The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journa by Goerge Lindemann - "For the Whitney’s Move, Boxes and Burly Men Just Won’t Do" @nytimes by ROBIN POGREBIN

The Whitney Museum's new space is in the final stages of construction. Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Anyone who has ever unwrapped a chipped piece of Wedgwood understands the headaches and peril associated with moving.

Now imagine what the Whitney Museum of American Art is going through as it plans to transport more than 14,000 items, including delicate pieces like Alexander Calder’s sculpture “Circus” and landmark paintings like Edward Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning” — to its new downtown home.

Let’s just say the logistics go well beyond buying some Bubble Wrap.

There are intricate packing and crating concerns, matters of truck scheduling and insurance and, of course, security, as artwork worth hundreds of millions of dollars is transported through Manhattan. When the Barnes Foundation moved its museum to Philadelphia from the suburbs for its 2012 opening, the movers, as a precaution, stripped all the signage from their trucks.

“Everything about it is monumental,” said Ron Simoncini, who was the director of security at the Museum of Modern Art when that institution moved to and from temporary quarters in Queens during its 2004 renovation. (The move from Manhattan took 400 truck trips and involved about 100,000 works of art, MoMA said.)

“It’s not like moving a business or moving a home,” Mr. Simoncini added. “It’s not like you call Staples.”

The Whitney’s transfer from its Upper East Side home at Madison and 75th Street to Gansevoort and Washington Streets in the meatpacking district is still a ways off.

The museum will shut down after its Jeff Koons retrospective closes on Oct. 19, and staff members will start moving into the new building in the fall. The art will be transported after that, so that the museum is ready for its spring opening. (A firm date has not been set.)

“We’re still making plans for the actual moving of art,” Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, said in an interview last week.

The new $760 million project, at the base of the High Line, designed by Renzo Piano, is entering the final stages of construction. (Members of the news media are to get a look at its progress on Thursday.)

Mr. Weinberg said it was not yet clear how many trucks will be involved, how many trips they will take and when they will begin pulling up to the new museum; those details will not be released even when they are determined, because of security concerns.

The Whitney, however, is no stranger to moving, Mr. Weinberg said; the downtown location will be its fourth. Founded in 1930, the museum opened on West Eighth Street in 1931, then moved to an expanded site on West 54th Street in 1954 and finally to its current building, which was designed by Marcel Breuer and opened in 1966.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art signed an agreement in 2011 to occupy the Breuer building for at least eight years.

Mr. Weinberg said he is excited at the prospect of being able to put more of the Whitney’s permanent collection on view. In the new building, which includes outdoor areas, the museum will double its total exhibition space to 63,000 square feet.

It will also be able to consolidate its administrative operations; the Whitney’s staff is spread around five different locations. “We have not all been under one roof for eight years,” Mr. Weinberg said.

John S. Stanley, the Whitney’s chief operating officer, is overseeing the move, Mr. Weinberg said.

“It’s one set of details after another,” said Mr. Stanley, who added that he did not yet have a cost estimate.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Rarely One for Sugarcoating" @nytimes by BLAKE GOPNIK

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "The Industrial Art of Those Talented Bugattis" @nytimes by JOHN LAMM

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "More Public Art for Governors Island" @nytimes by CAROL VOGEL

“Painted Phone,” one of Mark Handforth’s works to be shown on Governors Island. Credit Timothy Schenck Photography/The Trust for Governors Island

When a new 30-acre park opens at the southern end of Governors Island on May 24, it will boast a grove of hammocks, two ball fields, a formal garden and play areas with climbable structures and spray showers. It will also be part of an ambitious backdrop for a new public art program taking shape on this 172-acre island, the former Army and Coast Guard base in New York Harbor. The city took control of Governors Island in 2010, and each year there’s more to do and see, attracting thousands of visitors during the summer months.

The new Governors Island Park, with sweeping views of New York Harbor, Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, will be a canvas for artists to create site-specific installations. Susan Philipsz has composed a sound piece inspired by the island’s military history. Based on the notes of the taps military bugle call, it will be played every day at 6 p.m. “It’s like the ghost of the former military base,” said Tom Eccles, who is organizing the island’s public art program.

Mr. Eccles, director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., said he was trying to create “a sense of journey and discovery which is uniquely suitable to finding works of art in the landscape.” He asked the sculptor Mark Handforth to create an exhibition consisting of four totem-like sculptures, surreal works that include “Painted Phone,” a 30-foot bronze tree with lopped-off limbs cradling a blue phone. The works by Mr. Handforth will be in place for about two years. Ms. Philipsz’s sound composition is permanent.

The British artist Rachel Whiteread is creating a cast concrete structure resembling an abandoned shed, to be placed permanently on Discovery Hill, south of the new park. Set for completion in 2015, it will look like a found yet familiar object hidden in the woods.

A BARNETT NEWMAN FOR SALE

Being able to say that an artwork has been on “long-term loan” to a major museum can be an irresistible sales pitch for an auction house. Ask the experts in Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department about “Black Fire I,” a 1961 canvas by Barnett Newman to be auctioned there on May 13, and they will immediately note that it has been at the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1985.

A seminal example of Abstract Expressionism, it pairs Newman’s luminous use of a black palette with his signature device: the zip, a feathery band of a contrasting color used to define the composition of a canvas. The work, with an estimate of about $50 million, is being sold by the Daniel W. Dietrich II trust, named for a Philadelphia collector.

Just a year ago, Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, sold Newman’s “Onement VI,” from 1953, at Sotheby’s in New York. It fetched $43.8 million.

JEWISH MUSEUM’S NEW LOGO

Delving back to ancient sacred geometries and that most ubiquitous of forms, the Star of David, may seem too obvious a reference for the Jewish Museum, which was faced with the task of designing a new graphic identity. But the design, below, to be introduced on Tuesday, seems both familiar and modern. Sagmeister & Walsh, the New York design firm, has created graphics that will appear on the museum’s admissions tickets and banners, signs, gallery guides, gift wrap and even the menu in the museum’s cafe. By June they will also grace a revamped website.

“The old identity didn’t work anymore — it wasn’t adaptable,” Claudia Gould, who has been the Jewish Museum’s director for nearly three years, said of the current logo, featuring the museum’s name in a red box.

Stefan Sagmeister, one of the firm’s partners, said that it had approached “a lot of people involved with the museum — board members, employees, the director — and asked them what they thought the Jewish Museum should be.” Several similar adjectives emerged: intimate, inclusive (meaning multigenerational) and elegant.

“The new logo may be based on a hidden sliver of imagery that comes out of history,” Mr. Sagmeister said, describing the hexagram shape, a sign of Jewish identity since the Middle Ages but also a symbol used by other cultures. “But it has a contemporary look. It’s very necessary to attract a younger audience, and with this design I think you can feel the difference.”

