George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

A Legendary Dealer’s Eagle Eye

‘Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New’ at MoMA

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

‘Ambassador for the New’: A look at a new exhibition at MoMA that highlights the career of the gallery owner and art collector Ileana Sonnabend.

 By HOLLAND COTTER

If you think that all art exhibitions result from the natural meeting of laudable subjects and curatorial passion, consider “Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New,” which opens on Saturday at the Museum of Modern Art. Although the subject is a worthy one — Sonnabend was among the most foresighted art dealers of the late 20th century — the show is a byproduct of legal hassles and diplomatic campaigns surrounding her billion-dollar estate, which may be one reason it feels, as a tribute, cool and impersonal, a portrait-in-art that is only a sketch.

The art is certainly impressive, a constellation of icons, with Sonnabend’s eye and energy the gravitational force. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Romania in 1914, she married a future art dealer, Leo Castelli, born Leo Krausz, in 1932. During World War II, they and their young daughter, Nina, fled Europe for New York, where Castelli opened a gallery.

Artwise, they made a good pair. Although very different in demeanor and temperament — Castelli was debonair and talkative, Sonnabend stolid and shy — they shared an appetite for the untried and the difficult, with Sonnabend, in the long run, having the more adventurous eye. Together, in 1957 they made a famous exploratory trip to Robert Rauschenberg’s studio, where they met Jasper Johns. Sonnabend bought a Johns painting on the spot and became Rauschenberg’s avid and lasting advocate.

After she and Castelli divorced in 1959, Sonnabend remarried, moved to Paris and opened a gallery of her own. She introduced American artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Rauschenberg to Europe, helping, long-distance, to position New York as the new art capital. When she moved back to Manhattan in 1968 and set up business in SoHo, she pulled traffic in the other direction, drawing avant-garde European art from across the Atlantic. She sustained this cosmopolitan mix for five decades, and stayed interested in new art until her death at 92 in 2007. The MoMA show, organized by Ann Temkin, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, and Claire Lehmann, a curatorial assistant, is a sampler of some 40 objects covering that span, all owned by Sonnabend at one time. Rauschenberg’s monumental 1959 assemblage or “combine” titled “Canyon” has pride of place just inside the gallery entrance, and for good reason. It was Sonnabend’s favorite among the thousands of objects she acquired. It was a much-reported MoMA acquisition in 2012. And it’s still a startler.

Its central element, a taxidermied bald eagle, spread-winged and with a trussed pillow dangling from its claws, conjoins an American emblem with a reference to the Greek myth in which Zeus, in the form of a bird, abducts a boy he lusts after. A collaged photograph of the artist’s young son and the combine’s general air of chaotic dereliction add an intensely subversive spin to the notion of “American” art.

The chaotic look of the piece aroused indignation among some of its initial viewers, which was to Sonnabend always a sign of success. She hit that jackpot repeatedly. Europeans grumbled over Jasper Johns’s work, which was her debut presentation in Paris, and over Andy Warhol’s two years later. A piece by Mr. Johns, “Device,” from that first show, is in the MoMA show. So is one of Warhol’s spectacular “Death and Disaster” pictures, with repeated images of a suicide shuddering across the canvas. (Although shipped, this painting didn’t end up in Warhol’s Paris show because it was too big to fit in the gallery.)

She brought more Pop from New York — James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann — but by the mid- to late-1960s her interests had moved on to American Minimalism, evident here in a majestic Robert Morris sculpture in draped industrial felt. At the same time, she was captivated by a European near-equivalent, Arte Povera, distinguished by a grounding in radical politics and by a poetic use of materials, as in an untitled Giovanni Anselmo sculpture made from carved granite and fresh lettuce.

She exhibited and collected photography at a time when many people didn’t accept the medium as art. And she challenged those who did by promoting hard-to-love work, like the mid-1960s “portraits” of German industrial architecture taken by Bernd and Hilla Becher. She gave fledgling media like video and performance an early berth.

It’s safe to say that Vito Acconci’s notorious 1972 performance, “Seedbed,” for which the artist masturbated, invisibly but audibly, for hours, under a gallery floor, would not have been welcome at many other SoHo spaces, including, one suspects, the Castelli Gallery. When Sonnabend found an artist interesting, she let him (her roster was almost entirely male) do what he wanted, no questions asked.

Her final commitment to something like a movement came in the 1980s when she took on young American artists like Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach, who cribbed from Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism and who, in ways that make even more sense now, were gripped by a love-hate infatuation with the market. Classic pieces by all three are here.

When I say classic, I mean typical pieces, but I also mean widely seen and often reproduced. Given the thousands of objects that passed through Sonnabend’s hands over five decades, and the rich store of them that became her collection, the objects chosen for the MoMA exhibition are surprisingly unsurprising. With few exceptions — a 1962 Jim Dine “tool” painting, a 1972 Jannis Kounellis text piece — they’re familiar, and in the case of “Canyon,” a textbook staple.

“Canyon” plays a major role here. The show revolves around it in a very basic way. Because it incorporates the remains of a bald eagle, an endangered species, the work could not be sold. When Sonnabend died and her collection was appraised for tax purposes, her heirs — her daughter, Nina Sundell, and her adopted son, Antonio Homem — valued the unmarketable “Canyon” at zero; the Internal Revenue Service, however, estimated that it was worth $65 million and was prepared to tax the estate accordingly.

A deal was struck. If the piece was donated to a museum, the estate tax on it would be dropped. Both the Met and MoMA badly wanted it, and Sonnabend’s heirs made conditions for a gift.

The receiving institution would be required to mount an exhibition in Sonnabend’s honor and inscribe her name in the museum’s list of founding donors. In the end, Ms. Sundell and Mr. Homem deemed MoMA, which owns five Rauschenberg combines, the more appropriate setting.

Ms. Sonnabend’s name is now dutifully listed among the founders in the museum’s lobby.

Dutiful is also how the tribute exhibition feels, and cautious. MoMA is clearly concerned about perceptions of impropriety, the taint of commerce. Sonnabend Gallery is still in business; what remains of the collection (portions have already been sold) could go on the block at any time. Apparently to avoid the impression that the MoMA exhibition might serve as a sales show, the curators have surrounded “Canyon” mostly with work already in museum collections, including its own.

Such caution is wise, but in this instance it also prevents a subject from getting its full due. Sonnabend’s is an important story, not only because of the range of art she embraced, but because she lived in an era when few women were doing what she did.

MoMA presents her monumentally as a tastemaker and canon-shaper, but leaves out all the constructive matter, the human complications, a sense of misses along with hits: in short, context of a kind revealed in letters, informal photographs and contemporary documents. Such material is essential to any truly historical — which inevitably means personal — show. Sonnabend, quiet but deep and prescient, deserves that kind of accounting.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Art-Scene Glimpses, Lost Then Found

Vito Acconci, right, on Pier 18 in 1971, part of a trove of Harry Shunk and Janos Kender photos the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation is donating to five art institutions.

Shunk-Kender / Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

December 18, 2013

The black-and-white images from the 1960s immediately evoke an era of experimentation and ebullience on the art scene: Andy Warhol clutching a bouquet at a gallery opening; Yayoi Kusama lying on a sculptural love seat at the height of her first American fame; naked women covered in blue paint rolling on paper to create an image for Yves Klein, while musicians play in the background.

