The William S. Paley Collection, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New YorkPicasso’s 1905-6 painting “Boy Leading a Horse

By CAROL VOGEL
August 2, 2012, 2:57 PM

The staggering art collection put together by William S. Paley, the television impresario who founded the Columbia Broadcasting System, first went on view at the Museum of Modern Art in 1992. Paley, a longtime trustee at MoMA, had left his paintings, drawings and sculptures to the museum upon his death in 1990. After MoMA showed the collection it then traveled to museums in Indianapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego and Baltimore.

One city that did not get the show was San Francisco. But on Sept. 15, “The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism,’’ will open the de Young Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco before going to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, the Fine Arts Museum of Quebec and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.

On view will be highlights of the Paley holdings, including Picasso’s famous 1905-6 painting “Boy Leading a Horse,’’ Gauguin’s “Seed of the Areoi’’ (1892), from the artist’s first trip to Tahiti, and Degas’s 1905 large-scale pastel and charcoal “Two Dancers.’’ The exhibition will remain on view in San Francisco through Dec. 30.

$4M piece found

By KATE KOWSH, LIZ SADLER and DAREH GREGORIAN

Last Updated: 8:53 AM, August 1, 2012

A multimillion-dollar Roy Lichtenstein painting that disappeared 42 years ago has popped up in a Manhattan warehouse — and its owner is trying to make sure it doesn’t pull another vanishing act.

“Electric Cord” was last seen in 1970 when owner Leo Castelli sent the piece by the pop-art prince out to be professionally cleaned. It was never returned, and the fate of the painting was a mystery — until last week.

That’s when Castelli’s widow, Barbara Castelli, got a call from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation saying the piece had turned up at a high-end art storage warehouse on the East Side, where someone was trying to sell it.

She asked for a restraining order barring the estimated $4 million painting from being moved from the Hayes Storage Warehouse until she can get her day in court, saying in court papers that she’s “deeply concerned” about the possibility of the artwork, “which is an American treasure by an artist native to Manhattan, again disappearing, perhaps to never be seen again.”

Justice O. Peter Sherwood signed off on Castelli’s temporary court order freezing the painting’s location pending a hearing with the warehouse people and “John Doe” on Monday.

Amye Austin, an operations supervisor at Hayes, declined to comment.

Leo Castelli, who put on Lichtenstein’s first solo exhibit at his gallery in 1962, bought “Electric Cord,” a painting of a tightly wrapped electric cord, in the 1960s for $750, the court papers say.

In January 1970, he sent the piece out to be cleaned by a well-regarded restorer named Daniel Goldreyer. But instead of returning the painting, Goldreyer told Castelli the work had been lost.

Lichtenstein, who’s known for his dotted comic book-like panel works, died in 1997, and Leo Castelli died in 1999. The work was officially listed as “lost/stolen” in the international Art Loss Registry in 2007.

Then last week, James Goodman Gallery owner James Goodman called the Lichtenstein foundation to say he’d been told by a “third party” that the painting was at Hayes Storage, and asked if they’d authenticate the work, the court filing says. A rep for the foundation then tipped off Barbara Castelli.

Goodman told The Post he had no idea that the painting might have been stolen, and that the current owners claimed to have an invoice showing the piece was purchased from Leo Castelli.

kate.kowsh@nypost.com

By ERIC FELTEN

Oh, the perils of found-object art. Over the course of some 20 years, art dealer and collector Ileana Sonnabend negotiated with federal regulators over a prized possession: "Canyon," a work by artist Robert Rauschenberg that combines a painting, a rope-trundled pillow and a stuffed bird. The problem was the bird—a young bald eagle of obscure origin. And now, five years after Ms. Sonnabend died, the problem continues to be the bird. Under federal statutes that prohibit any traffic in bald eagles or their remains, the artwork cannot legally be sold to anyone. And yet the Internal Revenue Service is demanding that Ms. Sonnabend's heirs pay $40 million in taxes on "Canyon." It's the sort of case where you wonder if the IRS agents are named Willem and Franz.