A JUDD FOR ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

When it came to filling a gap in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the single greatest priority for James Rondeau, its chairman of contemporary art, has been to find a 1960s stack, one of those serial boxlike units that are perhaps Donald Judd’s most popular works. “It’s something I knew we had to have since I arrived here in 1998, and probably curators before me were on the lookout for one too,” Mr. Rondeau said.

Through the Mnuchin Gallery in New York, the Art Institute was able to acquire “Untitled (DSS 120)” from 1968, what Mr. Rondeau believes is among the last of the artist’s 1960s stacks still in private hands. Judd, who died in 1994, created his first stack in 1965. This one, measuring 10 feet from floor to ceiling, consists of identical stainless steel and Plexiglas boxes cantilevered from the wall at regular intervals so they form a column of alternating solids and voids.

The work was included in exhibitions of Judd stacks at the Art Institute earlier this year and the Mnuchin Gallery last year. Like many museums, the Art Institute does not disclose what it pays for acquisitions. But this stack was offered at a Christie’s auction in 2009, when it sold for nearly $4.9 million.

George Lindemann Journal by George "Most Wanted and Most Haunted" @nytimes by By HOLLAND COTTER

Visitors at “Warhol: Jackie” at Blain/Di Donna, a gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Credit Byron Smith for The New York Times

A half-century ago this week, the 1964 World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows, Queens. With Belgian waffles, Michelangelo’s “Pietà” and a Tent of Tomorrow, the event was a last postwar blast of guilt-free consumption, Sunday school piety and faith in the future as a good place to be. It was also the scene of a smashup in progress, as the America of the 1950s ran into the 1960s.

The momentum had jolted into high gear a year earlier. With the Kennedy assassination, an era of lost illusions had begun. So had a time of anger. As the fair opened, the Civil Rights Act was stalled in Congress. The country’s involvement in Vietnam was escalating. The Beatles had landed and set off a youthquake. The city itself, anxious to get clean for tourism, was beefing up on vice squads.

To a degree hard to imagine now, contemporary art had a reflective active role in this feverish picture. No artist took the cultural pulse more precisely than Andy Warhol. And we see his diagnostic instincts already fully developed in two remarkable New York exhibitions: “13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World’s Fair,” at the Queens Museum, and “Warhol: Jackie” at Blain/Di Donna, a gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

View slide show|11 Photos

Warhol’s Worlds

Warhol’s Worlds

Credit Byron Smith for The New York Times

By 1964, Warhol was a different artist from the one he’d been just a few years before. Gone were the filigreed drawings of boots and shoes that had made him a commercial design star. He left advertising and office life behind and set up shop in a ratty loft on East 47th Street that he called the Factory. There he made multiedition silk-screened paintings of subjects that he considered typical American themes: cheap food, tabloid violence and celebrity worship.

With the help of close friends and lots of speed, he turned out vast series of individual images, including soup cans and Coke bottles, car wrecks and electric chairs. He also did portraits of Marilyn Monroe, by then two years dead, and of the recently widowed Jacqueline Kennedy. In each case, the original likeness was lifted from news media sources, then reproduced exactly and repeatedly, like faces of saints in the Byzantine Catholic churches of his Pittsburgh youth.

During the same months he was doing all this, he was also working on a public commission: a new work to be displayed, along with that of nine other young Americans, on the facade of the New York State Pavilion at the World’s Fair. The pavilion’s architect, Philip Johnson, selected the artists (Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Rauschenberg were among them), assigned them a uniform size and left the choices of form and subject up to them.

Stumped for ideas, Warhol arrived at the theme for his fair project by chance. On a visit to a friend’s home, he came across a 1962 New York City Police Department brochure of mug shots titled “The 13 Most Wanted Men.” That was that. He reproduced, large, the head shots of the mostly young Italian-American and Irish-American crime suspects on Masonite panels and had the panels installed high on the pavilion’s exterior.

Managerial alarms went off. Word came down that the piece was unacceptable, had to go. Workmen came and blotted out its images with aluminum-colored house paint. Who made the censorship decision? It wasn’t Johnson. Accusatory eyes turned to Robert Moses, the fair’s demagogic president, who had a big stake in uplift and would have hated Warhol’s jailbirds. But with worries that the fair would be a flop (financially, it was) and the prospect of African-American groups protesting his hiring practices, he probably didn’t notice.

The real culprit seems to have been the New York governor, Nelson A. Rockefeller, who was running in the 1964 presidential election and feared that the ethnic content of the Warhol commission would cost him votes. Yet the few surviving photographs of “13 Most Wanted Men” in situ tell a simpler and even realer story: The piece was plain outrageous. Not only did it literally elevate criminality and violence for all to see (one of the mug-shot subjects looks badly beaten up); it also generated, for those in the know, homoerotic “rough trade” vibes that gave the label “wanted men” an extra spin.

Those rare photographs of the piece during its brief intact existence are in the Queens Museum show. (The pavilion itself, in poor condition, still stands.) So are, strikingly, nine of “13 Most Wanted Men” paintings that Warhol made on canvas, for gallery display, after the commissions were done. And all are given deep context through a wealth of supporting material.

A Stygian black “Little Electric Chair” painting from 1964-65, on loan from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, underscores the punitive, death-obsessed direction of so much of Warhol’s work at the time. And a homoerotic reading of the public commission is reinforced by the presence in the show of “13 Most Beautiful Boys,” a series of filmed head shots of various young men, gay and straight, who visited Warhol’s studio, beginning in 1964.

Most interesting of all, though, is the purely documentary material. The curators — Larissa Harris of the Queens Museum, Nicholas Chambers of the Andy Warhol Museum, along with Anastasia Rygle and Timothy Mennel — have performed miracles of archive diving. And they’ve surfaced with newspaper clips, letters, telegrams, contracts and other ephemera that flesh out the fate of the commission, which the news media barely reported and to which the public remained largely oblivious.

These materials also flesh out a sense of America at that time: a country startled by its own suddenly detonative tensions, tensions that made the World’s Fair, that “Olympics of progress,” anachronistic in its own day, and that give the Queens show, like many dedicated to Warhol, a keyed-up, caustic, slightly nasty edge.

A break in this mood comes in a set of four small 1964 portrait paintings, in cerulean blue and black, of Jacqueline Kennedy. Based on cropped news photographs, they catch her smiling on arrival in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and monumentally veiled at her husband’s funeral days later. The themes of violence and mortality that link so much of Warhol’s art from this period are here, but the pictures seem to belong to a different, graver world. Its essence is distilled in the other show, “Warhol: Jackie,” at Blain/Di Donna.