These photographs are among the highlights in an enormous trove of more than 200,000 prints, negatives and other photographic material that the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation is donating to five top art institutions. The gift, which the foundation will announce on Thursday, documents some of the art world’s most influential — and ephemeral — artistic achievements of the mid-20th century.

The gift of the Harry Shunk and Shunk-Kender Photography Collection, estimated to be worth around $25 million, is being split among the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington; the Tate in Britain; and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

The photographs were shot by two eccentric characters, Harry Shunk and Janos Kender, largely from 1958 to 1973, and they capture an indelible era centered on the avant-garde world in New York and Paris. Art was often made communally, and spontaneously, and those the photographers caught in the act of creating it include Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Eva Hesse, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and some 400 other artists.

Slide Show | The Shunk-Kender Archive An art foundation is giving away 200,000 images from one of the great archives of photography documenting 20th-century artists.

The German-born Shunk (1924-2006) and the Hungarian-born Kender (1937-2009) were hired as a team by artists and dealers to record events from routine gallery openings to major conceptual happenings. They shot on the fly and frequently at the same time, never identifying photos as by one or the other.

The collection’s spirit — recording art making that looked a lot like play — is epitomized by Shunk-Kender’s 1961 image of a gun-toting and paint-splattered Niki de Saint Phalle taking aim for one of her “rifle-shot” works, in which fractured bags of paint created the image.

Roxana Marcoci, senior curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called the Shunk-Kender images “an extraordinary, absolutely amazing archive.” MoMA has already received 638 vintage prints; among the most valuable of those is a near-complete set of images from a 1971 performance project on Pier 18. Among the works: the artist Vito Acconci, blindfolded, being led to the edge of the pier, and William Wegman’s contribution, a bowling ball rolling toward pins.

The prints fill an important gap in the Modern’s collection, Ms. Marcoci said, “the history of how photography documented performance art from the 1950s to the 1970s.”

They collaborated with Yves Klein on “Leap Into the Void” (1960), a photomontage of him doing a swan dive.

When the two photographers parted ways, in 1973, Kender gave Shunk control of the material they worked on together, and Shunk continued photographing for another 30 years; some of his solo work is also included in the gift.

For years, the entire archive was moldering in Shunk’s hoarder-style West Village apartment in the Westbeth artists’ housing complex, directly across the street from the Lichtenstein Foundation. Toward the end of Shunk’s life, foundation staff members were aware that he was a neighbor, but they had no idea of the extent of his holdings.

When Shunk died, in 2006, the photographs were carted off by the New York public administrator, and the estate was appraised. Dorothy Lichtenstein, widow of Roy and the foundation’s president, and Jack Cowart, its executive director, discovered its existence from the appraiser, with whom they had worked before. They stepped in and made a bid at the public auction, thinking they would be outbid by a museum.

“We hoped to be Plan B,” Mr. Cowart said, adding that it was important that the archive not be dispersed. Once acquired (the foundation made later, much smaller purchases of Shunk-Kender images from other sources), it became a consuming project to organize and whip the material into shape. The foundation also created a free online archive.

“This mother lode of art-historical data needed to be made available to everyone,” Mr. Cowart said. The Lichtenstein Foundation has divided the collection based on institutional strengths and curator requests, and in an unusual move, the five institutions will allow one another unfettered access to all parts of the gift. Mr. Cowart described the somewhat “subversive” sharing arrangement as “membership in a club.”

Glenn Phillips, acting head of the department of architecture and contemporary art at the Getty Research Institute, said, “This archival sharing is not so common, but the Shunk archive is the perfect candidate to try something like that.” The Getty is receiving the bulk of the gift, some 183,000 items, as well as management of the copyright on all the images, because of its ability to care for huge amounts of archival material.

The National Gallery of Art will receive around 2,300 images documenting Christo and Jeanne-Claude and their epic installation works. They are the most heavily represented artists in the archive. (Klein is the runner-up.)

The Pompidou Center will receive 10,000 prints, and the Tate’s final number has yet to be worked out. The Lichtenstein Foundation intends to have an entire set of the most important images available in Europe split between the two museums, so that scholars and curators there will have easy access. Shunk’s disorganized archive was almost lost to history when the foundation rescued it in 2008, despite the minimal presence of Roy Lichtenstein in the reams of photographs.

The acquisition and donation were the brainchild of Mr. Cowart — and of Ms. Lichtenstein, who personally donated $2 million to acquire the works.

“Our charter purpose is to facilitate public access to the work of Roy Lichtenstein, as well as the art and artists of his time,” Mr. Cowart said “We had been musing how we would implement that last part,” he added. “All of a sudden, this dropped in our lap.”

The foundation devoted years to organizing, cataloging and digitizing the material. Mr. Phillips of the Getty said, “A huge amount of the work we usually need to do on a collection like this has already been done.”

The foundation will hold on to some 25,000 Shunk-Kender works after the distribution and said it is likely to make more gifts.

As Mr. Cowart put it, “We feel very bonded to this project.”

Correction: December 18, 2013

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the surname of the artist featured in the image. He is Vito Acconci, not Annonci.

George Lindemann Journal

George Lindemann Journal - "A Complexity That Trumps Similarities" @nytimes By ROBERTA SMITH

A Complexity That Trumps Similarities

Call and response: Martin Creed’s toilet-paper pyramid at Hauser & Wirth, above, parallels a cinder-block one at Gavin Brown.

Genevieve Hanson / Hauser & Wirth New York

By ROBERTA SMITH

December 17, 2013

Sometimes I think the British artist-musician Martin Creed makes art for dummies, not excluding myself. At the same time, his accumulations and arrangements of everyday objects and materials initially seem so rudimentary and forthright that they can also make you feel smart.

The dumb-smart continuum is very much in play in Mr. Creed’s concurrent shows at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in the West Village and the uptown gallery of Hauser & Wirth. On this occasion he has made art from such mundane items as bricks, I-beams, colored yarn, rolls of toilet paper and light bulbs, rarely using more than one material or kind of object per work. Together these exhibitions provide an unusually complete picture of his subversive wit and rather restrained, almost classic sense of beauty, not least because he uses the two locations for call-and-response exchanges.

For example, the final work at Hauser & Wirth is a large pyramid of stacked rolls of white toilet paper that is surprisingly eye-popping. (It helps that the cardboard tubes read as black spots.) The first piece at Gavin Brown is its exact opposite, a pyramid made of cinder blocks. The works serve as each other’s punch lines in addition to being the largest possible pyramids that either space could accommodate. They also quietly spoof the big expensive artworks that typically fill New York’s large galleries. A similar sendup — in this case, of installation art as architectural intervention — is a large black balloon shape painted on a wall at Hauser & Wirth that at first looks startlingly like an actual hole.

Mr. Creed, who was born in 1968 and has exhibited in New York since 1997, has devised one of today’s more literal-minded hybrids of Minimalism and Conceptualism. His pieces achieve an unusual balance of materials and ideas, partly because thought is emphasized over traditional skill. Yet the complexity and artistic potential of the physical world is a constant theme.

Martin Creed His light-bulb installation at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, one of two shows in Manhattan devoted to the artist.

Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York

At Hauser & Wirth, the six widely available sizes of steel I-beams, each cut to a length equal to its height, are stacked, perpendicular to a wall like a staircase, splitting the difference between sculpture and architecture while taking up almost no space. There are more stacked I-beam pieces at Brown, including one that seems to penetrate a wall, another optical illusion. Next to this work is a wall installation made from every type of white light bulb produced by one company: 49 in all, screwed into electrical sockets set flush with the wall in a grid formation. The distinctly different bulbs disrupt the repetition expected of grids while creating a unified glow.

A similar affirmation of individuality, but far more emotionally charged, unfolds in a new video that shows about a dozen people with atypical gaits crossing the street just outside Mr. Brown’s gallery, one at a time. Some are clearly managing without their usual aids, be it a cane, crutch or wheelchair. But one way or another, they all make it across — moving, it seems, in rhythm to the sounds of a loud, cheerful rock song written and performed by Mr. Creed. In addition to uniqueness, fortitude is succinctly demonstrated in addition to uniqueness.

Human individuality and the challenge of capturing it may be an increasing focus for Mr. Creed, who is pursuing traditional mediums with a new zeal, as evidenced by a series of drawn and painted portraits in which conventional aesthetic decision-making has been deliberately thwarted.

These works invariably look a little odd, haphazardly expressionistic or even childish. Mr. Creed clearly made some of them with his eyes closed, including two pencil drawings that resemble skewed wire portraits by Alexander Calder. Others suggest that he was working from memory, without the model. A particularly messy one placed high on the wall, “Jumping up Portrait of Luciana,” leaves little doubt that each stroke was applied by the artist in midair.

Perhaps to prove that he has the requisite artistic skills after all, Mr. Creed has included a small, dark, relatively descriptive self-portrait. In its way, this drawing may spoof the idea of the artist as expressionist madman, or everything Mr. Creed is not.

Martin Creed’s work is on view through Saturday at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, 620 Greenwich Street, at Leroy Street, West Village; 212- 627-5258, gavinbrown.biz/home.html; and at Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, Manhattan; 212-794-4970, hauserwirth.com.

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George Lindemann Journal - "Mawkish Memoir, Tedious Staging" @wsj - By Heidi Waleson

 

The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic'

Park Avenue Armory

Dec. 17-21

New York

A successful memoir depends on the synergy of compelling raw material and the artistry of the teller, but Robert Wilson's "The Life and Death of Marina Abramović," a traveling production that opened last week at the Park Avenue Armory, brings out the worst aspects of both. The combination of Ms. Abramović, a performance artist known for long duration pieces (in "The Artist Is Present" at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, she sat motionless for hours), and Mr. Wilson, a pioneer of cryptic, image-based, slow-motion theater (" Einstein on the Beach" lasts 41/2 hours), is weird and finally tedious. The content is repellent, and the artistry doesn't amaze.

Marina Abramović Lucie Jansch

The first part of the piece plumbs Ms. Abramović's terrible childhood—battling parents, abusive mother—in a tone that is alternately deadpan, gleeful and sentimental. The second part, which has even less bite, is about the joys and (mostly) trials of her main romantic relationship. The actor Willem Dafoe, ensconced among file boxes at the side of the stage, is the storyteller, while Mr. Wilson's actor/dancers create processions and tableaux that are representative or not: Marina gets stuck in the washing machine, Marina's mother throws a crystal ashtray at her head, Marina spends a year in the hospital, Marina's parents fight, Marina plays Russian roulette. Everyone wears white clown makeup. The narration speeds along in short sentences, sometimes repeating or going in reverse: "1973: Burning her hair." "2009: Her heart is broken. Psychoanalysis." For most of the first section, Ms. Abramović plays her mother, an ominous, black-gowned figure with a Joan Crawford grin and a penetrating shriek; later, she plays herself.

The music is so amplified and mixed that although there are four live players in the pit, the instrumentals all feel electronic. Three musical genres overlap. The compositions of William Basinski, which repeat brief melodic figures in endless loops (like Philip Glass, another Wilson collaborator, but without the rhythmic drive), segue into the ululations of Svetlana Spajić and her four-voice ensemble. Their Serbian folk-inflected, straight-tone numbers, no doubt intended to evoke the heritage of Ms. Abramović, who was born in Belgrade, have more grit. Then there is Antony, a transgender singer and composer, who also wears a long black gown and sings croony, moony songs with few notes and little textual or textural variety.

Occasionally, the elements come together with a trancelike intensity. "The Story of the Shoe Polish," for example, in which Marina paints her room with shoe polish, which, because it looks and smells like excrement, keeps her mother out, is told in layers—with Mr. Dafoe minutely describing actions like sitting, drinking and urinating; Antony hissing the ballad "I am seething"; and eight Marina avatars dragging lines of miniature beds, like pull toys, onto the stage. The scene concludes with shrieks from Marina's mother, which make all the Marinas run and hide. Perhaps it is making a point about Ms. Abramović's artistic obsession with the body and minutiae as a psychological way to control her environment under abusive circumstances. Or perhaps not.

But the vignettes and the chatter continue endlessly, for two hours and 40 minutes, and the viewer's sense of detachment from the material grows. Finally, the images stop being curious and are just peculiar. Why, for example, is Antony holding a lobster on a leash? Why is there a man carrying an enormous snake? We've seen these kinds of Wilsonian pictures before. They're not magical, and the alternation of morbid glee and soupy sentiment undermines any connection we might feel with Marina. In the end, it left me stupefied and convinced that these artists were a lot less interesting than they think they are.

***

The Salzburg Marionette Theatre's production of Wagner's "Ring," presented at the Metropolitan Museum last weekend, is clever, but it suffers from the fact that without the music, the cycle is just a goofy story. The two-hour distillation of the four operas hits the major plot points but doesn't tell us why we should care. It does use the music—the renowned Georg Solti Decca recording (1958-1964)—but sparingly, with brief snippets of vocal parts and slightly longer stretches of instrumental material.

Two actor-narrators, Tim Oberliessen and Yoann Moess, tell the story, voice the characters, and even venture onto the stage to play the giants Fafner and Fasolt, as well as Gunther, Gutrune and Hunding. They keep it light, stress the absurdities of the libretto, and even add a little tongue-in-cheek political commentary and feminist criticism. (Of Alberich's encounter with the Rhinemaidens, Ms. Moess remarked: "Small men with big egos have caused a lot of trouble in the world.") The production design gives the nod to contemporary European style, though not at its most extreme. The period is the 1950s, with a Cadillac for the gods, a motorcycle for Siegmund, and a trailer home for Mime. Frei and Brünnhilde are done up like Barbie dolls with big chests and skinny legs, the Rhinemaidens are a synchronized swim team, and the Valkyries are Rockettes.

The deftly operated puppets have a lot of personality, and their interactions with the actors, who loom over them, are a nice touch. The actors become actual giants in this context, and when Mr. Oberliessen, as Siegfried disguised as Gunther, wrestled with Brünnhilde for the Ring, it was strangely lifelike and shocking to see this struggle between a large man and tiny woman. Magic effects, like the green blob of a dragon and the Alberich's transformation into a snake that looked like HVAC tubing, are also much easier to concoct in a marionette theater.

But the breakneck pace of the storytelling left little room for musical expansion. There was none, for example, in Brünnhilde's annunciation of Siegmund's death, one of the most harrowing moments in the cycle. Happily, for the two act finales, we got the musical conclusions of "Die Walküre" and "Götterdammerung," and could leave the theater remembering why we sit through the whole 16 hours.