The mantle of art provides little mediation or mitigation when it comes to endangered species. When Lawrence M. Small was made secretary of the Smithsonian Institution a little more than a decade ago, he let some magazines photograph his collection of Amazonian tribal art, much of which was made of feathers of protected rain-forest birds. The articles and photos were perused with keen interest at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which soon began an investigation. That he considered the items art made no difference—Mr. Small eventually pleaded guilty to federal misdemeanor violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

Does it help if the artwork is famous? Perhaps, as art lawyer Ronald Spencer notes, it is "bad public relations to destroy works of art," and that can temper the urge to seize. Still, counting on enforcement agencies to be reasonable is a dicey strategy. What is deemed all right under one administration might be discovered to be not all right at all once different officials are in place. The stuffed bird adorning "Canyon" first caught the attention of Fish and Wildlife Service agents in 1981, when the artwork came back through U.S. Customs after a European tour. The Interior Department seems to have been rather accommodating at the time, giving Ms. Sonnabend a permit to hang on to the piece.

But it was a different story in 1998 when she tried to lend "Canyon" to an international retrospective of Mr. Rauschenberg's work. The Sonnabend Gallery "encountered resistance from a new administrator at the Department of the Interior," as ARTnews put it. Federal officials notified the gallery it would have to "relinquish the carcass to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service" or donate the artwork to a nonprofit museum—unless "the carcass was taken from the wild prior to 1940" (when the Bald Eagle Protection Act became law).

But how to prove that? This is when the gallery again enjoyed the benefit of regulatory discretion. Mr. Rauschenberg was allowed to simply swear before a notary-public that the eagle was old enough to be legal. He told a quirky story about how the bird had come into his possession. It seems that an artist friend living in an apartment above Carnegie Hall rescued the dingus from the trash in 1959. The eagle, the story went, had belonged to an aged tenant who in his youth "was a member of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders." According to Mr. Rauschenberg's notarized statement, "this Rough Rider acquired, from the wild, a bald eagle which he had taxidermed prior to 1940." When the old cowboy had died, his family tossed the unwanted bird in the garbage. Though the artist was recounting a third-hand tale of an unknown, unnamed cavalryman he had never met, Mr. Rauschenberg's account was accepted as appropriate documentation. Who said the feds can't be reasonable?

Not everyone gets such benefit of the doubt. Just imagine if Gibson Guitar Corp.—locked in a dispute with the Fish and Wildlife Service over the legality of foreign wood sourced for its instruments—had ever tried to offer proof of provenance as flimsy as the artist's notarized statement. But then again, in its dispute Gibson chose not to make nice. The company has been challenging Fish and Wildlife rulings in court. Which might help explain why, a year ago, heavily armed and body-armored agents descended on the company's Nashville factory to seize guitars and pallets of wood.

The Sonnabend heirs would ultimately find out how unreasonable enforcement agents can be. When the IRS first came looking for some payment on the unsalable "Canyon," the tax agency told an attorney working for the estate, Ralph E. Lerner, that the artwork was worth $15 million. But the lawyer refused to agree to that number, insisting that, because there is no legal market for the painting, it has no dollar value. Then, in what Mr. Lerner described to Forbes as the "most shocking part" of the whole fiasco, all of a sudden the IRS issued an official Notice of Deficiency declaring the Rauschenberg to be worth $65 million. Which would suggest that the market value of going along to get along is somewhere around $50 million.

The IRS valuation isn't necessarily crazy, even if its justification—the idea that an imagined black-market value should be binding on people not engaged in black-market transactions—is. But thanks to federal law, that value is entirely hypothetical.

How arbitrary is it to take a good off the market and then demand taxes be paid on an imaginary, indeed illegal, market price? The circumstances may be rare and peculiar, but the capriciousness of officials appears to be all too common.