Organized in collaboration with Bibi Khan, a former curator of the Andy Warhol Foundation, this show is devoted to silk-screen paintings, with a few prints, of the first lady, based on eight news photos, including the one of her standing, stunned, as a witness at Lyndon B. Johnson’s emergency swearing-in. Despite the limited range of images, the paintings, alone or grouped, are astonishingly varied, with subtle differences in tonal values and weights of pigment, and forms coming in and out of focus, as if seen through curtains of static.

Much that seems cold and cynical in Warhol is here: in the mass production, in the voyeurism, in the opportunistic appeal to pop-cultural emotion. The repeated images — he made more than 300 “Jackie” paintings — are like a 1960s equivalent of today’s 24-hour television and Internet news cycle, repeating the same tragic data in an endless loop to a tinkly soundtrack.

But the “Jackie” pictures also evoke a specific type of image, one tied to desire, devotion and a salvational hope: the religious icon. In this light, the Blain/Di Donna show might be seen as a shrine to a black-and-blue Madonna, the “Most Wanted Men” as a roll call of martyr-saints. The saving grace of Warhol’s best art is that a sense of critical morality is always, if almost by accident, operative. And in 1964, when two damaged decades were slamming together, and he felt caught in the wreck, he called on it.

George Lidnemann Journal by George Lindemann "The Deep Freeze in Art Authentication" @wsj by Jennifer Maloney

Joe Simon, left, sued the Warhol foundation after it said his 'Self Portrait' wasn't an authentic Warhol. Madeleine Farley

As contemporary-art prices soar, collectors want assurances that works are authentic. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to get an answer.

A series of high-profile authentication disputes have made art historians reluctant to offer opinions, and prompted several artist estates and foundations to disband their authentication boards.

The authentication deep freeze means uncertainty for artworks that haven't previously been authenticated or included in an artist's catalogue raisonné, or scholarly inventory. Such works may end up occupying a murky middle ground and sell for less than authenticated works, experts say. "There are people who are willing to take educated gambles," said Peter Stern, an attorney who specializes in the art world. Others can't be sold at all.

In 2007, Joe Simon, a London-based filmmaker, sued the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts after the board ruled inauthentic a silk-screen featured during the artist's lifetime on the cover of his catalogue raisonné. The foundation announced in 2011 it was disbanding its authentication board after it says it spent more than $6 million fighting the suit. Mr. Simon said he dropped it because he couldn't afford to continue.

"Protecting collectors, it's not our job," said Michael Straus, chairman of the Warhol foundation. "I don't think putting the burden of that due diligence on an artist estate, especially in the absence of sufficient legal protections, is appropriate."

In February, a group of collectors sued the Keith Haring Foundation, saying the organization had cost them at least $40 million by publicly declaring their paintings "counterfeit" and declining to consider information that could establish their provenance. The foundation's authentication board was dissolved in 2012.

Collectors sued the Keith Haring Foundation after it declared some works, including this one, counterfeit. Connie Grisley Images

The case with the greatest chilling effect for scholars was one that led to the closure of Manhattan's Knoedler & Co. gallery. Last year, Long Island art dealer Glafira Rosales pleaded guilty to conspiring to pass off a Queens artist's paintings as works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and others. Former Knoedler President Ann Freedman named a long list of experts who she claimed had seen and endorsed the paintings before they were revealed as knockoffs. The reputations of several art experts were tarnished and at least one has been sued by a collector who bought a fake.

A bill introduced in the New York legislature in March could offer some relief to New York-based art experts. The bill aims to make it more difficult for collectors and dealers to bring lawsuits against art historians whose opinions they contest. Lawsuits have been brought against experts both for finding works inauthentic and for wrongly authenticating works that turned out to be fakes.

Even as many artists' heirs decline to perform official authentications, some continue to hold considerable influence in the marketplace.

In a recent deposition, Mark Rothko's son, Christopher Rothko, said he has twice been invited by an auction house to view Rothko paintings discovered since the publication of the Rothko catalogue raisonné. One of those paintings —which was authenticated by David Anfam, the author of the Rothko catalog—sold at Christie's for $33.7 million, Christie's said.

Last month, Christie's postponed a sale after the sisters of Jean-Michel Basquiat alleged in a federal suit that some works in the collection of Basquiat's onetime lover, Alexis Adler, were of "questionable authenticity." Six of the works had been approved by the estate's now-defunct authentication committee. Many others hadn't been evaluated.

"Now without the authentication boards, it's a real tricky situation for everybody," Ms. Adler said.

Write to Jennifer Maloney at jennifer.maloney@wsj.com

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Is This Rothko Real?" By Jennifer Maloney

For nearly 30 years, Douglas Himmelfarb has tried to prove his painting is a Rothko -- but no one will authenticate it. Marco Garcia for The Wall Street Journal

Douglas Himmelfarb spotted the painting in 1987 at an auction preview in South Los Angeles. The offerings that day were a mix of furniture and no-name artwork. This canvas was large and dirty, and depicted three rectangles of color stacked on top of one another. A handful of people stood clustered around it as someone pulled it off the wall and turned it around. On the back was a signature:

MARK ROTHKO

CAL. SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS

EX. NO. 7

A woman scoffed, Mr. Himmelfarb recalls: "Mark Rothko did not paint in California, and there is no such thing as the California School of Fine Arts."

Mr. Himmelfarb, at the time a 35-year-old ad writer and estate-sale scavenger, drove home to Santa Monica and ran to the library. He discovered Rothko had spent the summer of 1949 in California, as the painter first explored the stacked-rectangle structure for which he would become famous. The California School of Fine Arts definitely existed—Rothko taught there in 1949 before it was renamed the San Francisco Art Institute.

The next morning, Mr. Himmelfarb returned to the family-run auction house and bought the painting, unchallenged, for $319.50 with tax.

Since that day, he has been on a mission to prove his painting is real.

After decades of setbacks and dead ends, the collector recently obtained what three scholars believe is compelling photographic evidence linking the painting to Rothko.

Mr. Himmelfarb's long struggle highlights a crisis in the obscure but high-stakes world of art authentication. As prices for blue-chip artworks soar—the record for a Rothko is nearly $87 million—authentication is increasingly important because collectors want assurances before they open their wallets.

But in recent years, art historians, artist estates and foundations have become more reluctant to issue opinions on an artwork's authenticity. The threat of costly litigation brought by collectors contesting decisions has prompted foundations including the Keith Haring Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to fold their authentication boards. (See story below.) And in the wake of a recent art-fraud case that closed Manhattan's Knoedler & Co. gallery, some art historians have stopped giving opinions altogether.