Ms. Waleson writes about opera for the Journal.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal - "The End, if It’s Up to You" @nytimes by CHARLES ISHERWOOD

That familiar fantasy of spying on one’s own funeral has come spectacularly true for at least one of us mortals, the performance artist Marina Abramovic, whose work dates back to the 1970s and who has become a slavishly adored fixture on the art-celebrity circuit over the past decade. In “The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic,” a new music-theater piece being presented through Saturday in the Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory, Ms. Abramovic is lying plushly in state on a giant stage draped in black and lit by glowing white neon bars.

 As befits an art-world star, the drama of Ms. Abramovic’s pseudo-sendoff has been entrusted to another aesthetic luminary, the avant-garde theater and opera director Robert Wilson. The inception for the project came when Ms. Abramovic called Mr. Wilson and asked if he’d be interested in staging her funeral — death being a primary preoccupation of this self-punishing artist; he agreed, as long as he got to stage the life, too. Also providing eulogistical and biographical interpretation are well-known figures from other artistic realms: the composer and singer Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons), dressed in space-age black velvet and appearing as a sort of avatar of Ms. Abramovic, and the actor Willem Dafoe, looking like a skeleton raised from the dead himself in his white makeup under a flaming pouf of red hair.

If you’ve ever fallen into a daydream of contemplating your own interment and selecting the guest list, you are unlikely to come away from “Life and Death” with any practical tips, unless your digital address book is likewise stuffed to the gills with the names of artistic luminaries. Nor, I’m afraid, will general theater audiences attracted by the savory soup of talent involved find much to satisfy them here. This visually opulent but dramatically opaque consideration of the life and career of Ms. Abramovic will probably give pleasure verging on the orgiastic only to fervent admirers of Ms. Abramovic and Mr. Wilson. Both artists are known for creating work that tests audiences’ (and artists’) powers of endurance, and while “Life and Death” runs under three hours with intermission — a mere snap of the fingers in the timescape of their most monumental pieces — its fragmentary structure and largely static stage pictures often seem to stretch the passing minutes out indefinitely.

The artist is present onstage, to borrow the title from the recent retrospective of Ms. Abramovic’s work at the Museum of Modern Art. (It was the title of her popular stare-a-thon throughout the run of that show, too, as well as an HBO documentary.) Ms. Abramovic appears in “Life and Death” in several guises. The show opens with one of its most striking images: Three almost identical-looking female figures, their faces painted vampire white (a longstanding Wilson motif) are found lying motionless on black coffinlike structures as the audience enters. Black dogs, silhouetted against a brightly glowing backdrop (another classic Wilson touch), romp across the stage, sniffing and chewing at an elegantly arranged pile of bones, each spotlit in red light. One of the figures is Ms. Abramovic, who has written that she does indeed wish, when she’s actually dead, to have three coffins involved in her burial, presumably for purposes of sowing confusion and mystery: No one will truly know what happens to the body that she employed as her primary medium.

Ms. Abramovic makes her first appearance in the disjointed biographical drama that follows portraying her own mother, who looms large as a baleful influence in her life. (At times, the show threatens to devolve into a fabulously highbrow version of “Mommie Dearest.”) Most of the narration is provided by Mr. Dafoe, giving motor-mouth commentary on the action (which is glacially paced, as is Mr. Wilson’s way) from a platform in front of the main stage, surrounded by piles of newspapers.

The macabre Wilson maquillage turns Mr. Dafoe into a ringer for the Joker character from the Batman franchise, and he brings a dark, mordant humor (and several accents) to his delivery of the text, which ranges from random ticker-tape bullet points from Ms. Abramovic’s life (’68 — “discovering Zen Buddhism,” ’73 — “burning her hair, cutting a star on her stomach with a razor blade”) to more elaborately related stories of her traumatic home life growing up in Yugoslavia.

The grimmer passages of her youth were clearly formative influences. At one point, Mr. Dafoe describes a fight Marina got into with her suffocating mother, which ended with her mother saying that since she’d given Marina life, she had a right to take it. With that she flung a heavy ashtray at her head; Marina contemplated letting it hit her but ducked at the last minute.

The art she went on to create would flirt with the self-destructive impulse that was awakened by this and other incidents. In some sense, Ms. Abramovic’s hated mother embodied the idea of death for her, and she appears here as a sinuously menacing figure, stalking across the stage, tapping a finger on her arm indifferently, as tales of Marina’s miserable childhood are depicted.

The impulse to transform her body physically through self-mutilation was born, it is humorously implied, by Marina’s youthful desire to break her own nose (and have it redesigned by a surgeon to resemble Brigitte Bardot’s). One of the songs written and sung by Antony underscores the idea of creating art from abuse: “I will make a necklace from the stones you throw,” he croons in his ethereal sob of a voice. (Other lyrics hew more to vague New Age imagery: “I am a volcano of snow.”) Ms. Abramovic does a little singing herself, in a slightly croaky, accented voice that might charitably be compared to Marlene Dietrich’s.

The stories of Ms. Abramovic’s rough upbringing enliven the proceedings with their bleak humor, but much of the rest of the text is more impenetrable. There isn’t much cogent or sustained reflection about her career or the themes that run through her work. Instead, Mr. Dafoe gives a plodding description of some of the mundane actions Ms. Abramovic performed during her piece “The House With the Ocean View” (2002), in which she spent 12 days living on platforms in the Sean Kelly gallery, her only sustenance water, her every action on view to the public (during gallery hours, at least).

In the second act, Mr. Dafoe and Ms. Abramovic, dressed in military garb — Ms. Abramovic’s parents were celebrated for heroism in the fight against the Germans during World War II — sit on the stage and trade chatter about her difficulties with romance. Mr. Dafoe’s running commentary is often hilariously funny, undercutting Ms. Abramovic’s lugubrious self-seriousness.

That archness also swamps the show during some other passages, as when she provides a series of recipes for “spirit cooking,” or when the cast barks out through megaphones a series of prescriptions for artists to live by. (“An artist must be aware of his own mortality.”) Whether this was intended to be satirical, I couldn’t quite tell, but then much of what takes place in “Life and Death” defies easy exegesis, or even simple comprehension.

The rigorous, elemental aesthetic that has defined Ms. Abramovic’s own works here has been amplified by the manifold contributions of her collaborators, resulting in a show whose lavish effects tend to keep the woman at its center at a distance, atop a glossy pedestal instead of uncomfortably in our faces, as she is in her solo performances. “The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic” feels more like the gilding of an icon rather than the illumination of an artist’s experience.

The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic       

Conceived, directed and designed by Robert Wilson; co-creator, Marina Abramovic; performed by Ms. Abramovic, Willem Dafoe and Antony; musical director, composer and lyricist, Antony; composer, William Basinski; composer and lyricist, Svetlana Spajic; costumes by Jacques Reynaud; co-director, Ann-Christin Rommen; dramaturge, Wolfgang Wiens; lighting by A. J. Weissbard; sound by Nick Sagar; makeup design by Joey Cheng; video by Tomasz Jeziorski; music supervisor and music mix, Dan Bora. Presented by Park Avenue Armory, Alex Poots, artistic director. At the Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall, 643 Park Avenue, at 67th Street; 212-933-5812

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Theft Charges Reverberate in Connecticut Art World

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Jasper Johns in his studio in northwestern Connecticut in 1999. Unlike some artists, who employ many assistants, Mr. Johns is said to work with a small staff.

