PARIS — In a cultural twofer that makes it Frank Gehry week here, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, a private cultural center and contemporary-art museum designed by Mr. Gehry, had its official inaugural ceremony on Monday, attended by the French president, François Hollande. At the same time, the Pompidou Center across town is giving Mr. Gehry, based in Los Angeles, a major career retrospective, his first in Europe.

The Pompidou exhibition, “Frank Gehry,” establishes a narrative arc for a career that effectively started with small-scale, experimental wood-frame studios and houses in Southern California and culminates in the Vuitton Foundation in the Bois de Boulogne, which some critics have called one of the most technologically sophisticated, artistically motivated buildings of his oeuvre. A 126,000-square-foot, $135 million structure that formally opens to the public next Monday, it promises to add a major contemporary monument to Paris’s long list of historic architecture.

At the end of the ceremony, President Hollande described the building as a “cathedral of light” that was “a miracle of intelligence, creativity and technology.”

Mr. Gehry’s moment in Paris comes after his Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington was approved last week, following a bruising five-year process in which Mr. Gehry’s design went through more than 15 committees and commissions and many adjustments. In Paris, after settling concerns about building in a park, he needed the approval of only one client, Bernard Arnault, chairman and chief executive of the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, whose foundation owns the new building.

“The guy knew what he wanted, and he wanted a building that would be different than anything else anybody had ever seen,” said Mr. Gehry, interviewed over coffee on Monday in his hotel off the Champs Élysées.

Mr. Arnault hired Mr. Gehry, he has said, after seeing his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, a spectacle of fluid forms that reshaped that city’s derelict waterfront while enclosing classical white galleries inside. At Vuitton, Mr. Gehry builds on the Bilbao precedent, creating a more complex structure clad in glass rather than titanium.

Visitors encounter what looks like a Cubist sailboat, with glass sails and spinnakers rising above the tree line and billowing simultaneously fore, aft, port and starboard. The building appears to glide over a cascade of water lapping down a stepped embankment below its cantilevered prow. The two-story structure has 11 galleries, a voluminous auditorium and multilevel roof terraces for events and art installations.

The site is next to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, a 19th-century children’s park and zoo at the north edge of the Romantically landscaped Bois de Boulogne. The architect had to build within the square footage and two-story volume of a bowling alley that previously stood here; anything higher had to be glass. Mr. Arnault’s program for the Foundation, whose stated mission is to stimulate artistic creation, called for a museum with galleries for permanent and temporary exhibitions, and a concert hall.

Mr. Gehry said, “We talked to him about the site, and it was clear that it had to be something that fits into a garden, something in the tradition of a 19th-century glass pavilion or conservatory.”

Unlike his compatriot I. M. Pei, who placed the glass Pyramid at the Louvre to acknowledge the long axis of the Champs Élysées, Mr. Gehry ignored France’s geometric traditions. “The clouds of glass respond to nature’s geometry, to the park’s English landscaping,” he said of the Bois de Boulogne. “Nature’s apparent disorder has its own order.”

In trying to create a spirited adult version of the Jardin d’Acclimatation’s fantasy buildings, Mr. Gehry said he was “very moved by the park, which reminded me of Proust’s Paris.” He added: “I read him over and over again, and I realized it was a pretty emotional site for everybody. It brought tears to my eyes.”

He had two mandates: respecting the park and garden and satisfying the requirements for the galleries.

“Once we had the big, basic premise that there was a solid piece for the galleries, which we started to call the icebergs, and then the glass sails for the garden, we started to work them independently,” Mr. Gehry said. “Merging the two would not work, because you couldn’t have curvy galleries, and you can’t hang paintings on glass.” The diaphanous sails, supported on an acrobatic armature of wood and steel, project outside the iceberg.

The glass structure takes its place in a long Parisian tradition dating from the 13th-century Gothic Sainte-Chapelle on the Île de la Cité, with its tall walls of stained glass, and the 19th-century Grand Palais, an exhibition hall whose glass vaults echo the vast public spaces of Rome. The Foundation’s fragmented, multidirectional forms recall the Cubism of Braque and Picasso. The mission statement of the Foundation acknowledges 20th-century Modern art movements as a basis of the contemporary art it champions.

Visitors enter a tall hall from which angled staircases and meandering paths lead to the galleries and to a roofscape of outdoor terraces enclosed by the glass sails. Between the iceberg and the sailboat, accordion spaces expand and contract, alternately intimate and grand, in what Mr. Gehry called “a chaotic dance.” The white galleries, some with tall ceilings that act as chimneys of light, are “a refuge,” said Edwin Chan, a former design partner in the Gehry firm, who worked with Mr. Gehry and the main project architect, Laurence Tighe. One opens to the sky.

Frédéric Migayrou, the deputy director of the Pompidou, organized the full retrospective and a smaller boutique show of Mr. Gehry’s development drawings that will be on view at the Foundation. “This building doesn’t reveal itself at once, but over many encounters,” he said. “It’s a provocation for the viewer; you have to be part of it, as with an artwork where you make your own experience.”

Claude Parent, France’s 91-year-old éminence grise in architecture whose work in the 1950s and ’60s anticipated deconstructivism, said that when he first saw the Foundation building, “I was seized by an emotion so strong that it seemed to come from something other than architecture.” He called Mr. Gehry’s design “an act of unbridled imagination.”

Others describe the building less favorably. The architecture critic of The Guardian, Rohan Moore, known for his Spartan architectural attitudes, wrote dismissively, “Everything that is good about the Fondation could have been achieved, and better, without the sails.” Denis Lafay, writing in the online financial newspaper La Tribune, did not criticize the architecture but called the building the ostentatious result of an oligarch’s commodifying of artistic creation to burnish his own brand.

At the Foundation, Mr. Migayrou’s immersive show, “Voyage of Creation,” explains the building, with large-screen videos filmed from overhead cranes and drones that flew over and through the building.

“I wanted to give a dynamic view of the building, and the films put the building into movement,” he said in an interview. The show includes many conceptual and development models, along with the seminal sketches Mr. Gehry drew on the long flight back to Los Angeles after he and Mr. Arnault first met to discuss the project.

In the Pompidou retrospective, Mr. Migayrou includes little-known urban designs for housing projects and town plans, evidence of an urban-planning expertise that he said had informed the organization of all of Mr. Gehry’s architectural work. The exhibition also features a wall of previously unexhibited photographs by Mr. Gehry, who gravitated to raw moments in the cityscape, like cement plants, that his eye made beautiful.

“He was photographing the city, the spaces between places,” Mr. Migayrou said.