                                  

HIGH STAKES Paintings by Mark Rothko have soared in value over the past decade. The record, set in 2012 at Christie's in New York, right, was $86.9 million for 'Orange, Red, Yellow.' Christie's

An Art-World Titan

One of the giants of 20th-century art, Mark Rothko was part of the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s that introduced radical new directions in art, producing monumentally scaled abstract works and shifting the art world's focus from Europe to New York. Rothko, who became known for his large fields of intense color, is credited with creating more than 800 paintings over the course of his five-decade career. Born in what is now Latvia in 1903, he settled in New York in 1923 and by the early 1960s had become an international art star. He died in 1970.

Prices for his works, which were popular with collectors during his lifetime, have soared at auction in the past decade. After Rothko's "Orange, Red, Yellow" set a record of $86.9 million at Christie's in 2012, two of his paintings sold at Christie's last year for $46 million and $27 million. The works that fetch the highest prices are brightly hued examples of his signature stacked-rectangle paintings, often in reds, oranges, and blues. Forgeries have emerged, most notably in the recent art-fraud case that involved the Knoedler gallery, which sold fake Rothkos and other knockoffs that had in fact been created by an artist living in Queens.

A Born Collector

As a child growing up in Chevy Chase, Md., Mr. Himmelfarb wandered through Washington, D.C. art museums and haunted a local antique shop. He bought his first painting, for $30, at age 8 and had acquired a sizable collection by the time he was 17. After earning a degree in English from the University of Maryland, he went to work for an ad agency in Washington, moving to California a few years later.

In the late 1980s, he became friends with a pair of sisters in Los Angeles whom he met while art hunting. A year later, they named him their legal heir. He quit the ad business and began restoring a property they gave him—a courthouse in Malibu—and later acquired and restored other properties.

Mr. Himmelfarb and the sisters, Ruth and Ella Hirshfield, lived together in Bel Air and Honolulu. Now 61, Mr. Himmelfarb still lives with and serves as a caregiver for the sisters, who are in their 90s.

Mark Rothko © Brooklyn Museum/Corbis

Wooing a Top Rothko Scholar

After buying "Ex. No. 7" in 1987, Mr. Himmelfarb traced it back to Mollye Teitelbaum, a Los Angeles collector who sold it to the auction house while going through a divorce, according to her son Murray Teitelbaum, of Ojai, Calif. Ms. Teitelbaum and her ex-husband, Ben Teitelbaum, had acquired a large but mostly undocumented collection at auctions and through a San Francisco dealer, their son said. The couple made many art-buying trips to San Francisco, visiting artist studios and galleries and paying in cash. Mollye and Ben Teitelbaum both died in the 1990s.

"Ex. No. 7" was one of a pair the Teitelbaums had owned since at least 1964, Mr. Teitelbaum said. The other, with a similar signature and labeled "Ex. No. 4," is now owned by the younger Mr. Teitelbaum.

If one were deemed authentic, the other likely would be, too.

Mr. Himmelfarb began reading as much as he could about Rothko. At the same time, he began a correspondence with David Anfam, a British art historian who would become the world's leading Rothko authority.

In the late 1980s, Dr. Anfam was about to embark on a decadelong project at the National Gallery of Art in Washington to publish a catalogue raisonné, or official inventory, of Rothko's works on canvas. When a work is included in a catalogue raisonné, it is generally accepted as authentic.

Dr. Anfam initially thought Mr. Himmelfarb's painting held promise, according to documents in a bankruptcy-court case that Mr. Himmelfarb filed last year after overleveraging his properties. Hoping to use his painting to pay off creditors, he subpoenaed correspondence and other documents that illustrate his efforts to prove the painting's authenticity.

Dr. Anfam visited Mr. Himmelfarb in California around 1988, briefly inspected the painting and said he would study it in more depth at a later date, both sides confirm.

In 1989, Dr. Anfam wrote to the collector: "I very much look forward to the opportunity to assess your fascinating 'Rothko,'" according to a letter filed in the bankruptcy case.

In 1993, Mr. Himmelfarb visited Dr. Anfam at the National Gallery. The two men were photographed together on the roof of the museum. Dr. Anfam inspected the painting again around 1994, according to William Harbig, Dr. Anfam's legal adviser.

In 1998, shortly before the catalog was published, the collector and Dr. Anfam had a heated phone conversation, Mr. Himmelfarb says.

Dr. Anfam revealed that he had discovered in Rothko's archives a black-and-white photograph he believed was of "Ex. No. 7." The collector felt that the presence of a photo of his painting in the artist's personal files was incontrovertible proof of its authenticity. But Dr. Anfam demurred, saying anyone could have put the photograph there. Mr. Himmelfarb says he became angry, asking: "What do you think, I snuck into his house and stuck the photograph in his personal file?"

He says he then called Dr. Anfam a f---ing imbecile.

According to Mr. Himmelfarb, Dr. Anfam replied that he could tear up the photo if he wanted to, and hung up.

Dr. Anfam declined to answer questions from The Wall Street Journal about his dealings with Mr. Himmelfarb. He referred some questions to his legal adviser, Mr. Harbig. Mr. Harbig acknowledges that Dr. Anfam discovered the photo but said the historian "doesn't remember any argument. And he also says that he has never hung up on anyone."

The catalog was published soon after. In a devastating blow to Mr. Himmelfarb's campaign, it didn't include "Ex. No. 7," though it named Mr. Himmelfarb in the acknowledgments. The catalog listed at least six black-and-white photos of paintings, each with the following attribution: "Known only from a photograph in the R.A.," or Rothko archives.

"He harbored this grudge against me," Mr. Himmelfarb says. "If you can tell me why this is not a Rothko and prove it to me, I'm happy to walk."

Mr. Harbig, the legal adviser, said: "To David, scholarship is like a holy grail. I have great difficulty believing that he would not include something in the catalogue raisonné simply because he had a personal animus against the owner of the painting."

Mr. Himmelfarb admits to a penchant for speaking bluntly, sometimes too much so. At an opening party for an art museum once, he says he criticized the design, calling it a "penitentiary for art," not realizing that the architect was standing nearby.

"I think I had a little too much braggadocio after I found the painting," he says. "Maybe that's part of the problem. I thought, 'This is great, and I did it.'"

The 15-year Quest for a Photo

A few years after losing the fight to have his painting included in the Rothko catalogue raisonné, Mr. Himmelfarb set out on a new quest: to get his hands on that black-and-white photograph of his painting. He knew that the catalogs are often revised, with works added and subtracted, as new information comes to light. If he could find the photo, it could help him prove the painting was genuine.

