day and half of traveling, a studio employee came to the door to say that Mr. Calzolari was ill and would not be able to keep the appointment after all. They were about to leave when Mr. Calzolari himself, looking grave beneath a thick white beard and a shock of white hair, emerged, grudgingly let them in and spent the next nine hours talking about his work.

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—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