A version of this article appeared July 26, 2012, on page D10 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Bald Eagle Is a White Elephant Thanks to Uncle Sam.

Erik Lasalle, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

El Anatsui’s “Broken Bridge,” shown installed in Paris, will be on display at the High Line later this year.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: July 26, 2012

Every museum has a few paintings or sculptures so popular that art lovers think of them as old friends. When one disappears, its absence is noticed.

“Our viewers let us know what they miss,” said Ann Temkin, the Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator of painting and sculpture. “If a certain Warhol or Picasso is not on view, people are very vocal.”

Last week “One: Number 31, 1950,” one of Jackson Pollock’s mystical drip paintings, was removed from the walls of the fourth-floor painting and sculptures galleries and taken to the Modern’s conservation lab for a few months for study and cleaning as part of a larger research project. So Ms. Temkin had a considerable hole to fill. “I did feel we had to put up another major Pollock in its place,” she said.

MoMA has a few drip Pollocks from which to choose. The issue, though, was size. “One: Number 31, 1950” is almost 18 feet long, a length Pollock worked with knowing the dimensions of the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, where it was first shown. None of MoMA’s other drip Pollocks are anywhere near as big.

“We do have an equally great, though not as gigantic, Pollock,” Ms. Temkin said, referring to “Number 1 A, 1948,” which has just been hung in place of “One.” “It’s the painting where Pollock’s hand prints are visible in the upper right-hand corner,” she said, “and it was made a year and a half earlier at that very moment when all of the Abstract Expressionist painters were at that breakthrough moment.”

A canvas of delicate layered webs, globs and pools of paint, “Number 1 A, 1948” is just shy of nine feet long. But when she hung it on the wall, Ms. Temkin was surprised. “It has the amazing capacity for its presence to expand far behind the boundaries of the canvas itself,” she said.

TIN DRAPERY FOR HIGH LINE

The High Line attracts nearly four million visitors a year, and it had 500,000 last month alone. It has become a phenomenon, not simply as a place to walk above the dense city streets and enjoy views of the Hudson River, but also as a serious art destination. Year by year its arts programming grows. Now it includes films and performances as well as projects by fine artists.

A star in the fall lineup will be a site-specific installation by El Anatsui. This artist, who was born in Ghana and lives in Nigeria, is known for his shimmering, almost painterly tapestries fashioned from discarded bottle caps that are woven together with copper wire. On an outdoor wall adjacent to the park, between 21st and 22nd Streets, he will be creating “Broken Bridge,” a monumental drapery made from pressed tin and mirrors.

“He hasn’t shown here much except in galleries,” said Cecilia Alemani, the curator and director of High Line Art. “We’re particularly excited because this piece is slightly different than others he has made in the past, since it includes mirrors that will reflect the surrounding landscape.”

“Broken Bridge,” his first outdoor installation in the United States, is to be installed in early October and be on view through the spring of 2013.

NEW MUSEUM EXPANSION

In 2009 the New Museum bought 231 Bowery, the building next door to its current home on the Lower East Side. While it has yet to undergo extensive renovations, the building is being used for artist residencies and additional ground-floor exhibition space, which the museum calls “Studio 231.” At the same time it has been working on an expansion that does not have the construction headaches of bricks and mortar.

The museum has recently raised about $1 million to expand virtually, redesigning its five-year-old Web site. The new site, four years in the making, is to go live on Friday. “We hope it will be a destination location,” Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum, said in a telephone interview. “We have a fast-growing online audience that is already three times the size of our on-site audience, which is about 350,000 visitors a year.”

These are among the Web site’s new features:

¶The Art Spaces Directory, an international guide with an interactive map to more than 400 independent art spaces in 96 nations.

¶A digital archive of the museum’s 35 years, including images, videos and publications.