Mr. Himmelfarb figured the photo was in one of two places: the National Gallery of Art, where Dr. Anfam worked on the catalog, or the archives maintained by the artist's children, Christopher Rothko and Kate Rothko Prizel.

The collector hired Gerald Nordland, a former director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and acquaintance of Rothko, to research the painting. In 2002 and 2003, Mr. Nordland wrote to the Rothko family and the National Gallery requesting access to the photograph, arguing that it "could be significant in supporting the authenticity of the painting," according to letters filed with the court. Mr. Nordland got nowhere.

In 2008, Mr. Himmelfarb was hosting a cocktail party at an estate he had purchased in Honolulu when Stephen Little, then-director of the Honolulu Academy of Arts, wandered into the library and let out a yelp.

"He said, 'What is a Rothko doing in Honolulu?'" Mr. Himmelfarb recalls.

Intrigued by the collector's story, Dr. Little spent the next three years researching the painting of his own accord. He became convinced that the painting wasn't only real, but illustrated "the most critical transitional moment in Rothko's career," Dr. Little wrote in a 2010 essay.

Emails and letters filed in court and reviewed by the Journal map out Dr. Little's efforts.

In 2009, Dr. Little wrote to Christopher Rothko, requesting photographs of the back sides of a few paintings in the Rothko family collection. The request was rebuffed.

"I am afraid that the Rothko family, as a matter of strict policy, does not involve itself in questions of authenticity. I am sorry that I cannot be more helpful," Mr. Rothko replied to Dr. Little in a letter.

Dr. Little also lobbied Ruth Fine, then a curator at the National Gallery who was working on an inventory of Rothko's works on paper, to consider "Ex. No. 7"—and Mr. Teitelbaum's "Ex. No. 4" —for inclusion in a planned addendum to the inventory of works on canvas.

In 2010, she wrote that she would consider looking at both paintings.

But by the following year, Ms. Fine had decided not to. When Mr. Himmelfarb approached the Pace Gallery in 2011 for an authentication, Pace contacted a colleague of Ms. Fine at the National Gallery. The colleague, Laili Nasr, replied: "The painting is not a lost oil painting, it was fully known to David Anfam at the time of the publication of the works on canvas catalog and we do not see any reason to alter Anfam's decision in this case."

National Gallery spokeswoman Deborah Ziska said that in the past couple of years the institution canceled its plans to publish an addendum to the works on canvas inventory because the works on paper volume, including some 2,600 works, had become "such an enormous undertaking."

"The National Gallery of Art does not authenticate works of art, although the publication of a catalogue raisonné implicitly authenticates the works listed therein," she said, adding that the 1998 "book reflects the scholarship at the time it went to press."

Ms. Fine, who is retired, and Ms. Nasr, now project manager of the works on paper project, declined to answer questions about why they decided not to reconsider the painting.

In 2011, Dr. Anfam authenticated a newly discovered Rothko painting that sold at Christie's for $33.7 million.

The same year, in separate correspondence with Dr. Little and Christopher Rothko, Dr. Anfam wrote that he wouldn't reassess Mr. Himmelfarb's painting but he hoped the National Gallery would do so.

"Indeed, it's a scholarly obligation, don't you think?" Dr. Anfam wrote to Dr. Little in a 2011 email reviewed by the Journal.

The pressure on Mr. Himmelfarb to authenticate and then sell the painting continued to mount. He had already lost the Malibu courthouse, which he had turned into a banquet hall, in 2010. To save his other properties from foreclosure, he had been trying to secure a loan against the painting. In October 2012, Mr. Himmelfarb's attorney wrote to Dr. Anfam, accusing the historian of having "discouraged people from purchasing, lending upon and/or acknowledging" the painting as a Rothko. The attorney threatened Dr. Anfam with "legal action" if he disparaged the painting.

"David will never, under any circumstances, give an opinion on Mr. Himmelfarb's painting," Dr. Anfam's legal adviser said. The art world, he added, has become "a very litigious environment."

Finding the Photo

In 2013, Mr. Himmelfarb filed for bankruptcy in a bid to save his last remaining property, the estate in Honolulu. Hoping to establish the value of "Ex. No. 7" and use it to pay off creditors, Mr. Himmelfarb was now able to take depositions and use subpoenas to request information as part of the bankruptcy proceedings. He asked for records from the National Gallery, Christopher Rothko and Marion Kahan, the Rothko family's collection manager.

Among the records they turned over was a copy of the photo—the same black-and-white image that Dr. Anfam had alluded to 15 years earlier.

In depositions for the bankruptcy case, Ms. Kahan and Mr. Rothko confirmed that the photograph was of Mr. Himmelfarb's painting. Ms. Kahan said that she found it in a file of 17 black-and-white photos from a box of photographs in the Rothkos' warehouse. Of the 16 other photos—all reviewed by the Journal—at least six appear to be identical to photographs reproduced in the catalogue raisonné, accompanied by the note: "Known only from a photograph in the R.A."

Mr. Rothko and Ms. Kahan declined to comment. In his deposition, Mr. Rothko said that each time they were previously asked for the photograph, they looked but couldn't find it.

When they turned the photo over to the court, Mr. Rothko's attorney stipulated that it be accompanied by a disclaimer, saying in part: "Ms. Kahan and the Rothko family… specifically caution against drawing any undue inference of authenticity" from it.

Last week, the U.S. District Court in Honolulu completed the foreclosure of Mr. Himmelfarb's Honolulu estate—his final remaining property.

'An Absolute Genuine' Rothko

Gerald Nordland, the former San Francisco museum director, is now 86 years old. Told by a reporter that Mr. Himmelfarb had finally obtained a copy of the photo, Mr. Nordland said: "Oh my God. Good!"

"If there is a chance for one more that we can find legitimate, then I think that widens our way of looking at Mark's work," he said.

Peter Selz, a former curator and museum director who organized Rothko's first show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961, believes the painting is real.

"I think I know Rothko's work as well as anybody," said Dr. Selz, 95 years old, who wrote an essay last year asserting the painting's authenticity. "This is an absolute genuine painting by Mark Rothko," he said.

But he said that without the Rothko family or David Anfam vouching for the painting, there is little Mr. Himmelfarb can do.

In his court deposition, Christopher Rothko was asked if he knew anyone who currently authenticates Rothko paintings.

"I don't know of any individual, no," he said.

Write to Jennifer Maloney at jennifer.maloney@wsj.com

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Bare Knuckles at Sotheby’s Auction House" @nytimes By ALEXANDRA STEVENSON and MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED

Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesAndy Warhol’s “Liz #1 (Early Colored Liz)” on the block at Sotheby’s, which faces a shareholder challenge on May 6.