He also chose models and original drawings to show the evolution of Mr. Gehry’s ideas leading up to the Vuitton Foundation. Other shows, Mr. Migayrou said, “have portrayed Gehry’s buildings as an object, a shape.”

“I tried to do the reverse,” he said, “going through all the works to define the evolution of the language, the continuities, the idea of dynamic movement, how he opens form so that they interact with the city and provoke the movement of the body around the building.”

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "London Caps a Busy Art Week" @wsj by Mary M Lane

LONDON—Christie’s bested rival Sotheby’s and boutique house Phillips during a round of evening auctions last week that tested the contemporary art market before New York’s major November sales.

All three houses logged solid results overall, but critical tests of deceased or older artists for whom the auction houses are trying to develop markets were mixed.

The auction market during Frieze Art Week, the European art world’s most frantic week of buying held each October, was further boosted by a sale of 43 museum-quality works from the collection of Karlheinz Essl, an Austrian owner of DIY stores whose failed expansion into Turkey and Eastern Europe triggered the sale.

Mr. Essl’s auctioned works last Monday totaled $75 million, between the $64 million and $96 million pre-sale estimate. It burnished Christie’sgrowing reputation as the leader in liquidating large single-owner collections, a reputation that first drove Mr. Essl’s interest in having them handle the “painful process,” he says.

German painter Gerhard Richter fetched the top price but also suffered the most awkward moment in that sale: his four-paneled painting “Clouds (Window)” sold for $10 million but “Net,” a major abstract painting expected to sell easily, failed to reach its $12 million low estimate, prompting a funereal moment of silence from the audience.

Mr. Richter, 82 years old, was the world’s most expensive living artist at auction before Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Dog” sold last year for $58 million. Specialists expected demand for Richters to be boosted by his show at Marian Goodman’s new London gallery that opened last week with sold-out works priced between $76,000 and $4.4 million.

But buyers are establishing a pecking order for Mr. Richter’s older works, auction specialists and private dealers acknowledged after the auctions.

Though “Net” is an excellent example of Mr. Richter’s transition between blurring paint and using a squeegee, buyers shunned it because it wasn’t a “typical” Richter, says Christie’s specialist Francis Outred.

“The aesthetic wasn’t fashionable,” he said.

Mr. Richter’s drab camouflage-colored 1971 “Jungle Painting” stalled at Sotheby’s on Friday night under its $3 million low estimate.

The overall contemporary sale at Sotheby’s totaled $45 million, just above the pre-sale low estimate and below Christie’s’ $64 million total for its competing sale held on Thursday. Sotheby’s enjoyed a surprise hit in its side Italian sale on Friday when a private European collector paid $20 million for Piero Manzoni’s “Achrome,” a blindingly white 1958-1959 canvas.

Attempts to drum up market demand for two artists academically revered but ignored by buyers were lackluster, particularly for Cy Twombly and Anselm Kiefer.

Mr. Kiefer, 69, has always been a tricky sell given his heavily Nazi-themed works that frequently depict him giving the “Heil, Hitler” salute in a Nazi uniform. One of two Kiefers at Christie’s stalled at $563,000, far below its $660,000 low estimate. A Mandarin speaker paid $1.9 million for his 1999 work “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!,” a $981,000 loss on the work’s previous value but reflective of a trend amid Chinese millionaires to buy works confronting Maoist thought. A buyer at Phillips paid $1.3 million for “For Paul Celan,” Mr. Kiefer’s homage to the Nazi-persecuted Jewish poet.

Mr. Kiefer’s London dealer Jay Jopling also has taken an unorthodox step to bolster his artist’s soft market by involving an academic institution in a business deal, according to people familiar with the situation. In a move many art insiders would consider anathema, Mr. Jopling himself joined as a main sponsor, along with BNP Paribas, of London’s ongoing Royal Academy exhibition on Mr. Kiefer. Having works in a prestigious exhibition increases an artist’s public profile—and the value of the works.

Mr. Jopling has been quietly selling around seven of the works currently on loan in the show for approximately $750,000 each, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Jopling’s former employee Tim Marlow joined the Royal Academy as director of artistic programs, a newly created position, five months before the show opened. The Royal Academy denied that Mr. Marlow’s transition influenced the show or the sales, of which it says it is unaware.

When asked to comment on the Royal Academy deal and his continued purchases at auction of expensive works by other artists he controls who suffer from soft high-end markets including Tracey Emin, 51, Mr. Jopling said he was “not in the mood” to discuss the matter.

Christie’s next month wants between $35 million and $55 million for a major Twombly abstract but a $24 million Twombly painting offered by Van De Weghe Fine Art at Frieze art fair failed to sell.

The Manhattan auctions begin Nov. 11 at Sotheby’s.

Write to Mary M. Lane at mary.lane@wsj.com

Inside the SculptureCenter in Long Island City, Queens, with Mary Ceruti, left, the center’s executive director and chief curator, and Ruba Katrib, the curator of the upcoming exhibit "Puddle, pothole, portal." Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Visiting the SculptureCenter on its dead-end street in Long Island City, Queens, feels like stumbling onto a loner artist’s studio. The two-story brick building, a former trolley repair shop with the words “Derrick and Hoist Co. Inc.” fading beneath the cornice, has worn its institutional identity so lightly that the center has existed for years as a kind of art-world secret, attracting only 13,000 visitors in 2013, despite being highly regarded by critics and artists.

But now, 86 years into one of the stranger vagabond histories of any New York City art institution, the nonprofit center is beginning to look — if not act — more like a museum. On Sunday, it will open its expanded and renovated building to the public, after a 14-month, $4.5 million project that used the raw materials of contemporary sculpture — Cor-Ten steel plates, concrete slab and plywood — to alter subtly the building’s exterior and interior.

The center, at 44-19 Purves Street, just off Jackson Avenue, will have a new courtyard entrance that leads to its first substantial front desk and a bookshop, across from which visitors will be able to see beyond a floating wall into the cavernous main exhibition space. A roll-up gate that was once the way inside for many of the largest sculptural pieces has been replaced by castle-sized steel doors that look as if they were conceived by Richard Serra. But most of the building remains defiantly garage-like, down to old ceramic electrical insulators jutting from the basement walls.

“There are plenty of white boxes in New York, and we don’t want to be another one,” said Mary Ceruti, the center’s executive director and chief curator, who added that though the center is only blocks from several subway stops and a five-minute walk from MoMA PS1, it has been a place whose location has long defined whom it attracts.