By PETER APPLEBOME and GRAHAM BOWLEY

Published: August 18, 2013

For 16 years, William Morrison has watched the passing parade at his airy, contemporary Morrison Gallery in Kent, in northwestern Connecticut, where luminaries like Meryl Streep, Sam Waterston, Kevin Bacon and Kate Winslet, and far-flung artists great and small live the understated good life of the Litchfield Hills.

Last week he was pondering something less genteel — federal charges that James Meyer, a familiar local artist and longtime assistant to the modern master Jasper Johns, had stolen 22 works from Mr. Johns and had sold them through an unidentified New York gallery for $6.5 million.

“I never would have imagined this,” Mr. Morrison said. “He was always very nice to me, and I thought he was loyal to Jasper. If it’s true, I’m shocked about it and disgusted. It’s crazy. Isn’t being Jasper Johns’s assistant enough?”

Mr. Meyer’s arrest last week rocked the New England reserve of the area, where Mr. Johns is a revered but largely invisible presence and Mr. Meyer a midlevel figure in the local art scene whose stature was elevated by his relationship with a celebrated master. And it highlighted a dynamic as old as fame itself, the often-fraught relationship between an established star and a younger hopeful working on his behalf.

While an artist like Jeff Koons is famous for hiring dozens of assistants to help produce his paintings and sculptures, Mr. Johns, who did not respond to requests for an interview, works with only a small number of assistants at his compound; they are said to be loyal and tight-lipped, even after leaving his employ, which made the news even more surprising.

Chris Mao, founder and director of Chambers Fine Art, a Chelsea gallery, who said he had known Mr. Johns well for several years, had the impression that his assistants were few in number. “It is mostly him,” Mr. Mao said. “He is working hard even at this stage.”

One person who worked for years as an assistant to an internationally known artist — who spoke anonymously because he did not want this instance to reflect on his experience and who had no knowledge of the Johns-Meyer relationship — noted that most artists’ assistants are artists on their own who can risk losing their own artistic identities and identifying to a dangerous degree with someone else’s success.

He said: “I’m sure that many, many years ago, there were a few guys running around the Sistine Chapel trying to pick up girls or impress a potential patron by saying things like: This thing would be a mess if it weren’t for me. You see the way those hands are almost touching? Mike wanted them further apart.”

The relationship between Mr. Johns and Mr. Meyer was long-lived and extraordinarily important for Mr. Meyer, whose Web site says he was “born of Mexican heritage and adopted in Lynwood, California, in 1962,” grew up on Long Island, attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and became the studio assistant for Mr. Johns in 1985.

The indictment charges that Mr. Meyer, 51, carried out the thefts from September 2006 to February 2012. He was arrested on Wednesday and appeared in court in Hartford, where he was released on an unsecured $250,000 bond. The indictment accuses Mr. Meyer of having falsely told an unidentified New York gallery that Mr. Johns, who is 83, had given him the pieces as gifts. According to a federal official, Mr. Johns’s lawyer was the one who contacted the authorities. Mr. Meyer has pleaded not guilty. Neither Mr. Meyer nor his lawyer, Donna Recant, responded to requests for comment.

Around the end of the period cited in the indictment, some friends of Mr. Meyer were surprised to learn he was no longer employed by Mr. Johns. Soon stories began to circulate in Connecticut and New York that the split involved allegations of theft. There were other signs that not all was normal. On March 5, 2012, less than a month after the split, Mr. Meyer transferred ownership of the house he and his wife, Amy Jenkins, had owned together to her name alone.

In an interview from the 1990s with Matthew Rose, an artist and writer, Mr. Meyer described himself as a total naïf who barely knew Mr. Johns’s work or how art studios functioned when he was looking for a job and was given a list of some of the most important artists in New York. He stumbled into a position with Mr. Johns that lasted 27 years. During that time, he also tried to make his own name as an artist with works whose influences included suburbia and Dostoyevsky filtered through the techniques and sensibilities of Mr. Johns.

“While 1960s suburban American remains my primary source of inspiration,” Mr. Meyer wrote on his Web site, “rethinking the linkage of image, shadow and subsequent images, sets off a conceptual clock of instantly recognizable pieces to a more complex puzzle. It’s my way of generating psychological power.”

During the last three decades Mr. Johns rose to almost unimaginable heights in the art world and marketplace. His painting “Flag” from the collection of the best-selling author Michael Crichton, who died in 2008, sold for $28.6 million at a New York City auction in 2010. Koji Inoue, a Christie’s specialist and contemporary art expert, said Mr. Johns’s works can change hands in private sales for significantly higher prices — sometimes above $100 million.

Mr. Meyer has regularly exhibited his art, including at galleries in New York like the Gering & López on Fifth Avenue, where he had a show this spring. According to Mr. Meyer’s Web site, his work has been acquired by some prestigious collectors and institutions including the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

But he appears to have had only modest success at public auction. Artnet, which tracks auction sales, lists only five instances when his works were put up for auction. Four times his works were “bought in,” or failed to sell, including a 1995 watercolor with an estimate of $2,500 to $3,000. In 2011, however, a mixed media collage sold at auction in Stockholm for $788.

The indictment alleges that Mr. Meyer deposited $3.4 million of the $6.5 million in illegal sales in a Connecticut bank. Records show that Mr. Meyer owns four cars: a 2005 Subaru, 1971 Volkswagen bus, 2008 Mini Cooper and 2006 Toyota pickup; two motorcycles, including a 2007 BMW; and three trailers. In recent years, he has owned several boats including a 42-foot fiberglass sailboat that is now registered in his wife’s name.

But the house, now in his wife’s name, is a modest one in Lakeville, Conn., and was purchased in 1996 for $185,000, records show. Over the years, he took out six mortgages on the property, which is now assessed at $361,428. Mr. Meyer lists as his residence a slightly frayed house in Salisbury about 15 minutes on two-lane country roads from Mr. Johns’s 102-acre gated estate in Sharon.

A few people in Mr. Meyer’s circle were familiar with the allegations, but more common was concern for Mr. Meyer and Ms. Jenkins, an admired art teacher and artist, and their two children, who attended local schools.

Mr. Meyer is lauded by friends as a public spirited part of the community who helped found the popular artgarage in Falls Village, Conn., an after-school art studio at a local high school. Others describe him as overbearing and too quick to traffic on his association with Mr. Johns.

“Everyone is shocked, because they know him to be someone of integrity,” said one friend, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the situation. He added: “It’s got to be a complicated psychological thing, working with an artist for so long. Who knows, maybe Jim felt entitled.”

Ruth Asawa, an artist who learned to draw in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II and later earned renown weaving wire into intricate, flowing, fanciful abstract sculptures, died on Aug. 6 at her home in San Francisco, where many of her works now dot the cityscape. She was 87.

Her daughter Aiko Cuneo confirmed the death.

Ms. Asawa had been shunted from one detention camp to another as a child before blossoming under the tutelage of the artists Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Franz Kline and Josef Albers. Gaining notice in the art world while still a student, she soon began building a wider following with abstract wire sculptures that expressed both the craftsmanship she had learned from Mexican basket makers as well as her ambition to extend line drawings into a third dimension. Many of these were hanging mobiles.