Directors of Sotheby’s gathered in their wood-paneled boardroom with an urgent goal: how to mollify Daniel S. Loeb, the outspoken hedge fund mogul who is the auction house’s largest shareholder.

Yet on that day, in late February, even as the board was debating whether to give the investor the two board seats he had demanded, Mr. Loeb suddenly struck. He nominated three director candidates, officially declaring war against the art world stalwart.

That battle — being closely watched in Manhattan socialite and art circles as well as on Wall Street — is now heading to its final stages as both sides lobby other shareholders before the company’s annual meeting on May 6.

On Thursday, Mr. Loeb gained a significant advantage as the influential proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services recommended that shareholders vote for two of the three board nominees he has proposed, including himself. (Glass-Lewis, I.S.S.’s rival, is, however, supporting the Sotheby’s slate.)

Michael Nagle for The New York TimesWith a 9.6 percent stake, the mogul Daniel S. Loeb is Sotheby’s biggest shareholder.

Mr. Loeb, 52, is no stranger to no-holds-barred corporate battles, but this one is different in several ways. For one, it is almost as much a test of his reputation as an art aficionado as it is of his skills as an investor.

Known for his focus on contemporary and feminist art, Mr. Loeb has regularly made ARTnews’ list of the 200 biggest collectors. Works that have graced his Manhattan office or homes include a seven-foot-wide metallic pink-and-blue Jeff Koons egg — which he reportedly sold for $5.5 million — and a Martin Kippenberger sculpture of a crucified frog.

As part of its defense, Sotheby’s has publicly questioned Mr. Loeb’s art expertise, irking him in the process.

For Sotheby’s, the hedge fund challenge comes as the 270-year-old auction house is grappling with a seismic shift in the business of selling art. Fierce competition and the rapid sprouting of new millionaires and potential clients in emerging economies like China have forced auction houses to reconsider their traditional models.

“Sotheby’s is like an old master painting in desperate need of restoration,” Mr. Loeb has argued.

The battle is reverberating not just among investors but also within the exclusive and close-knit circles of the art world. Some have questioned whether Mr. Loeb, as an upstart, is doing what’s best for the business of art.

“I think what people may be concerned about is that although he is a significant collector, his primary focus is finance and he is not an art world insider,” said Jeff Rabin, a co-founder of the art consulting firm Artvest Partners.

Founded in London in 1744 to sell off several hundred rare books, Sotheby’s has been one of the most prestigious names in the art world. It is the oldest listed company on the New York Stock Exchange.

Yet it was hit hard during the financial crisis. For the last year, activist investors have circled the company, anticipating a broader shake-up of the art market.

“The big question for Sotheby’s is how to adapt to a changing market without losing what makes them special and different,” said John D. Shea, the chief executive of Proxy Mosaic, a firm that advises shareholders in activist situations.

To Mr. Loeb, Sotheby’s has not adapted quickly enough, leaving it ripe for the sort of corporate agitation that has made billions for himself and investors in his firm, Third Point. His playbook: buying a large stake in a company, and using that position to call for shifts in strategy and, often, board seats.

According to Mr. Loeb, Sotheby’s has fallen behind its chief rival, Christie’s, in recent years, especially in the Impressionist and Modern art beloved by today’s mega-collectors, like hedge fund moguls. For example, while Sotheby’s reported its biggest-ever night of contemporary art auctions in November, with $390 million in sales, Christie’s equivalent night fetched $691 million in sales. (Christie’s, however, is privately owned by the French businessman François-Henri Pinault and does not report financial results.)

Mr. Loeb has accused Sotheby’s of rebating the fees its takes for selling multimillion-dollar works, while also taking less of the buyer’s fees to attract more business. He has taken issue with the auction house’s strategy of focusing on top clients and headline sales. He has even criticized board members’ relatively low holdings of their own company’s stock.

In Sotheby’s view, Mr. Loeb has disrupted its business for months by contacting major employees and positioning himself as their new boss, while also suggesting that prominent art world figures consider becoming the auction house’s chief executive.

In the fall, he met with Jeff T. Blau, chief executive of the Related Companies, to discuss a possible move to Related’s Hudson Yards complex or the Time Warner Center, according to people briefed on the matter.

Company officials have also complained that Mr. Loeb has sometimes misunderstood the business. Moving Sotheby’s out of its current headquarters, for example, would make life difficult, given how customized it already is for the auction house.

And they have alluded to accusations that Mr. Loeb has committed “greenmail,” the frowned-upon practice of buying up big stakes in companies and then forcing them to buy the shares back. After winning an activist campaign at Yahoo — one of his biggest victories to date — the Internet company bought back the majority of Mr. Loeb’s stake a year later for $1.2 billion, yielding a significant profit.

Tyrone Siu/Reuters“Bloodline: Big Family No. 3” by the Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang, on preview at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong this month.

Though the billionaire investor first met with Sotheby’s last August, he came out swinging in October, when, in a typically Loeb-like letter, he disclosed a 9.3 percent stake. He now has a 9.6 percent stake.

He accused the auction house’s chairman and chief executive, William F. Ruprecht, of having outstayed his welcome while being paid a salary that “invokes the long-gone era of imperial C.E.O.s.” Ultimately, he demanded Mr. Ruprecht’s resignation.

Sotheby’s responded by instituting a poison pill, a defense that would limit activist investors from owning more than 10 percent of a company, a move that Mr. Loeb sneered was a “relic of the 1980s.”

Unusually, Mr. Loeb then went quiet, even as another hedge fund manager, Mick McGuire of Marcato Capital Management, announced a multipronged plan for the company to generate $1.3 billion in cash for shareholders. Mr. McGuire, who has a 6.6 percent stake, said this week that he would vote with Mr. Loeb at the annual meeting.

By January, Sotheby’s announced its own initiative to return $450 million to shareholders through dividend payouts and stock buybacks, after concluding a financial review initiated by its new chief financial officer, Patrick S. McClymont.

“We spoke with many of our shareholders, and we asked people for their thinking on these topics,” Mr. McClymont said at the time.

Privately, Mr. Loeb was holding talks with Mr. McClymont and Domenico De Sole, the dapper co-founder of the luxury clothier Tom Ford and Sotheby’s newly installed lead independent director. By winter, the hedge fund manager had dropped his demand that Mr. Ruprecht resign, a matter of some satisfaction for the company.

Sotheby’s offered to make Mr. Loeb a director and to give him plum board committee assignments, including its nominating committee. But Mr. Loeb, irritated by what he perceived was a disinterest in listening to him, argued that a single directorship could not drive home real change, and repeatedly demanded two seats.

Now the two sides are contesting three board seats.