“People come here ready to see art because they’ve made the effort, and that’s a good thing,” Ms. Ceruti said. “Would I like more people to make that effort? Yes, and that’s part of why we did this.”

In some ways, the renovation — while exceedingly modest, compared with those at many other American art institutions — is an indication of the SculptureCenter’s success in a contentious bet it made 13 years ago. Founded in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1928 as the Clay Club, the center soon moved to the West Village and then, in 1948, to a carriage house on the Upper East Side, where it operated a beloved school with artists’ studios.

But in 2001, its board, deciding that the institution was mired in outdated figurative ideas and was out of touch with contemporary artists, upended everything, closing the school and the studios, selling the carriage house and reinventing the center in Queens as a European-style kunsthalle, a noncollecting museum whose mission was to nurture the work of emerging and underappreciated artists.

The move left anger and disappointment in its wake, but by several measures, the center has thrived since. It has shown, early on, the work of many younger artists who have gone on to substantial careers, like Monika Sosnowska, a Polish artist with a show of new work at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Chelsea; Gedi Sibony; Seth Price; Jessica Jackson Hutchins; and Rashid Johnson, whose first solo museum show was there.

It sometimes seems that little of the subsequent attention the artists receive rubs off on the center. But by showing such work, it has solidified a reputation as a place where artists can develop somewhat insulated from the growing pressures of the art market.

“Sometimes, even now,” Ms. Ceruti recalled, “I have a trustee who says, ‘Mary, what do you think of this artist?’ And I say, ‘Well, when we showed her five years ago. ...’ And then I tell the trustee, ‘You were at that show!’ ”

She added, “We have to find better ways to help people remember what we’ve done.”

Andrew Berman, whose architecture firm designed the expansion (the initial design in 2002 was by Maya Lin) said he had sought mostly to create “a measured process of arrival,” an entryway that fostered more anticipation than the center’s previous setup, where visitors entered almost smack-dab into exhibition space.

“The thought was to not in any way iron out its character or even remove the more rough and insistent edges,” Mr. Berman said of the space, which grew 2,000 square feet, to 6,500 square feet. “To me, it speaks of a place where things were made. And that’s sort of perfect as an art space.”

(The exhibition inaugurating the space, “Puddle, pothole, portal,” organized by the curator Ruba Katrib and the artist Camille Henrot, will be a characteristically eccentric, group-show exploration of 20th-century industrial space, using the art of Saul Steinberg and the 1988 movie “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” as unlikely compasses.)

The project — half of its cost was provided by the city, and the rest by private donors — will make the center more approachable, as the neighborhood around it is rapidly transforming from industrial to residential. Not so long ago, the neighbors were a vacant lot and an auto shop; a nearby lumberyard used to lend its forklift for moving sculptures. Now the center is flanked by two tall, shiny new condominium buildings, and there are rumors that a boutique hotel is coming to the block.

“It’s not the Wild West anymore,” Ms. Ceruti said. “There’s a kind of ‘We can’t do anything we want, make all the noise we want, the way we used to’ feeling in the last few years. But the flip side is that people are much more comfortable coming here now. They know people who live here.”      

"Reality Skewed and Skewered (Gushing, Too)" @nytimes by  ROBERTA SMITH

The brooding realism of Robert Gober, which will be haunting 13 galleries at the Museum of Modern Art beginning Saturday, is as American as apple pie — with the sugar left out. The sharpness of his tenderly handmade sculptures and installations — a repertory of familiar yet startlingly altered playpens, sinks and easy chairs and truncated human limbs and bodies — brings us up short.

Mr. Gober’s artwork is often called Surrealist, but it’s too real and full of barbs to comfortably fit that label. One of the first galleries displays five of the stark white bathroom, kitchen and laundry sinks with which Mr. Gober, now 60, first announced his presence to the New York art world in the mid-1980s and separated himself from the overheated bravura of Neo-Expressionist painting and the industrial cool of Minimalism. Symbolism is rife in all his objects, which are also subtly touched all over and full of imperfections.

Lacking faucets or other plumbing, each sink has a ghostly yet resonant visage. The empty faucet holes also evoke the nipples on a headless male torso, pure yet lifeless, like a figure on a cross. In one gallery, a playpen slants precariously; while in another, a playpen is twisted into an X: both visibly hostile to their usual occupants. And in the next, seemingly benign wallpaper repeats hand-drawn images of a black man hanging from a noose and a white man safe and asleep in his bed, while signs of filth and purity — sculptured bags of kitty litter and an ivory satin bridal gown — hold the floor.

Later on, the waxen lower half of a man’s body, hyper-real down to the hairy legs and jammed against the wall as if crushed, is dotted with pale drains absent from the sinks. The implicit obsession with cleanliness expands here and the nine drains also echo AIDS-related Kaposi’s sarcoma. Still later in the show, a slipcovered easy chair is run through with an enormous twisted culvert, a shocking collision of lulling comfort and backbreaking roadwork and a form of penetration so violent rape comes to mind.

The exhibition forms a partial, often painful portrait of a nation, while also suggesting a culmination of restrained American realisms that run from Homer and Eakins to Johns and Vija Celmins, and include Duane Hanson, Walker Evans and Edward Hopper.

It highlights some of the conditions of Americanness: the country’s triumphs and tragedies, its amazing grace and falls from same, its faith in a spirit unseen and preoccupation with sin, and its forgotten respect for manual labor and craft. (In addition to wallpaper, less traditional mediums used here include basket weaving and leather working.)

It also offers sobering reacquaintance with recent history and unfathomable loss: the implacable legacy of slavery, the talent destroyed by the AIDS crisis, the shattering that was Sept. 11. And always at the center — of the show and of art — and in the silence and vulnerability of so much that Mr. Gober has done, dwells the theme of redemptive love and the all too real effect of its absence, which is poisonous hate. This much is stated up front, in the show’s title: “Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor.”

The show’s national portrait is rendered by an artist who is at once a moralist and an aesthete and an anthropologist of his own childhood and psyche, which were shaped by growing up gay and Roman Catholic in mostly Protestant New England. He is also a modest poet who all but disappears behind the mirroring familiarity of his work. Discussing the meaning of his art in The New York Times in 1997, Mr. Gober told Steven Henry Madoff: “It’s kind of hovering, with you in front of it. That’s who I want to stand in front of the work,” he said. “You. Not me.”

As deeply as I’ve been affected by Mr. Gober’s art over the years, I wasn’t sure how a full-dress treatment at the Modern would turn out. A little Gober goes a long way, and it tends toward dour, short on humor and color. It can also seem repetitious. (In the mid-1980s, he made more than 50 increasingly eccentric sinks.)