¶“First Look,” a series organized by the curator Lauren Cornell, featuring a new digital artwork every month. “It will be a combination of either works that are not familiar to a wide audience or commissions,” Ms. Phillips said. She explained that the museum plans to tap artists who already work in the digital realm. It also intends to ask artists who have not created digital works before to contribute. For the Web site’s start Taryn Simon, an artist, and Aaron Swartz, a Web programmer and political activist, have teamed up to create “Image Atlas,” which invites viewers to enter a key word: what pops up will be top results from search engines around the world.

¶A blog called Six Degrees will have weekly interviews, photographic essays, short videos, reviews and curators’ recommendations. Running alongside it will be social-media platforms inviting public participation.

THE STAMPS OF DANCERS

While the financially troubled United States Postal Service may be streamlining operations, it continues to commission artists for new stamps. On Saturday it introduces “Innovative Choreographers,” four first-class stamps depicting the dance giants Isadora Duncan, José Limón, Katherine Dunham and Bob Fosse.

James McMullan, best known for the posters he has created for the Lincoln Center Theater, illustrated the stamps. Working primarily from archival photographs, Mr. McMullan said he wanted his stamps to be different from the rest. “I love dance, and I love gesture,” he said in a telephone interview from his home and studio in Sag Harbor, on Long Island. “This was the opportunity to make something unusual, something with movement rather than a static portrait.” Each choreographer is depicted in a move identifiable with his or her work.

In addition to the stamp project Mr. McMullan has also been looking through his archives in preparation for a retrospective of his work that opens on Nov. 21 at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where he teaches. “There will be materials besides the theater posters,” he said, explaining that the show will include life drawings — both pencil and gouache — that he has been making for more than 30 years.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 27, 2012, on page C22 of the New York edition with the headline: At MoMA a Substitute for Pollock’s ‘One’.

Erik Lasalle, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

El Anatsui’s “Broken Bridge,” shown installed in Paris, will be on display at the High Line later this year.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: July 26, 2012

Every museum has a few paintings or sculptures so popular that art lovers think of them as old friends. When one disappears, its absence is noticed.

“Our viewers let us know what they miss,” said Ann Temkin, the Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator of painting and sculpture. “If a certain Warhol or Picasso is not on view, people are very vocal.”

Last week “One: Number 31, 1950,” one of Jackson Pollock’s mystical drip paintings, was removed from the walls of the fourth-floor painting and sculptures galleries and taken to the Modern’s conservation lab for a few months for study and cleaning as part of a larger research project. So Ms. Temkin had a considerable hole to fill. “I did feel we had to put up another major Pollock in its place,” she said.

MoMA has a few drip Pollocks from which to choose. The issue, though, was size. “One: Number 31, 1950” is almost 18 feet long, a length Pollock worked with knowing the dimensions of the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, where it was first shown. None of MoMA’s other drip Pollocks are anywhere near as big.

“We do have an equally great, though not as gigantic, Pollock,” Ms. Temkin said, referring to “Number 1 A, 1948,” which has just been hung in place of “One.” “It’s the painting where Pollock’s hand prints are visible in the upper right-hand corner,” she said, “and it was made a year and a half earlier at that very moment when all of the Abstract Expressionist painters were at that breakthrough moment.”

A canvas of delicate layered webs, globs and pools of paint, “Number 1 A, 1948” is just shy of nine feet long. But when she hung it on the wall, Ms. Temkin was surprised. “It has the amazing capacity for its presence to expand far behind the boundaries of the canvas itself,” she said.

TIN DRAPERY FOR HIGH LINE

The High Line attracts nearly four million visitors a year, and it had 500,000 last month alone. It has become a phenomenon, not simply as a place to walk above the dense city streets and enjoy views of the Hudson River, but also as a serious art destination. Year by year its arts programming grows. Now it includes films and performances as well as projects by fine artists.