Mr. Loeb has nominated himself and two associates, including Olivier Reza, a former investment banker whose jeweler family has done business with Sotheby’s. The auction house’s slate includes Jessica Bibliowicz, a financier and daughter of Citigroup’s former chief executive, Sanford I. Weill, and Robert S. Taubman, whose family rescued Sotheby’s from a hostile bid in the 1980s, but whose father was convicted in a big price-fixing scandal a decade ago.

Each side has fallen into the timeworn rhythms of a corporate proxy fight, flinging attacks at each other on an almost weekly basis. In its most recent counterpunch, Sotheby’s disclosed on Wednesday its preliminary first-quarter results, including a 34 percent jump in Impressionist and contemporary sales from the same time a year ago. Overall, net auction sales rose 40 percent, to $730 million, while the company’s overall loss narrowed to about $6 million.

In its report on Thursday, I.S.S. wrote that while Mr. Loeb’s plan lacked a solid vision, both his and Marcato’s critiques still had merit. “In the particulars of their criticisms of things like commission margin, there is credible reason to believe their larger criticism about strategic myopia has some credibility,” the advisory firm wrote.

To some outsiders, Sotheby’s seems to be receptive to some of its critics’ recommendations. The question is whether its executives are making certain changes fast enough.

“There is a lot of minutiae with this proxy battle,” said Oliver Chen, a luxury goods analyst with Citigroup. “But there are a lot of big-picture questions — for example, ensuring that the model has another 100 years ahead of it.”

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "MoMA Plans a Robert Gober Retrospective" @nytimes

An untitled installation by Robert Gober from 1992 that features a hand-painted forest mural. Credit 2014 Robert Gober, Bill Jacobson/Matthew Marks Gallery

It seems almost inconceivable that there has never been a Robert Gober retrospective in an American museum. This 59-year-old artist, who rose to prominence in the mid-1980s, is perhaps best known for his creepy sculptures of body parts — a cast wax leg or torso with individually applied hairs on them — as well as his signature sinks fashioned from plaster painted with enamel.

But for several years now, Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, has been quietly working on “The Heart Is Not a Metaphor,” a large-scale survey of Mr. Gober’s work, which will be on view there from Oct. 11 to Jan. 18, 2015. The show’s title, chosen by Mr. Gober, is taken from a sentence in “Sleepless Nights,” a 1979 novel by Elizabeth Hardwick, because, Ms. Temkin said, he often chooses enigmatic phrases for exhibitions.

So often, organizing an exhibition of a living artist’s work can be a tug-of-war between curator and artist. But what few realize is that, in addition to being a celebrated artist, Mr. Gober is also an active curator. He has organized exhibitions, like the paintings of Charles Burchfield at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Whitney Museum of American Art; he also put together a room of works by the painter Forrest Bess at the Whitney’s 2012 Biennial. “Robert is totally involved and approaching himself as if he were one of his subjects,” Ms. Temkin said.

Over the years, he has been particularly influential among a generation of artists too young to have seen his only previous retrospective, which took place in 2007 at the Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland, or the meticulously carved doll’s house that he made when he was just 24 and struggling to get by, which was included in the 2013 Venice Biennale (organized by Cindy Sherman).

The show at MoMA will include about 130 works in all mediums. There will be many well-known objects but also some rare sculptures and new works made just for the retrospective.

Because some of his sculptural installations involve plumbing — like sinks and bathtubs with running water — and others, like a room-size, hand-painted mural depicting a New England forest in summer, need space, the show will take place in the contemporary art galleries on the second floor, rather than the museum’s special exhibition galleries on the sixth.

ART AS MAGAZINE INSERT

In January 2013, to celebrate its 100th anniversary, the magazine Art in America lined up a year’s worth of artists to design its monthly covers. Big names like Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Urs Fischer and Louise Lawler have all been contributors. “We’ve loved doing it so much we’ve just continued,” said Lindsay Pollock, the editor in chief.

Now, the magazine is going one better. Tucked inside the May issue, on newsstands April 29, will be a specially commissioned print by Jasper Johns on perforated paper that can be carefully torn out and framed. A black-and-white lithograph on translucent vellum, it depicts many of Mr. Johns’s signature motifs: numbers, a map of the United States and sign language.

“Amid all the recent consternation about the art world’s fixation on money and glitz, Jasper Johns and Art in America are going against the grain by offering a substantial, free piece of art by a legendary artist,” Ms. Pollock said.

The print is a co-publication with the independent curator and print expert Sharon Hurowitz and has been produced by Bill Goldston, the print publisher, at Universal Limited Art Editions. It is only the second time Mr. Johns has collaborated with a magazine on a project. In 1973, he produced a print called “Cups 2 Picasso,” for XXieme Siècle, a French publication.

BURIED IN THE SUBURBS

A pair of 14-foot-tall salvaged box trucks, their cabs submerged in the ground and set amid the impeccably manicured polo fields that surround the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Conn., may seem like a messy intrusion. They are meant to. But the installation, which the New York artist Dan Colen has titled “At Least They Died Together (After Dash),” will be the first thing visitors see.

“It’s about bringing the city to some other place,” Mr. Colen said. “I wanted to bring a bit of the city with me. From a distance they will just look like minimal cubes.”

Mr. Colen found the trucks on Craigslist. “At first I was looking for trucks with graffiti on them, but then I changed my mind because graffiti seemed too redundant,” he said.

The title refers to a collage that his friend, the artist Dash Snow, gave him before his death in 2009. It is a prelude to “Help!” a comprehensive show of his work on view there from May 11 through Sept. 7. Included in the show are more than 45 paintings, 15 sculptures, drawings and one video.

“Dan’s one of the better painters around,” said Peter Brant, the collector and founder of the foundation, who coincidentally owns Art in America. “I’ve been collecting his work for six or seven years now.”

SPONSOR REOPENS WALLET

Since opening its elegantly pleated, stainless-steel building designed by Zaha Hadid in 2012, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University in East Lansing has presented 32 exhibitions and attracted more than 125,000 people, which is boosting the local economy there by about $5 million a year, according to museum officials.

To mark Michael Rush’s second year as director, Mr. Broad, the Los Angeles financier who founded the institution with his wife, has given $5 million to increase its exhibition endowment and to provide annual funds for shows over the next five years. The Broads provided the initial $28 million gift for the design and construction of the museum and for its endowment, which now totals $33 million.

George Lindemann Journal by Goerge Lindemann - "A Provocateur’s Medium: Outrage" @nytimes by Roberta Smith

The 2012 survey of the courageous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei seen at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington has finally arrived in New York, and is much improved. The show, “Ai Weiwei: According to What?,” which opens Friday at the Brooklyn Museum, has been beefed up throughout, but most notably by two installation pieces completed in 2013. One, “S.A.C.R.E.D.,” is perhaps the best work of art Mr. Ai has yet made.