In 1968 she startled her admirers by creating her first representational work, a fountain in Ghirardelli Square on San Francisco’s waterfront. It had two mermaids — one nursing a “merbaby” — frogs, turtles, splashing water and a recording of frogs croaking.

Lawrence Halprin, the distinguished landscape architect who designed the waterfront space, had planned to install an abstract fountain. But after a long, unexplained delay, the developer chose Ms. Asawa for the job. Her creation set off a freewheeling debate about aesthetics, feminism and public art. Mr. Halprin, who had been a fan of Ms. Asawa’s abstractions, complained that the mermaids looked like a suburban lawn ornament.

Ms. Asawa countered with old-fashioned sentiment. “For the old, it would bring back the fantasy of their childhood,” she said, “and for the young, it would give them something to remember when they grow old.”

By and large, San Franciscans loved it. Ms. Asawa went on to design other public fountains and became known in San Francisco as the “fountain lady.” For a work in a plaza near Union Square, she mobilized 200 schoolchildren to mold hundreds of images of the city in dough, which were then cast in iron.

The work became the locus of a dispute this summer with Apple Inc., which wanted to remove the sculpture to make way for a plaza adjacent to a store it is building. After a public outcry, the company and the city promised to protect the sculpture, but the final disposition of the piece remains unresolved.

Ms. Asawa’s wire sculptures are in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In May, one of her pieces sold at auction at Christie’s for $1.4 million, four times its appraised value.

After the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco opened a new building in 2005, it installed 15 of Ms. Asawa’s most significant hanging wire sculptures at the base of its tower. As they drift with air currents, her large organic forms have been said to resemble a giant, eerie kelp forest.

Her work is inextricably linked to her life. “Glimpses of my childhood” inspired her, she once said. One memory, of sunlight pouring through a dragonfly’s translucent wing, was transmuted into the crocheted wire sculptures for which she first became known. In 1958, The New York Times wrote of their “gossamer lightness” and the way “the circular and oval shapes seem like magic lanterns, one within the other.”

Ms. Asawa said another influence came from riding on the back of horse-drawn farm equipment on the fruit and vegetable farms where her Japanese-American parents worked in California. She made patterns with her feet as they dragged on the ground.

“We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within forms in my crocheted wire sculptures,” she said in an interview with The Contra Costa Times in 2006.

A third influence — one she insisted was positive — was being held in internment camps with her family during the war, a fate that befell 120,000 Japanese-Americans, rounded up by the federal government for fear that they might aid the enemy. Her family spent the first five months of detention in stables at the Santa Anita Park racetrack. It was there that three animators from the Walt Disney Studios taught her to draw.

“I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one,” she said in 1994. “Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am.”

Ruth Aiko Asawa was born on Jan. 24, 1926, in Norwalk, a Southern California farming town. Her third-grade teacher encouraged her artwork, and in 1939, her drawing of the Statue of Liberty took first prize in a school competition to represent what it means to be an American.

In 1942 F.B.I. agents seized her father and sent him to an internment camp in New Mexico. Ms. Asawa did not see him for six years. Two months later, she, her mother and her five siblings were taken to the racetrack. After five months, they were taken to a camp in Arkansas, where Ms. Asawa graduated from high school.

In 1943, a Quaker organization arranged for her to attend Milwaukee State Teachers College, now the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to prepare to be an art teacher. She completed three years but was unable to earn her degree after being barred from a required student-teacher program because of her ethnicity.

Ms. Asawa then spent three years at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a magnet for budding artists and renowned teachers. There she befriended the choreographer Merce Cunningham and studied painting with Albers, whose theories on color were immensely influential. While still a student of his, in 1948, she caught the attention of a reviewer for The Times, who observed that her work “transformed Albers’ color-shape experiments into personal fantasy.”

Ms. Asawa had started exploring wire as an artistic medium after a trip to Mexico in 1947, when she noticed looped wire baskets being used in the markets to sell eggs and produce.

“I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out,” she explained. “It’s still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.”

Ms. Asawa wore bandages to protect her hands when working with wire, but still suffered constant cuts. When young, her children were usually at her side while she worked.

Her husband of 59 years, Albert Lanier, an architect she met at Black Mountain, died in 2008. Their son Adam died in 2003. In addition to her daughter, Ms. Cuneo, she is survived by her sons, Xavier, Hudson and Paul Lanier; her daughter Addie Lanier; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Ms. Asawa supported arts education in San Francisco public schools, and in 2011, the one to which she was most devoted was renamed for her. For years Ms. Asawa maintained the grounds herself.

Her own educational experience came full circle in 1998, when the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which had prevented her from graduating a half-century earlier when it was a teachers college, sought to present her with an honorary doctorate. Ms. Asawa asked that she be awarded the bachelor’s degree instead.

In today's contemporary art world, most people would consider the status of California Light & Space artist James Turrell (b. 1943) to be nothing short of paradisiacal. He has three concurrent, major museum exhibitions going: a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and solo shows at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. At Lacma, time-sensitive tickets limit the number of people admitted at any one time, with posted suggestions as to how much time should be spent with each work so the visitor's eyes can adjust for optimum viewing. Houston is exhibiting seven of Mr. Turrell's "immersive light environments" that date from the late 1960s to the present, along with what the museum calls its "beloved light tunnel," "The Light Inside" (1999). "Aten Reign"(2013)—a hyperpretty, computer-controlled, colored-light installation—occupies the Guggenheim Museum's famous rotunda.

Each exhibition affords viewers the kind of pure, unencumbered-by-things perception commonly associated with religious ecstasy and revelatory near-death experiences. Add to this heady mix Mr. Turrell's continuing, ultragrand project to turn Roden Crater—an extinct volcano in the northern Arizona desert—into a celestial observatory that's one giant work of art, and you've got an artist whose oeuvre comes as close as any out there to being timeless and universal. Or so it may seem.

Mr. Turrell—a handsome man with an oracular presence, a long beard and a full head of silver hair that he often tops with a black cowboy hat—is the son of an aeronautical-engineer father and a mother, trained in medicine, who worked in the Peace Corps. Mr. Turrell earned a pilot's license at 16, studied perceptual psychology at Pomona College and art as a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine. Perhaps influenced by his Quaker parents, he registered as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war.

LACMA/James Turrell/Florian Holzherr

'Afrum (White)' (1966)

"Afrum (White)" (1966), in the Lacma exhibition, was Mr. Turrell's ingeniously simple breakthrough work: a rectangle of brilliant white light projected into the corner of a room to give the illusion that it was a luminous, hovering box. A year later, at age 24, he had a solo show of several such projections at the Pasadena Art Museum, and was credited in many quarters as being the first artist to put light itself on display as art.

But Mr. Turrell didn't just slide down a beam of light and land, sui generis, in the Southern California art world. Los Angeles—with its shiny custom-car culture and surfer-Zen regard for the Pacific horizon—already had a "finish fetish" art style that emphasized light reflections on shiny surfaces. As early as 1963, Larry Bell was experimenting with mirrored boxes and Craig Kauffman with vacuum-formed plastic, and by the mid-1960s, Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler were busily dematerializing the art object by including a gauzy electric-light surround as part and parcel of their minimalist wall works. (Mr. Irwin, who's about to turn 85, has one of his miraculous scrim pieces, "Scrim Veil—Black Rectangle—Natural Light," from 1977, reinstalled at the Whitney Museum through Sept. 1.) But where light is concerned, Mr. Turrell—whose daunting output falls into such categories as "Space Division Constructions," "Veils," "Perceptual Cells," the "Magnatron Series," the "Tall Glass / Wide Glass Series," the "Window Series" and "Skyspaces"—is clearly the head honcho.