But the show clarifies his development, revealing its pace with abundant visual jolts. Organized by Ann Temkin, chief curator, and Paulina Pobocha, assistant curator in the museum’s painting and sculpture department, it is full of felicitous signs that Mr. Gober had free rein but overdid nothing, thanks in part to good curatorial instincts and a keen appreciation of empty space. He even pauses to devote two galleries to works by other artists that appeared in group shows he organized, demonstrating a characteristic generosity and illuminating his own work with inspirations or influences. At the same time, the museum seems to have met his every wish, drilling through floors and inserting plumbing where there was none.

The opening gallery introduces a lexicon of themes: the body (a man’s leg protruding from the wall); the insistence on hand-forming, whether difficult or nearly invisible (a seemingly real dented can of paint, made of cast glass); the natural world (a study for the flowering plants painted on the slipcover of his first easy chair) and language (a print of a handwritten card advertising cat-sitting services). Most arresting is “Untitled Closet” (1989), a quaint door frame revealing a shallow, dead-end space. A symbol of family secrets, punishment and the love that sometimes still dares not speak its name, the closet foreshadows Mr. Gober’s preoccupation with architectural detail, while also reflecting his family home, built by his father. But the installation has, foremost, an uncanny beauty that typifies the stillness and quiet of Mr. Gober’s best efforts.

He arrived in New York in 1976 with his art bags pretty much packed. He was not yet 22, had a bachelor’s in fine arts from Middlebury College and was soon making big, detailed dollhouses that he was unsure he could call art. Yet in 1982-83 Mr. Gober created “Slides of a Changing Painting”: 89 images of paintings made on a small piece of plywood in his storefront studio in the East Village. He made a slide of each motif, then scraped off the paint and began again. It is stunning to see how much of his art this work foretells.

Second, and perhaps more shocking, the sinks finally function, acquiring faucets, plumbing and audibly running water. A cacophonous symphony of sights and sounds contrast control and freedom: barred prison windows versus open forests, faucets that gush like waterfalls versus boxes of rat poison. These oppositions, unveiled at the Dia Art Foundation in 1992, turn subtle in bundles of old newspapers full of reports of power and its discontents. Several have ads featuring Mr. Gober in the bridal gown: a gay man forbidden to marry.

The show culminates in Mr. Gober’s memorial to Sept. 11, first seen at the Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea in 2005. It makes an even stronger impression here, in tighter quarters, its resonances heartbreakingly intensified. Spreads from The Times’s Sept. 12, 2001, report about the terrorist attacks approximate stained-glass windows. They are drawn with glimpses of embracing bodies, a combination that powerfully contrasts public and private loss. The pews are apparently palettes of scruffy plastic foam (actually painted bronze), displaying objects that evoke fecundity, birth and the Crucifixion. On the altar wall, a headless body hangs as if on a cross, water sprouting from his nipples, recalls the first sinks. A spring robin perches on his arm. There are more layers of history and meaning to be explored here, but Mr. Gober’s great subjects are autonomy and self-knowledge, which this exhibition demonstrates at nearly every turn. As he said: “You. Not me.”

George Lindemann Journal "Enduring the Elements" @wsj by Richard Cork

Exploring mortal drama with religious overtones. St. Paul's Cathedral

London

Nothing can prepare visitors to St. Paul's Cathedral, in the heart of the city, for the impact of Bill Viola's visionary video installation "Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water)." After walking through the spectacular elaboration of Christopher Wren's architecture, I find the work positioned at the far end of the long South Quire Aisle. The carbon-steel stand containing four plasma screens is purged and minimal; designed by Norman Foster at his most austere, it contrasts very severely with the profuse ornamentation enlivening the High Altar nearby. The presentation of "Martyrs" is not allowed to interfere with the visceral power of the images themselves, focusing relentlessly on the plight of four figures who undergo extreme torment.

When Mr. Viola first made his reputation, in the 1980s, as a pioneering video artist from New York, his work seemed more secular than sacred. In the poignant "Nantes Triptych" (1992), three screens record the birth of a baby, a man surrounded by water and an old woman's death in a hospital. The baby was Mr. Viola's second child and the dying woman was his mother. So his fascination with extreme mortal drama was already clear, but his exploration of religious images became overt as he grew older. The overseers of St. Paul's were very impressed by his 2003 exhibition at the National Gallery in London, where he disclosed an intense interest in traditional Christian art. Small wonder, then, that "Martyrs" was commissioned for the cathedral, where Mr. Viola's figures immediately look at home in a building dedicated to suffering and redemption.

No seats are provided, so I stand and watch as three men and one woman, one on each screen, endure their unimaginable agony. This time, unlike in the "Nantes Triptych," the figures are all performers. Above them, an enormous Wren window admits daylight to the cathedral. But absolute darkness surrounds the martyrs as they strive to withstand their alarming pain. My encounter with "Martyrs" is profound enough to make me feel that I have never before experienced the strange, heightened intensity provided by Mr. Viola here.

At the beginning, the man on the far left is virtually invisible. Almost covered by a stifling heap of earth, he seems to be buried alive. Only after moving in very close to the screen do I realize that his head is still protruding, although he clamps both hands protectively against his skull. Next to him, a fair-haired woman dangles from thick ropes tied round her wrists. Her clothed body is seen full-length, and ropes entwine her ankles as well. There she hangs, twisting in the wind and contrasting with a seated elderly man on the next screen. He appears to be asleep, yet small flames have already started descending from above and settling ominously on the floor near his bare feet. Meanwhile, on the far-right screen, a bearded young man lies motionless on the ground. Although his naked torso looks healthy and well-built, he might be close to death already. Soon enough, the rope tied round his ankles begins pulling him up into the air.

Mr. Viola wastes no time in putting all the martyrs through hell. The duration of his entire video is only seven minutes, and all the way through I find my gaze darting from one screen to the next in an attempt to discover what exactly is happening to each of these doomed figures. It is a highly dramatic spectacle, especially when the man on the far left is uncovered. The earth rushes upward, like smoke rising from an inferno or even an inverted waterfall ascending to the sky. The man emerges from his hunched humiliation, gradually becoming upright. His stance is very different from the position of the hapless woman, who is now tossed brutally from side to side by furious air.

Yet the most alarming development of all affects the elderly man in the chair. The flames flare upward with terrifying force, threatening to burn him. He wakes up, placing hands on knees while raising his head and staring out directly at us. As for the athletic young man on the right, he dangles upside-down and stretches out his arms at either side. For a moment, I am reminded of the Crucifixion. But Mr. Viola rightly ensures that "Martyrs" cannot be pinned down to a single religion. Water starts pouring down from the top, drenching the young man and making his dark hair hang in long, dripping tresses.