A star in the fall lineup will be a site-specific installation by El Anatsui. This artist, who was born in Ghana and lives in Nigeria, is known for his shimmering, almost painterly tapestries fashioned from discarded bottle caps that are woven together with copper wire. On an outdoor wall adjacent to the park, between 21st and 22nd Streets, he will be creating “Broken Bridge,” a monumental drapery made from pressed tin and mirrors.

“He hasn’t shown here much except in galleries,” said Cecilia Alemani, the curator and director of High Line Art. “We’re particularly excited because this piece is slightly different than others he has made in the past, since it includes mirrors that will reflect the surrounding landscape.”

“Broken Bridge,” his first outdoor installation in the United States, is to be installed in early October and be on view through the spring of 2013.

NEW MUSEUM EXPANSION

In 2009 the New Museum bought 231 Bowery, the building next door to its current home on the Lower East Side. While it has yet to undergo extensive renovations, the building is being used for artist residencies and additional ground-floor exhibition space, which the museum calls “Studio 231.” At the same time it has been working on an expansion that does not have the construction headaches of bricks and mortar.

The museum has recently raised about $1 million to expand virtually, redesigning its five-year-old Web site. The new site, four years in the making, is to go live on Friday. “We hope it will be a destination location,” Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum, said in a telephone interview. “We have a fast-growing online audience that is already three times the size of our on-site audience, which is about 350,000 visitors a year.”

These are among the Web site’s new features:

¶The Art Spaces Directory, an international guide with an interactive map to more than 400 independent art spaces in 96 nations.

¶A digital archive of the museum’s 35 years, including images, videos and publications.

¶“First Look,” a series organized by the curator Lauren Cornell, featuring a new digital artwork every month. “It will be a combination of either works that are not familiar to a wide audience or commissions,” Ms. Phillips said. She explained that the museum plans to tap artists who already work in the digital realm. It also intends to ask artists who have not created digital works before to contribute. For the Web site’s start Taryn Simon, an artist, and Aaron Swartz, a Web programmer and political activist, have teamed up to create “Image Atlas,” which invites viewers to enter a key word: what pops up will be top results from search engines around the world.

¶A blog called Six Degrees will have weekly interviews, photographic essays, short videos, reviews and curators’ recommendations. Running alongside it will be social-media platforms inviting public participation.

THE STAMPS OF DANCERS

While the financially troubled United States Postal Service may be streamlining operations, it continues to commission artists for new stamps. On Saturday it introduces “Innovative Choreographers,” four first-class stamps depicting the dance giants Isadora Duncan, José Limón, Katherine Dunham and Bob Fosse.

James McMullan, best known for the posters he has created for the Lincoln Center Theater, illustrated the stamps. Working primarily from archival photographs, Mr. McMullan said he wanted his stamps to be different from the rest. “I love dance, and I love gesture,” he said in a telephone interview from his home and studio in Sag Harbor, on Long Island. “This was the opportunity to make something unusual, something with movement rather than a static portrait.” Each choreographer is depicted in a move identifiable with his or her work.

In addition to the stamp project Mr. McMullan has also been looking through his archives in preparation for a retrospective of his work that opens on Nov. 21 at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where he teaches. “There will be materials besides the theater posters,” he said, explaining that the show will include life drawings — both pencil and gouache — that he has been making for more than 30 years.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 27, 2012, on page C22 of the New York edition with the headline: At MoMA a Substitute for Pollock’s ‘One’.

Yoga was probably far from Josef Albers’s mind when he was working on the series of color-saturated pictures he called “Homage to the Square” beginning in 1950. Yet deep meditation was built into the project, which went on for a quarter of a century, sustained by the almost reflexive focus that comes with long practice of a craft.

In Albers’s case practice really did make perfect. The hundreds of same-size paintings in the “Homage” group are about as faultless as art gets. Each is composed of three or four precisely nested squares. The color in each square is calculated to interact with and transform the colors around it. The paint surfaces look machine tooled but aren’t. They’re sensuously if minimally textured, like skin.