As a result, this show is far clearer and more gripping than its original incarnation and something of a triumph. It brings many of Mr. Ai’s past efforts into focus as the juvenilia they often were, while making a persuasive case for his ability periodically to reconcile art and ideals and life — which in his case is usually, unavoidably, political — into a memorable balance.

The show originated at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, organized by Mami Kataoka, its chief curator. The Brooklyn presentation has been expertly overseen by Ms. Kataoka and Sharon Matt Atkins, the museum’s managing curator of exhibitions.

           

Mr. Ai is a complex, troublesome figure: an artistic provocateur who works in several mediums, an activist and thorn in the side of the Chinese powers that be and an impresario able to marshal scores of variously adept Chinese artisans to make ambitious pieces that he barely touches. He’s also a designer and part-time architect who collaborated with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on the emblematic “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. And he was the darling of the Chinese power structure, until he began jumping in where he wasn’t invited.

Initially, he made his presence felt on his outspoken blog, complaining about the destruction of the old alleyway neighborhoods of Beijing to make way for the Olympics (his involvement with the Bird’s Nest notwithstanding) — until the blog was shut down by the government in 2009. That year he was beaten by the police when, in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, he began to agitate for more information about the shoddily built schools that collapsed, killing thousands of children. Then he was held incommunicado for 81 days in 2011, and, since his release, he has been prohibited from traveling beyond Beijing.

That restriction has not stopped him from making artworks and spiriting them out of China, or from sending assistants to oversee his exhibitions.

Some Westerners may wonder why Mr. Ai doesn’t find a way to leave China (ignoring that his every move is carefully watched). But Mr. Ai is not like, say, a Russian ballet star, who can usually perform as well in London or New York as in Moscow.

Mr. Ai would be nothing without China. His country, its history, its artistic and material culture, its totalitarian government and the travails of its people drive his art. Conversely his art at its best bears witness to the often perverse machinations of the state. His recurrent theme, that of an individual wrestling with all this, is sometimes superficially touched upon in his earlier pieces and is usually detailed in wall labels. More recently, it is profoundly and frighteningly invoked.

This is the case with “S.A.C.R.E.D.,” which was exhibited at the Venice Biennale last year and is now in the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum, where people see it as they enter and again as they leave. It brackets the rest of the show.

On first sight, its six imposing iron boxes resemble a work by Richard Serra. But each box has a firmly shut door and step-size iron boxes upon which visitors stand to peer down through an opening in the top. Inside is a roughly half-scale diorama of the tiny, sparsely furnished cell in which Mr. Ai spent his 81 days of detention. Each includes a painted fiberglass sculpture of Mr. Ai performing one of his daily activities — sleeping, eating, showering, using the toilet — always accompanied by two uniformed guards who seem deliberately to crowd him.

With each successive box, we follow Mr. Ai from chair, to bed, to table, watching a government trying to break an individual without touching him. Because it is enacted in almost real space, the piece gives this tactic a visceral immediacy greater than writing, photography or perhaps even film. This makes sense: Confinement is spatial limitation. The slightly reduced size enables you take in these scenes all at once, to get the picture and empathize, but also to conduct your own surveillance.

“S.A.C.R.E.D.” sets a high standard, a level to which the other works don’t always rise. That’s certainly true of “Stacked,” the newest and largest installation, which is also in the lobby. Consisting of his signature Chinese bicycle frames, but this time copies made from stainless steel, it is the latest, extravagant expression of his continuing involvement with Duchamp’s principle of the ready-made.

The ready-made that serves Mr. Ai best is life itself. As “S.A.C.R.E.D” implies, his strength is as a kind of imaginative documentarian who figures out ways to bring reality close, sometimes unbearably so. This gift has long been evident in his photographs, which are well represented here in gritty black and white, recording his life as a young artist in both New York (where he lived from 1983 to 1993) and Beijing; and in color images papering the walls that show the building of the gigantic Bird’s Nest as well as the destruction that cleared space for the Olympic build-out.

Further color images flutter past on a dozen monitors in “258 Fake,” an ebullient document of his life centered on a studio populated by friends, assistants and cats. (Mr. Ai calls his studio Fake, and 258 is its actual street number.) The documentary impulse is also evident in the show’s increasingly searing videos, one of which follows the plight of a woman infected as a child with H.I.V. from a blood transfusion in a Chinese hospital, part of a medical system that only grudgingly acknowledges her disease.

More traditional notions of the ready-made operate in the first gallery, which concentrates on Mr. Ai’s early work of the last decade. The space is dominated by sculptures made from lustrous wood and antique furniture salvaged from houses and temples doomed by the Olympics. Especially good are his reconfigured Qing dynasty tables, their legs planted on both the floor and the wall as if under great strain. Even better is “Kippe,” an exquisite wood-pile-like mass of scraps that suggest a funeral pyre.

Otherwise, the sadness of the stories is provided by the labels, though the pieces themselves are primarily familiar forms of international Conceptual sculpture translated into local materials. You glimpse Mr. Ai’s implicit rebelliousness in his repainted Han dynasty vases and photographic triptychs showing him dropping the irreplaceable objects, shocking gestures that gain resonance from his recent work.

Two other high points are room-size installations. One is an enlarged version of “Straight,” which consists of 73 tons of rebar (nearly double the tonnage at the Hirshhorn show) salvaged from the collapsed schools of the Sichuan earthquake, painstakingly straightened so that nothing appears to have been amiss and stacked in a thick undulating carpet that visitors walk around. It suggests both a landscape and the orderliness of a morgue. Its stark density balances its tragic back story. (But a large snake made of children’s backpacks coiled on the ceiling is an earthquake commemoration whose lightheartedness is almost insensitive.)

The other work is “Ye Haiyan’s Belongings,” named for a Chinese women’s rights advocate. The government has responded to her activism with repeated evictions, the last time dumping her and her daughter on the side of a highway. Mr. Ai responded first with financial aid and then turned Ms. Ye’s hastily packed household goods into a fairly successful artwork.

Four walls of the gallery are papered floor to ceiling with images of neatly arranged possessions of Ms. Ye and her daughter: clothes, CDs, teapots, rice bowls. This rather cheerful surround contrasts with the dusty and desolate array of the items themselves, packed in shabby cardboard boxes and suitcases on the floor, along with appliances, a motorbike and a bicycle.

In these last two works and in “S.A.C.R.E.D.,” we feel the crushing vortexes that the Chinese government creates for its citizens, sometimes in groups, sometimes individually. It is not clear how often Mr. Ai will find ways to enter these maelstroms and make them hauntingly, even beautifully, visible. But for as long as he can we will be lucky.