A Skypace is essentially a beautifully placed and tailored hole in a ceiling (or the open top of a specially built enclosure) that reveals a crisply cropped sliver of sky that seems to exist as a flat shape on the ceiling's own plane and at the same time accentuates one's perception of changing natural light. In 1974, Mr. Turrell's first Skyspace was installed in the residence of the Milanese collector Giuseppe Panza. Since then, Mr. Turrell has executed more than 80 such works around the world.

They're not cheap. Much of the proceeds of their sales, however, have been pumped—along with funds from the DIA Foundation and other helping hands—into the Roden Crater project. Completion dates for this remote complex of architecturally and sculpturally fastidious tunnels, ramps, stairs, platforms and a Skyspace iteration, have been set, variously, at 1990, 2000 and 2011. As of now, it looks as if the Roden Crater might take its place—although much more serviceable and beautiful in its incompletion—alongside the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota, which was begun in 1948 and is still being worked on.

Mr. Turrell isn't bogged down in a probably neverending Roden Crater enterprise, however. In the Lacma retrospective, there's a spherical Perceptual Cell entitled "Light Reignfall" (2011), into which a viewer (after paying about double the cost of an ordinary ticket to the show) is slid, face up in a big drawer, in order to experience a personal 10-minute lightshow. More democratically, spectators at the Guggenheim can stand, sit or lie supine and look up at the smooth, 60-minute color cycle of "Aten Reign," a cone of concentric ovals ascending toward the museum's famous skylight.

The purposes of Mr. Turrell's art are profoundly simple: To make the viewer realize that his art takes place within one's perceptual apparatus—indeed, consciousness—rather than outside of it, embedded in a configuration of inert material, and to make the viewer aware of the act of perception itself. "Seeing oneself see," Turrellians call it. By doing this, viewers shake themselves free from a more earthbound kind of aesthetic perception that is rooted in objects, making judgments of good-better-best among them, and improving one's taste. (Mr. Turrell has said that "Taste is repression.")

Do Mr. Turrell's work, and its wonderful, breathtaking arc from "Afrum (White)" to "Aten Reign," truly escape taste? Which is to ask, do they fly free from history, style and the vicissitudes of culture? Although the attempt is both noble and exhilarating, the answer is no.

photograph by David Heald - Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Installation view of 'Aten Reign' (2013) at the Guggenheim Museum

After a while, looking up at "Aten Reign," one notices in the first layer of scrim, stretched overhead, a couple of individual threads, a bit of dust, an incipient wrinkle. Inexorably, one begins to pay attention, as it were, to the man behind the curtain. And the nested ovals are necessarily tints of one color or two closely neighboring colors at a time, a convention in high-end room décor redolent of Los Angeles in the 1950s. As shapes, they evoke the post-Surrealism and abstract classicism of such earlier Southern California artists as Helen Lundeberg and Frederick Hammersley. And on a track parallel to the pop-culture influences of custom cars and surfer's bliss, those two painting styles fed directly into the work of the "finish fetish" artists who were Mr. Turrell's artistic contemporaries in mid-1960s Los Angeles.

That doesn't mean Mr. Turrell's art falls short in its ambitions. Its inescapable Southern California flavor merely reiterates the truth that particular times, places and, yes, tastes, cling to works of art even as cosmically intended as "Light Reignfall" and the Roden Crater project. Such human traces are, in fact, what give visceral life to art that wishes to be abstractly universal.

Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York.

A version of this article appeared August 15, 2013, on page D7 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Can the Light Set You Free?.

George Lindemann Wins Inaugural Better Beach Award

March 26, 2013

Tech entrepreneurs are starting to peer out from their hoodies and explore the art world, and dealers and museum boards couldn't be more thrilled. WSJ's Ellen Gamerman joins Lunch Break with a look at the new players, and the culture clash it's setting up with Wall Street's elite. Photo: Getty Images.

Next week, San Francisco will unveil a major public art installation using 25,000 energy-efficient lights to illuminate the city's Bay Bridge in countless abstract combinations.

The Bay Lights, set to run every night for the next two years, will also spotlight a new role for the area's tech entrepreneurs: patrons of the arts.

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Winni Wintermeyer for The Wall Street Journal

BETA TESTING Leo Villareal, a tech-world favorite, with his computer-assisted light sculpture that will illuminate San Francisco's Bay Bridge in abstract patterns every night for the next two years.

Created by artist Leo Villareal, the $8 million computer-assisted light sculpture has been financed by some high-profile tech donors including Yahoo YHOO +2.86%CEO Marissa Mayer and Internet power couple Mark and Alison Pincus. Mr. Villareal, who designed the bridge's light patterns using software he created, is also emblematic of a new breed of artist that is especially attractive to wealthy technology executives. A former researcher at Microsoft MSFT +0.61%co-founder Paul Allen's think tank in the early 1990s, Mr. Villareal weaves that tech background into his work.

"This was a whole I.T. job, which you wouldn't associate with a monumental piece of public art," Mr. Villareal said one chilly evening on a San Francisco pier as he tested the work with his laptop. Every time he stabbed at the keyboard through a hole in his glove, the lights rearranged across the bridge.

Around San Francisco, tech entrepreneurs who spent years building businesses and accumulating wealth are starting to peer out from under their hoodies and explore the art world. As the Internet industry matures, the people who helped make it happen are having children, buying houses and taking tentative steps into philanthropy—and now the art world. It's a lucrative emerging market that is gaining the attention of museums, dealers, consultants and other art-world heavyweights.

"Art comes between buying the Ferrari and getting the kids into college," said New York mega-dealer Larry Gagosian, who added that he sees "tremendous potential" from tech entrepreneurs as they grow older.

As they have with risky and fast-growing startups, the new tech players are putting a distinctive spin on the art scene—both in the type of work they collect and the low-profile way they acquire it. Many tech collectors exploring the market, for instance, are seduced by works with a digital twist.

"An engineer will look at a photograph or video art in a way a banker couldn't—we think in ones and zeros, we think in terms of screens," said Trevor Traina, a 44-year-old collector of photography who sold his first tech company to Microsoft for more than $100 million.

Unlike on Wall Street, where a trophy canvas can work as a passport to highflying social circles, flaunting isn't part of the tech culture. "If you saw these people, you'd never guess that they have money—it's all about just being cool," said San Francisco dealer Chris Perez, who works with about 20 tech clients.

Two years ago, as a service largely to its growing base of tech clients, Christie's began shipping artworks to San Francisco ahead of the major modern and contemporary art sales, said Ellanor Notides, who runs the Christie's San Francisco office. She said tech clients are chasing pieces by market darlings like Gerhard Richter, whose work sold for more than $34 million at Sotheby's last year.

Lately, some art insiders have been buzzing that the wife of Google co-founder Larry Page, Lucinda Southworth, is starting to buy art. (A Google spokeswoman said the company doesn't comment on executives' personal endeavors.) Tech entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen collects—including works by Robert Rauschenberg—as do tech venture capitalists Matt Cohler, who favors contemporary photography, and Jim Breyer, who owns pieces by emerging artists in China and Brazil.