Albers’s overall aim was to create an impression of effortless, inevitable harmony, which, of course, demands hard work. And labor is the subject of “Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper” at the Morgan Library & Museum, a show not about finished products but about the constant hands-on research and experimentation, the hitting, missing and learning-as-you-go correcting that went into them.

Hands-on came naturally to Albers, born in Germany in 1888. One grandfather was a carpenter, another a blacksmith. His father was a joiner and wall painter who worked with stained glass. Although Albers studied painting, it was as a maker of stained glass that he joined the faculty of the He meant his own and ours.

“Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper” remains on view through Oct. 14 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org.

Librado Romero/The New York Times
Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000, at the Museum of Modern Art, includes props from “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

By KEN JOHNSON
Published: July 26, 2012

Childhood, it is often said, is a recent invention. Children used to be treated as small adults to be put to work as soon as possible. Education meant discipline and punishment. Then came the 20th century and the idea that children are fundamentally different from adults and should be treated accordingly. The ideal child, a creature of terrific potential, became an inspiring symbol of futurity, and the care and education of actual children exercised the minds of great thinkers, including many from the fields of art and design.

“Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000,” a big, wonderful show at the Museum of Modern Art, examines the intersection of Modernist design and modern thinking about children. A rich and thought-provoking study of a great subject, it is loaded with intriguing things to look at — some 500 items, including furniture, toys, games, posters, books and much more.

Juliet Kinchin, a curator in MoMA’s architecture and design department who organized the show along with Aidan O’Connor, a curatorial assistant, observes in her catalog introduction that no period in human history was as invested in concern for children as the 20th century. Yet contradictions abound: “Elastic and powerful,” Ms. Kinchin writes, “the symbolic figure of the child has masked paradoxical aspects of the human predicament in the modern world.” How much freedom to allow and how much control to impose are questions not only about children but also about people everywhere in a time of declining traditional values and expanding possibilities for new ways of being and doing.

What do children need to flourish and become proper members of society? How you answer such questions depends on what you think the essential nature of the child is. Implicitly if not overtly, a different image of the child presides over each of the exhibition’s seven chronologically laid-out sections.

At the start we meet what you might call the rational-creative child, who, given the right materials to play with and a few logical guidelines, will turn into a little architect. Here are kits for creating two- and three-dimensional designs developed by Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten movement in the early 19th century. A teaching tool kit full of variously shaped nonrepresentational objects created by Maria Montessori is more colorful and inviting, but it too is based on the understanding that huge, complicated things are usually made from little things following simple rules.

Moving on to the post-World War I era, another vision of childhood comes into view under the heading “Avant-Garde Playtime.” Here one of the most telling objects is a painting called “The Bad Child” (around 1924), a decorative panel for a child’s bedroom by the illustrator and designer Antonio Rubino. In retro-Victorian style it pictures a boy in a comical rage surrounded by a menacing cast of fairy tale characters. The moral may be that the child bedeviled by hobgoblins of small minds becomes a monster himself. Being irrepressibly energetic and playful, children need room to express their impulses and imaginations, which do not always align with adult, bourgeois strictures of behavior.

This version of the child can be seen as a reflection of the avant-garde artist’s own desire to shed burdensome moral and aesthetic conventions. (And to celebrate his own powers; this was a time when the idea of the child as a pure creative genius captivated artists like Klee, Miró and Picasso.)

So it may be not so surprising to learn that the Futurist painter Giacomo Balla designed pieces of children’s furniture like a simple, painted wood wardrobe on view here, held off the floor by a pair of flat, abstracted cutouts of children. Here too are child-size chairs and desks by De Stijl artists, including a delightful diminutive wheelbarrow by Gerrit Rietveld; it is remarkable how little needed to change in scaling down the basic language of simple rectilinear forms and primary colors. It is almost as if these artists had been designing for their idea of the child all along.