In the final phase of this mesmeric work, turmoil gives way to stillness. Yet there is no loss of intensity. If anything, the figures become even more compelling as they arrive at stasis. The man on the far left stands erect, head up and eyes closed as if lost in prayer. By a miracle, none of the earth that once smothered his body can now be seen on his flesh or clothes. He has been purged, and the woman's gyrations have likewise ceased. She has even managed to free her hands from the thick ropes, but her feet are still bound together and so her fingers cling to the ropes for support. Suspended in space, but not inverted, she throws her head backward as if searching for the light-source above.

Her deathly pallor is echoed by that of the man in the chair. Although the flames have subsided and his entire body is unaccountably intact, he looks blanched enough to be dead. The theme of extinction is pursued at the far right, where the inverted young man is pulled up until he disappears at the top, leaving only a thin, melancholy trickle of water in his place. An overall sense of tragedy dominates the work, but at least the young man might have ascended to another realm. Even the man on the far left, who is still standing, tilts his head back and shuts his eyes, while a strong white light shines down and almost makes his face dissolve in the brightness. At this point, all four screens grow dark and the work terminates.

After a few seconds, though, it starts again and the martyrdom is re-enacted on a continuous loop, replayed over and over. Wandering away from Mr. Viola's elegiac installation, I walk behind the High Altar and, in the Jesus Chapel, discover a large open book with names carefully written inside. The chapel especially commemorates U.S. soldiers who died in World War II, and their names lend a poignant historical dimension to Mr. Viola's work. But his overall intentions cannot be limited to the idea of a military memorial. "Martyrs" may invite us to witness what Mr. Viola describes as "the human capacity to bear pain, hardship, and even death," yet its deepest power resides in his ability to convey the fundamental mystery of sacrifice.

Mr Cork's latest book, "The Healing Presence of Art," was published by Yale in 2012.

George Lindemann Journal "Christie's 'Bumpy' Sale Anchored by $23.8 Million Schwitters" @wsj by Kelly Crow

Christie's in London sold a 1920 jewel-toned painting by German artist Kurt Schwitters created from debris he found scattered around Berlin—including cardboard strips and street-poster fragments—for $23.8 million Tuesday.

One successful sale was a Kurt Schwitters collage for $23.8 million. UPPA/Zuma Press

The price for "Yes—What?—Picture" reset Schwitters's auction record, but it also represented one of the few successes in an otherwise disappointing Christie's $146 million sale in which a third of the house's 60 offerings went unsold.

The sale also fell short of the house's $164 million low bar.

Christie's sale was pockmarked by plenty of artworks that fell flat and went unsold, creating an eerie saleroom atmosphere that has been rare since the recession.

Schwitters's abstract performed well in part because it is so rare: His collage relief paintings, which he made during the turbulent, impoverished years following World War I, helped establish his international reputation—and yet only three works from this period remain in private hands. This version was also three-feet high, large for an artist better known for painting on placemat-size canvases. After a dogged, three-way bidding war, a telephone bidder won it for more than double its high estimate.

A couple other pieces sold well, but with strings attached. Before the auction, Christie's had enlisted outside investors to pledge to bid on a pair of paintings by Henri Matisse and Joan Miró—unless other collectors during the sale offered even more.

Christie's risk-offsetting strategy paid off for the house because these paintings garnered no other bids in the moment and so were claimed by their guarantors for $11.6 million and $7.7 million, respectively.

Matisse's Nice-period "The Artist and His Nude Model" from 1921 was expected to sell for at least $11.9 million, and Miro's "Woman's Voice in the Night, Roissignol" from 1971 was estimated to sell for at least $6.8 million.

Works by Surrealist artists such as Max Ernst and Rene Magritte fared reasonably well. A red-and-black Ernst sold to an Asian telephone bidder for $616,975.

A $1.5 million sculpture of black curtains by Magritte sold to London-based art adviser Bart van Son, who said his collector client "has the perfect spot for it at home."

"You don't see much sculpture by Magritte, and it's a marvelous piece," Mr. Van Son added afterward.

Sculptures by Alberto Giacometti largely fell like dead weights at Christie's sale, though. Giacometti has had a mixed performance at auctions lately, and he didn't weather his market test well Tuesday. Of his eight examples up for bid, only four found takers—including a 1956 mustard-colored "Woman of Venice II," that sold for $15.4 million, over its $13.6 million low estimate.

Giacometti's gray portraits and his bronze sculpture of a spindly waving "The Hand" went unsold. The piece was expected to sell for at least $17 million.

Among the other unsold offerings was a Piet Mondrian that was expected to sell for at least $8.5 million—collectors said it had condition problems—and a Chaim Soutine was expected to sell for $2 million or more. The Chaim Soutine stalled at $950,000.

After the sale, Amsterdam collector Matthÿs Erdman said Christie's set estimates that appeared too high, particularly for some material that looked mediocre compared to Sotheby's BID -1.02% Sotheby's U.S.: NYSE ^$39.79 -0.41 -1.02% June 26, 2014 12:37 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 432,844 P/E Ratio 18.69 Market Cap $2.77 Billion Dividend Yield 1.00% Rev. per Employee $576,249 40.2540.0039.7539.5010a11a12p1p2p3p 06/24/14 Christie's 'Bumpy' Sale Anchor... 06/23/14 Dueling Bidders Push Up Trophy... 06/20/14 Checker Cabs Come to Brooklyn More quote details and news » BID in Your Value Your Change Short position offerings the night before.

"People go for trophies, and I think Christie's had trouble getting their prices right," Mr. Erdman said. "Even in this market, you can't get away with everything."

Christie's Chief Executive Steven Murphy said the house had a "bumpy night" and that his staff would look harder at their estimates moving forward. But Mr. Murphy said he didn't think the sale portended a downturn in the market overall.

"The masterpieces still flew," he said.

Next week, both houses are slated to conduct sales of contemporary art in London.

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "The Collections | The Top 10 Attractions at Design Miami/Basel" @tmagazine

The Collections | The Top 10 Attractions at Design Miami/Basel

Studio Swine’s “Hair Highway.”