Mr. Breyer, a board member of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, finds parallels between art and startups. He loves taking a chance on lesser-known talent and often visits galleries while traveling abroad on business. He particularly admires artists like Picasso who show the capacity to reinvent themselves. "It's a personal characteristic not only of the artists I gravitate to but the entrepreneurs," he said. (Mr. Breyer sits on the board of News Corp NWSA +1.04%., which publishes The Wall Street Journal.)

The new collectors' interests sometimes contrast with the more traditional tastes of tech pioneers before them: Oracle ORCL +1.18%CEO Larry Ellison buys centuries-old Japanese art. Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang hunts for leading examples of Chinese calligraphy. Microsoft's Mr. Allen collects masterpieces by blue-chip artists like van Gogh and Mark Rothko.

Now San Francisco museums are stepping up their pursuit of the tech industry, particularly as companies like Twitter, Pinterest and Dropbox settle in new offices in the city rather than Silicon Valley.

Mr. Traina, the Internet entrepreneur, loaned his impressive photography collection for a show at the city's de Young Museum last year. Dave Morin, an early Facebook FB +2.68%employee who is now CEO and co-founder of the private social network Path, just joined the board of SFMOMA.

Since 2010, SFMOMA has brought on 12 new trustees—at least half from the tech community, according to museum deputy director of external affairs Robert Lasher. He added that in addition to donating money and loaning artworks, tech contributors are helping retool the institution's digital strategy and guide the museum to a more global role in a nearly $555 million expansion.

Next week, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's annual Mid-Winter Gala is expected to be populated by a number of tech-world all-stars. Yahoo's Ms. Mayer bought a table while Apple lead designer Jonathan Ive is expected to come as well. Organizers are hoping for the return of past attendees like Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman.

 

Ligorano/Reese/Catharine Clark Gallery/Nora Ligorano (photo)

Tech collectors chase works like Ligorano/Reese's fiber optic tapestry.

From her glass-walled office at Web retailer One Kings Lane, co-founder Alison Pincus has been working her contacts for San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum, which recruited her for its board last year. At her company's headquarters, which sits in the same San Francisco building as Twitter and Yammer, the Givenchy-and-Balenciaga-clad Ms. Pincus described going to last year's TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., with a mission: to convince friend and fellow art collector David Krane, a general partner at Google Ventures, GOOG +0.60%to join the museum's board.

She succeeded.

Ms. Pincus, whose husband, Mark, is founder and CEO of the social-gaming company Zynga, ZNGA +1.63%also lends the museum her expertise. The 38-year-old mother of two is helping revamp the museum store, where the home page now showcases little more than a small mezuza. The shop needs "bespoke products," a sleeker website and items not limited to Jewish themes, she said.

As art and tech circles overlap more frequently, a cottage industry of dealers and specialized consultants has sprung up to offer advice. San Francisco art adviser Sabrina Buell is a Stanford graduate and former New York gallery director who helps tech honchos—some of them old college pals—begin collecting art.

The 36-year-old San Francisco native meets clients in her downtown office, with its high ceilings and exposed ductwork, first asking them broad questions about their tastes—abstract or figurative? color or muted? Then she goes analog, loading them up with resource books and catalogs. "I like people to look at a thousand things before they buy one," said Ms. Buell.

Her clients tend to avoid status symbols. "If you're young and you walk into someone's house and see a Picasso, it would be like, 'Whoa'—just because you have the capacity, you don't have to buy the most expensive things," she said. Still, her clients often get blue-ribbon treatment, with galleries and auction houses sending art directly to their homes so they can see the art up close while mulling a purchase.

Ms. Buell, whose great uncle is Napa vintner Robert Mondavi, bought her first work of art when she was 15, a Michael Kenna photograph she had written about for an English class. Today she fills the loft she shares with her partner, industrial designer Yves Behar, with edgy contemporary works. Ms. Buell and her colleague, Mary Zlot, trade in discretion: Zlot Buell + Associates doesn't even have a website.

Despite the stepped-up activity, some art dealers still bemoan what they call the indifference of the tech world and write off tech billionaires as glorified engineering nerds who skipped art history to play with their computers.

Others see a shift happening, thanks in part to the booming art market. "It once was a very culturally vapid community, but it's become incredibly rich lately," said Adam Sheffer, a partner at the New York gallery Cheim & Read. "I think people are coming to realize fine art has come to be worth something."

Dealers who work with tech clients are protective of them, wary of a culture clash with snooty art climbers. When a tech entrepreneur who favors Patagonia jackets and sneakers told San Francisco dealer Claudia Altman-Siegel he was headed to the Swiss art fair Art Basel, she had some advice: "I was like, 'No one's going to be nice to you if you're not dressed up,'" she said.

Then again, relative anonymity can be a plus. San Francisco tech investor Art Berliner, managing director of Walden Venture Capital, said when he walks into certain New York galleries he rarely gets the hard sell—or any sell at all—because most people don't know who he is.

Mr. Berliner, whose eclectic collection includes work by Israeli artist Michal Rovner, keeps some of his pieces in his office. He said his artwork helps set a creative tone and soothe nerves when entrepreneurs come to pitch their businesses: "Having art around does make the scene less intimidating."

Apple senior director Jeffrey Dauber owns a $50,000 video work by artist Lincoln Schatz that features layered video images of Mr. Dauber engaging in his morning ritual—including a shot of him pulling down his pants. The voyeurism resonates with a man whose industry helped redefine the idea of privacy.

"The thing about being in tech is, I have no illusions—I know we're being watched," said Mr. Dauber, who keeps his extensive art collection in its own house in San Francisco.

Dick Kramlich, an early pioneer in the tech venture capital scene, plans next year to open a private museum of new media art—which includes video, film and computer-assisted installations—in a Napa Valley building designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the architecture firm behind Beijing's Bird's Nest and the Tate Modern in London. The 77-year-old chairman and co-founder of New Enterprise Associates said the collection's tech orientation was his wife's idea: "She said, 'Look, you're going down to Silicon Valley every day, I think if I did something in this area it might be of interest to you,'" he said.

Internet entrepreneur Mr. Traina, who recently launched a new startup called IfOnly.com, now has 300 master works of photography on the six floors of his mansion in San Francisco's Pacific Heights. During a recent tour, walking by a room wallpapered in peacock feathers, he pointed out classics by Diane Arbus (Mr. Traina bought one of her iconic photographs of identical twins for just under $500,000 at Sotheby's in 2004) and contemporary works like a Doug Rickard photograph of a computer screen showing a Google Street View of a depressed city neighborhood.

Raised in a moneyed family among art lovers—his father had a world-class collection of Fabergé cigarette cases—Mr. Traina promotes the art world to his tech buddies. He organized the Mid-Winter Gala for the Fine Arts Museums in part to lure a "farm team" of young donors and future board members. Trustees now include Zachary Bogue, a tech investor married to Yahoo's Ms. Mayer, an SFMOMA board member.

The institution returns the favor by opening up singular experiences to Mr. Traina, who recalls a trip to the Netherlands he once took with fellow board members. Early one morning, he was allowed to visit an Amsterdam museum while it was still closed. "This very nice woman left me alone in a room with five Vermeers," he said. "I realized the power great art can have."

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