An opposite approach to childhood enters the picture in the 1930s as fascist social engineers in Germany and Japan turned to children as raw material to be molded into cogs for industrial and military machinery. A baleful section on these developments, as reflected in photographs, posters and children’s books, is highlighted by startling kimonos for Japanese children patterned with images of warplanes, bombs and cannons.

Consciousness of the needs of children and how best to serve them expanded in all directions after World War II. Health and hygiene became concerns, and designers were called upon to create not only more constructive toys and functional furniture but entire school buildings that would provide the light, air and space that youngsters need to grow sound minds and bodies. The rational-creative child, the playful, unruly child — these were eclipsed by the healthy child, who would be more amenable to a new era of conformity in the 1950s.

Then came consumerism and the advent of the needy child, driven by wants and desires he did not know he had until they were triggered by popular media. From astronaut costumes and ray guns in the ’60s to Nintendo’s Game Boy of 1989, designers and manufacturers catered to juvenile fantasies with predatory resourcefulness.

The contradictions of contemporary childhood come together most resonantly in a display of props designed by the artist Gary Panter for the television program “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” (1986-91) arranged around a video projection of an episode of the show. Surrounded by friendly characters like Globey, an animated world globe, and Chairy, a soft, big-eyed chair, the antic man-child Pee-wee, played by Paul Reubens, resembles a happier version of Rubino’s bad boy. He lives in an artificial world without adult supervision where almost all his fantasies come true. Yet he is constantly buffeted by his own desires and frustrations. He is the infantilized consumer par excellence, and in his archly knowing performance as a children’s show host, he is too a kind of postmodern Pop artist, toying subversively with the semiotics of mass entertainment.

The exhibition ends on a rueful note with a brief section about playgrounds that includes a model for a pastoral playground by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi from 1961. Playground designers in recent years have been stymied by increasingly stringent demands for safety. But how do you give children freedom to explore and test their abilities while minimizing risk and lawsuits? The image of the vulnerable, endangered child haunts today’s consciousness more urgently than ever, as children increasingly do their playing online, in often seamy virtual realities where real-life strangers with bad intentions are easily encountered. And what about the child who is dangerous to others? The issues are only going to get more complicated and the challenges for designers of the 21st century more daunting.

“Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000,” continues through Nov. 5 at the Museum of Modern Art, (212) 708-9400, moma.org.

 

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: July 23, 2012

New York City teems with questionable urban legends. But the fable about the postal clerk and his wife, a Brooklyn librarian, scrimping to amass an astounding collection of modern art, cramming all 5,000 pieces in a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment, then donating the whole kit and caboodle to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and galleries in all 50 states, is true.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Dorothy and Herbert Vogel at a Manhattan art gallery in 1992.

Herbert Vogel, who retired as a postal clerk in 1980 but kept collecting art, died on Sunday at 89 at a nursing home in Manhattan, the National Gallery announced. When he and his wife, Dorothy, gave thousands of artworks to the museum in 1992, J. Carter Brown, then the museum’s director, called their collection “a work of art in itself.”

So too were the lives of the couple colloquially called Dorothy and Herbert (the order on which Mr. Vogel insisted). Shortly after their wedding in 1962, they bought their first piece of art, a small crushed-metal sculpture by John Chamberlain. Realizing that their own efforts at making art were not up to the standards of Mr. Chamberlain and other artists they admired, they began buying others’ works. Starting slowly, they bought what they liked — within the strictures of two civil-service incomes — with the only criterion that they be able to carry it home.

Fitting it in their small apartment on the Upper East Side was no problem, as long as they didn’t mind devoting their closets to art, getting rid of their sofa and other furniture, and perpetually tripping over paintings. Mrs. Vogel told journalists that she did not — repeat, did not — keep art in her oven. “We didn’t set out to live bizarrely,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1992.