The Design Miami/Basel fair — the annual European companion to Design Miami in Basel, Switzerland — has a single objective: facilitating the sale of expensive design objects to wealthy collectors. Yet much like its neighbor, Art Basel, the show can also serve as a resource for enthusiasts and curious window shoppers, who come to see and enjoy the works on view, or survey what’s happening in design now (lots of experimentation with everyday materials, apparently). Without the placards or checklists one would normally find in a gallery or museum, though, it would have been entirely possible for non-experts to meander in and out of the fair’s 50-something booths this year without knowing for sure what’s old and what’s new, or which pieces represent real breakthroughs in materials and process. There were many more novel contemporary works on view than ever before, balancing out the usual glut of 20th-century icons, but it wasn’t necessarily obvious unless you scoured the $30 show catalog.

For example, I nearly walked right past what turned out to be my favorite thing in the entire show, which ended Sunday: a series of furnishings and accessories made from resin-encased human hair by the little-known London designers Studio Swine, who created it during a five-month residency with Pearl Lam Galleries in China. The gallery’s assistant happened to point out the project to me after I grilled her about another new piece by the young duo, a cabinet made from aluminum foam. Similarly, it took some persistence to learn that a group of intricate gold-wire necklaces at Caroline Van Hoek were by a 23-year-old newcomer (Hermien Cassiers), and that almost all the works in Gallery Fumi’s booth were previously unseen experiments by emerging talents — including Studio Markunpoika’s trio of vases made by gluing together blocks of pencils and turning them on a lathe. Listed here are 10 new projects by up-and-coming designers that, based on six or seven hours spent digging around Design Miami/Basel and pestering people, we figured were worth a closer look.

Oliver LangStudio Swine’s curio cabinets.

Studio Swine at Pearl Lam
Building on a process they used to make eyeglasses a few years back, the London newcomers’ “Hair Highway” pieces are made from resin embedded with dip-dyed human hair, sourced from the world’s largest hair marketplace in Shandong Province. The designers created the series during a five-month residency with the gallery in Shanghai. The young Royal College of Art graduates also created these elaborate curio cabinets during their stay, which debuted during the show as well — they’re made from industrial foamed aluminum meant to evoke Chinese scholar’s rocks.

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Oliver LangJeremy Wintrebert at Gallery Fumi

Jeremy Wintrebert at Gallery Fumi
For its inaugural appearance at Design Miami/Basel, Gallery Fumi brought a selection of mostly new works by mostly young designers. I was advised to keep an eye on the Paris-based glass artist Jeremy Wintrebert, creator of these mouth-blown “Cloud” lamps, who will have both a solo show with Fumi and a commissioned installation at the Victoria and Albert museum during the London Design Festival.

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Oliver LangStudy O Portable at Gallery Fumi

Study O Portable at Gallery Fumi 
Another favorite at Fumi was this table by this London duo, who normally make sculptural jewelry and housewares but had scaled their Fuzz process — which involves building up layers of ceramic resin around a geometric void — up to furniture size for the first time.

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Oliver LangKueng Caputo at Salon 94

Salon 94
The New York art gallery was another newcomer to the fair; it cherry-picked a few dozen quasi-functional pieces from its roster of talents, including lights by Andy Coolquitt and a new marbled console and dining table by the hip Swiss design-art duo Kueng Caputo.

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Oliver LangValentin Loellmann at Galerie Gosserez

Valentin Loellmann at Galerie Gosserez
Galerie Gosserez devoted its entire booth to the work of the 31-year-old German designer, who seems to be coming into his own as of late: his gawky, lumpy furnishings have taken a more elegant, less contrived turn, like the new Fall-Winter cabinet, which pairs an organic black frame with sleek, Scandinavian-style oak panels.

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Oliver LangChristopher Schanck at Johnson Trading Gallery

Christopher Schanck at Johnson Trading Gallery
New York’s Johnson Trading Gallery focused on bringing the work of this Detroit talent, who hires local makers to produce his foam shelves and tables skinned in aluminum foil, to an international audience. Particularly novel was a piece that fused his foil process with an earlier experiment in chemically eroded wall mirrors.

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Oliver LangAnton Alvarez at Design at Large

Anton Alvarez at Design at Large
For his graduate thesis in 2012, Alvarez invented a technique to bind chunks of wood together with resin-soaked thread by passing them through a kind of spinning hoop. For Design Miami/Basel’s new Design At Large showcase, curated by Dennis Freedman, Alvarez unveiled the first batch of pieces he’s been making with a supersized version of the machine that he created this spring.

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Oliver LangTomás Alonso at Victor Hunt Gallery

Tomás Alonso at Victor Hunt Gallery
In the London designer’s latest series, tables and tabletop accessories made from various types of marble lock together comfortably thanks to simple grooves cut into their surfaces.

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Oliver LangBrynjar Siguroarson

Brynjar Siguroarson
For a solo show at Galerie Kreo earlier this year, Siguroarson created wooden furniture embellished with a rope-knotting technique he learned from a shark hunter while traveling in the tiny Icelandic town of Vopnafjordur, along with local materials like leather, fur, and fishing lures.

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Oliver LangBenjamin Graindorge at Ymer & Malta

Benjamin Graindorge at Ymer & Malta
The French gallery invited young designers to revisit marquetry for its presentation; Graindorge teamed up with the Parisian master craftsman Yves Josnan to create a table with a veneer comprising 2,000 pieces of 17 different types of wood.

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George Lindemann Journal - "Car Parts, Guitars and Wall Art at Art Basel" @wsj by Kelly Crow

Early hours at the Swiss art fair Clara Tuma for The Wall Street Journal

Tap tap. Bang bang. What does a frothy contemporary art market sound like? A construction site.

Walking through the vast warren of art-filled booths at Art Basel, the Swiss art fair that closes Sunday, shoppers at the VIP preview Wednesday could hear nails regularly being hammered into booth walls—a sign that dealers had sold everything on display and were hanging up fresh pieces for sale.

"Every year, we come into this fair thinking it can't get better than last year, and then it does," said dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, who sold out his booth within the fair's opening hours Tuesday—including "Folk Thing Zero," a $2.3 million Georg Baselitz statue of a hulking blue man. "The art keeps getting bigger and selling faster."

After a blistering season of New York auctions, collectors descended on this fair with a feeding-frenzy feeling that they would need to shop quickly—and be willing to splurge—if they wanted to take home any of the roughly 14,000 works on offer. Miami art adviser Lisa Austin said her client, Miami collector David Martin, vied for seven pieces during the VIP preview Tuesday but bought only two because the rest had already sold.

Matthew Armstrong, art adviser to New York billionaire financier Donald Marron, said he typically expects to see a swath of brand-new pieces at Basel. But this time around he noticed more artworks that had been created a few years ago but were already coming back onto the market—a clue that the works' original owners may be seeking quick profits by reselling them through galleries now. As a result, the fair occasionally had a didn't-I-see-that-before vibe. "It's a moderately contemporary fair," he joked.