Wandering around the mountains of art were eight cats with names like Manet, Renoir and Corot. Twenty exotic turtles completed the scene.

But the art was what came to matter most, and the Vogel collection grew into a guidepost for an often austere school of art that followed Abstract Expressionism’s long reign: Minimal Art, which often examined monochromatic surfaces and essential forms. It was nowhere near as popular as Pop Art, which drew its colorful imagery from consumer products and arose around the same time.

There was also a buyers’ market for conceptual art, in which the image is an idea. An example in the Vogel collection was a few inches of frayed rope with a nail through it; another was a black cardboard square with the definition of the word “nothing” printed on it in white.

Their style was to make friends with the young, often little-known artists who were making the new art. Thus they bypassed galleries, a practice some in the art world later criticized as cheating the system. They bought on credit and were slow to pay. They had no car, took no vacations and ate TV dinners; a night out was a trip to the nearby Chinese restaurant. They sometimes did cat-sitting in exchange for art.

Artists liked to be taken seriously by patrons eager to understand novel directions in art, and they particularly appreciated the Vogels’ pattern of buying artists’ works over a period of years to capture evolving careers. “You knew when you were selling them something it was becoming part of an important collection,” Chuck Close, who helped develop the painting style called photorealism, said in an interview with Newsday in 1992.

Christo, whom the Vogels collected before he became famous for monumental works of environmental art, told The Miami Herald in 1989, “They passionately collect some artists, and they collect them from the beginning, before gallery or critical interest.”

Among the artists the Vogels collected were Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Richard Tuttle and Donald Judd. In more recent years they collected works by Andy Goldsworthy, James Siena and Pat Steir, among others.

Earl A. Powell III, the current director of the National Gallery, said in a statement: “The radical expansion of intellectual and stylistic expressions in many media by European and American artists since the 1960s is reflected in the diversity of the works that Herb and Dorothy collected over five decades.”

Herbert Vogel was born in Manhattan on Aug. 16, 1922, dropped out of school and worked in garment-industry sweatshops. But he told Smithsonian magazine in 1992, “I knew there was another world out there, and somehow I’d find it for myself.”

After a stint in the Army, he encountered paintings by the old masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That led him to contemporary art, and contemporary art led him to the Cedar Bar, the fabled artists’ hangout in Greenwich Village. There he listened in awe to Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and David Smith.

“I was nothing — a postal clerk,” he told The Times. “But I respected the artists, and they sort of respected me. They would talk until 3, 4 in the morning, and I would be one of the people who just listened. I just remember it very vividly. I never even asked a question.”

In 1960 he met Dorothy Faye Hoffman at a resort in the Poconos. On their first date, art did not come up. On subsequent dates, as they went to the movies and watched the presidential election returns together (Senator John F. Kennedy won), they fell in love. After their honeymoon in Washington, where they visited the National Gallery, they both took classes in painting. They soon realized they would rather hang other artists’ work on their walls.

“I wasn’t bad,” Mrs. Vogel told Newsday. “I didn’t like Herbie’s paintings, actually.”

In 1992 five full-size moving vans were needed to move their art to the National Gallery, where they were soon feted by William H. Rehnquist, the chief justice of the United States, and David Rockefeller. In 2008 the gallery announced that it would help them carry out their plan to give 50 artworks to a museum in each of the 50 states. The couple liked to work with the gallery because it has never sold a painting, and admission is free.

In 2008 Megumi Sasaki directed a documentary about the Vogels, “Herb & Dorothy.” Ms. Sasaki had her camera operators focus on how Mr. Vogel’s eyes intensified and lit up when he liked something. In addition to his wife, Mr. Vogel is survived by his sister, Paula Antebi. In 1992 Mr. Vogel, whose highest salary at the post office was $23,000 before taxes, told The Associated Press that he and his wife could easily have become millionaires. “But we weren’t concerned about that aspect,” he said.