Whatever their budgets, the 86,000 people expected to attend Art Basel will all be on the lookout for the latest art developments. Here, a few early trends:

VROOM VROOM

Years ago, Richard Prince caused a stir by painting car hoods and hanging them, like canvases, on the wall. This year, Basel purred with pieces created from all sorts of car parts, from batteries to bumpers to windshield wipers that still swished.

Rob Pruitt transformed a miniature refrigerator into a Carmen Miranda-like figure by topping it with a pair of painted tires and tucking plastic fruit in the center hole so that it evoked a towering hat. One of the more elaborate examples is Josephine Meckseper's assembly-line installation that featured several tires balanced atop a silvery conveyor belt sitting beside a pair of TV screens broadcasting a 12-minute montage of car commercials. Ms. Meckseper's gallery, Andrea Rosen, said an art foundation had put a hold on the 2009 work, "Sabotage on Auto Assembly Line to Slow it Down." It was priced at $220,000.

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

The fair's playful atmosphere was also reinforced by a suite of artworks made from, or about, musical instruments. Performance art duo Prinz Gholam embedded a video of themselves playing a guitar into the soundhole of one of the artist's childhood guitars, which was covered in Disney stickers. It sold to a European collector for around $16,300.

New York's Pace Gallery devoted much of its booth to an orchestra's worth of lumpen soft violins and towering blue sculptures of drums and clarinets by Claes Oldenburg, which the gallery said were selling briskly.

Over at New Delhi's Gallery SKE, artist Navin Thomas salvaged a group of trumpets in Bangalore and used them like speakers to blare his recordings of chirping tree frogs. The gallery said the artist is interested in "electroacoustic ecology," which means he uses urban scrapyard items to remind people about the nature they may be leaving behind. The work, "The Fruit of Some Unknown Tree," was priced around $20,000.

BUY ONE, BUY ALL

In a season where collectors are seeking wall-power art, more galleries were spotted offering multiple, smaller works by artists arranged in huge grids—some of which could be bought individually or in various sets. Singapore conceptual artist Heman Chong at Singapore Tyler Print Institute offered up his $4,000 painted book covers on their own or as a set. Günter Förg's wall of colorful abstracts, which had titles like "Mr. Green" and "Mr. Brown," were priced at $7,300 apiece, or $24,500 for a quartet.

Photographer Joel Meyerowitz's nine still-life scenes, which were inspired by a visit to Paul Cézanne's studio, could be bought individually for around $10,000. But Karen Marks of Howard Greenberg Gallery said collectors at the fair preferred to buy them in trios. "Grids are cool," Ms. Marks added. "Collectors can get interactive by choosing how many they want and how to hang them. It gives them a chance to get involved."

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

George Lindemann "Jeff Koons Retrospective To Open at the Whitney" @wsj by ELLEN GAMERMAN

Photos: The Artwork of Jeff Koons

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'Loopy' by Jeff Koons © Jeff Koons/Whitney Museum of American Art

In recent days, Jeff Koons worked on installing a huge topiary at Rockefeller Center, promoted an H&M partnership that features his famed balloon dog on a new handbag and appeared naked in Vanity Fair.

If the most expensive living artist at auction has always embraced publicity, he's got it in a bear hug now as he prepares for next Friday's opening of the Whitney Museum of American Art's "Jeff Koons: A Retrospective." It is the 59-year-old's first major museum exhibit in New York. The show marks some milestones for the Whitney, too: the museum's biggest-ever single-artist exhibition, its last show before opening in a new downtown location next year and its most expensive solo retrospective to date.

The artist's auction performance—led by the 2013 sale of "Balloon Dog (Orange)" for a record $58.4 million at Christie's—has never been stronger, with his annual average lot price this year at $2.4 million, according to Artnet. In 2014, he has sold more than he ever has at auction by value—upwards of $112 million, Artnet said.

From his balloon dogs to oil paintings, Jeff Koons is enjoying unmatched success in the contemporary art world. Ahead of his first-ever New York retrospective at the Whitney Museum, WSJ's Ellen Gamerman joins Tanya Rivero on Lunch Break to explain why Mr. Koons is today's most expensive living artist. Photo: Getty

What explains such prices? Fans of the artist point to his ability to push the boundaries of the art world—as he has done with his well-known knack for marketing his own work—as well as his mastery of art history and his sixth sense for finding the next big idea in popular culture. It helps that the art is so accessible: Instead of out-there performances or bewildering installations, he creates gem-colored paintings and seductively shiny sculptures inspired by inflatable toys, sex, cartoons and the like.

"If you look at various aspects of Jeff's career, whether it's his relationship to kitsch and popular culture or his use of technology in fabrication or the way that he thinks about a perfect replication—in each of these areas he's moved the stakes out in the field," said Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney show's curator. "He's just done so many things to change the parameters that art is happening in, even though his work is somewhat traditional."

Over the decades, a cadre of powerful dealers has helped bankroll expensive works by Mr. Koons, whose career has been bolstered by a handful of influential collectors purchasing his works by the dozen. While detractors have never been shy about calling Mr. Koons a master of hype, his biggest backers have been committed to him since the 1980s.

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Jeff Koons is the most expensive living artist at auction. Getty Images

A former Wall Street commodities broker, Mr. Koons employs nearly 130 people in his New York studio. He asks them to sign non-disclosure agreements to protect intellectual property and trade secrets around the art and has his employees handle the labor while he focuses on bigger concepts, former staffers say.

"People have a concept of how an artist works—they imagine Jackson Pollock pouring paint over a canvas, they definitely don't imagine a man in an office in a suit thinking up ideas," said New York artist and former Koons studio assistant Jaclyn Santos. "To him, it's not about making a work physically, it's about making the idea."

Mr. Koons was unavailable for an interview. A representative from his studio said the artist is involved in every detail of a work's execution.

His raw materials and construction methods are famously expensive. For certain stainless steel sculptures, fabricators in Germany created an alloy with special reflective qualities. He set up a stone milling facility in Pennsylvania for his granite works. He has involved experts like Bavarian wood carvers and a Nobel-laureate physicist, and used technology found everywhere from hospitals to Hollywood.

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'Metallic Venus' by Jeff Koons © Jeff Koons/Whitney Museum of American Art

"There is this whole ecosystem within his organization and outside it, working together to make all of this possible," said Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Bits and Atoms. Mr. Gershenfeld, who has worked with the Koons studio on developing custom hardware and software for 3D models, said some technology he has developed through the collaboration likely will be used commercially.

In her catalog essay for the Whitney show, Artforum editor-in-chief Michelle Kuo wrote that the fabrication of some of Mr. Koons's works has become so technologically complex, production standards for his art in some cases now exceed those found in the aerospace industry or the military.

The artist has been open to unusual business arrangements. Recently, heappeared in a promotional video for the Oceana Bal Harbour, a luxury condo near Miami set to open in 2016. Residents of the roughly 240-unit development will share ownership of two Koons sculptures the developer bought for about $14 million. One of the works, "Pluto and Proserpina," will appear in the Whitney show, with the condo development credited as the owner. Real-estate billionaire Eduardo Costantini, who is spearheading the development, said the works by Mr. Koons were a natural choice given his "very profound identity" as a global artist.

Greek industrialist Dakis Joannou owns close to 40 pieces by Mr. Koons, eight of which he loaned to the exhibit. The art world's devotion to Mr. Koons ultimately comes down to his talent, Mr. Joannou said, adding that he was fascinated by the artist from the start. "I saw in him a man with very ambitious ideas, a man who had huge work," he said. "He has absolutely no limits in achieving his ideas."

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

George Lindemann Journal - "At Art Basel, Works With a Museum Presence" @nytimes by Carol Vogel

BASEL, Switzerland — In an old market hall adjacent to the cavernous center where Art Basel, the gold standard of contemporary art fairs, is taking place, there is a happening unlike anything ever staged here. Called “14 Rooms,” it consists of 14 mini-performances created by artists including Marina 

BASEL, Switzerland — In an old market hall adjacent to the cavernous center where Art Basel, the gold standard of contemporary art fairs, is taking place, there is a happening unlike anything ever staged here. Called “14 Rooms,” it consists of 14 mini-performances created by artists including Marina Abramovic, Damien Hirst and Yoko Ono, each secreted in a small space behind mirrored doors. Open one door, and there’s a Marina Abramovic look-alike naked and astride a bicycle seat, arms outstretched. In another, identical twins sit in front of identical spot paintings by Mr. Hirst.

“Performance art is usually at the periphery, so why not put it front and center?” said Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS1 in New York, who organized the project with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, a director of exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London. “It’s a temporary museum. Nothing here is for sale.”

But next door at Art Basel, almost everything is. As big and boisterous as ever, with 285 galleries from 34 countries participating, this fair is still a magnet for the contemporary art world. Spotted at Tuesday’s V.I.P. opening were big-money collectors like Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire; Daniel S. Loeb, the activist hedge fund manager and Sotheby’s new board member; Mitchell P. Rales, the Washington industrialist, and his wife, Emily; Jerry I. Speyer, chairman of the Museum of Modern Art; and Daniel Brodsky, chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his wife, Estrellita, an independent curator. Few artists ever make an appearance at art fairs but Oscar Murillo, the Colombian-born painter, did.

Last month, $2.2 billion worth of art changed hands at the big auctions in New York. The strength of those sales affected everything about this year’s fair, from the higher prices to the choice of art. So have museum exhibitions. “Collectors are driven by institutional context,” the dealer David Zwirner said. Prominently displayed in his booth is a shiny blue stainless-steel sculpture of a dolphin by Jeff Koons, whose retrospective is opening this month at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Priced at $5 million, it sold on Tuesday to a collector from China, Mr. Zwirner said. His booth also features paintings by the South African-born Marlene Dumas, who has a traveling show opening at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam in September; and canvases by Gerhard Richter, who is the subject of an exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel.

Mr. Zwirner wasn’t the only dealer touting works with a museum presence. Dominique Levy, a New York dealer, had a 1964 black-and-white comic book drawing by Roy Lichtenstein that was in a show at the Morgan Library & Museum four years ago. It sold for an undisclosed price to an American collector.

“Sotheby’s and Christie’s went through a record cycle, and that gives people confidence,” Mr. Zwirner said. “Basel is our biggest weapon, if we want to go mano a mano with the auction houses.”

Brett Gorvy, chairman of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, was here, too. Prices, he said, are “informed by the auctions.” “Collectors have sticker shock, yet they’re pulling the trigger,” he added, using as an example one of Andy Warhol’s “fright wig” self-portraits from 1986 that several people said had belonged to Thea Westreich, the New York collector and dealer. It was bought by another New York collector for around $34 million, according to Per Skarstedt, the dealer who sold it. In addition to examples of Warhol and Bacon — both top sellers at auction last month — Mr. Koons, whose sculptures had adorned the covers of both Sotheby’s and Christie’s contemporary art auction catalogs, was ubiquitous. The Gagosian Gallery is featuring “Hulk (Wheelbarrow),” a giant green painted bronze Hulk carrying a wheelbarrow filled with live flowers; it is priced at $4 million. Almine Rech, another dealer, brought two “Gazing Ball” sculptures made this year, one priced at $2 million and the other at $1.6 million. Both sold to European collectors, she said.

Younger trendy artists are also represented here, with paintings by Jacob Kassay, Joe Bradley and Mark Bradford, many of which were spoken for.

One young artist determined to control his market is Wade Guyton, the American painter who produces canvases on inkjet printers. Last month, protesting an enormous price asked for one of his paintings at auction, he made copies of the 2005 image from the original disk and posted them on Instagram. (Prices for his paintings were stronger than ever anyway, with one bringing nearly $6 million.) Undeterred, for Art Basel he gave each of the five dealers he works with — Frederich Petzel from New York, Gió Marconi in Milan, Galerie Gisela Capitain from Cologne, Galerie Francesca Pia from Zurich and Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris — a black painting, all the same size and all made from the same disk. They each had a $350,000 price tag, and all of them sold either on Tuesday or before.

In an email, Mr. Guyton explained that he instructed the dealers to hang his paintings at identical heights, “so each time you walk up to one, you would have a similar physical encounter.” He added: “On the one hand, it is a way to satisfy all my galleries simultaneously and fairly. It’s also a way of talking about the repetitive experience of seeing similar artworks throughout a fair and embracing that aggressively by showing almost identical works.”

For a few years now, people have complained that dealers have been selling or reserving work by sending collectors images of what will be on view in Basel well before the fair opens. That discussion grew louder this week. “Preselling should be forbidden,” said Philippe Ségalot, a private New York dealer whose antics in years past — including hiring a Hollywood makeup artist to disguise him so he could sneak into the fair before everyone and snap up the best works — have become Art Basel legend.

“If I had done that this year,” Mr. Ségalot said, “there would have been nothing to buy.”