The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

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 by George Lindemann - "The Ups and Downs of The Spring Auctions" @wsj by Kelly Crow

                                  

Midway through New York's major spring auctions, collectors of Impressionist and modern art appear to be showing signs of sticker stock, even as contemporary-art buyers prepare to splurge on.

Earlier this week, Sotheby's BID -0.05% Sotheby's U.S.: NYSE ^$40.48 -0.02-0.05% May 14, 2014 9:51 am Volume (Delayed 15m) : 39,739 P/E Ratio 18.97 Market Cap $2.79 Billion Dividend Yield 0.99% Rev. per Employee $576,249 41.0040.7540.5040.2510a11a12p1p2p3p 05/07/14 The WSJ's Kelly Crow at the So... 05/07/14 Loeb Wins by Losing at Sotheby... 05/07/14 Court Ruling Bolsters New Type... More quote details and news » BID in Your Value Your Change Short position and Christie's sold a combined $611.2 million worth of Impressionist and modern art, a total that fell within their presale expectations and exceeded a similar series last May that sold for $478 million.

Bidding proved thin for some of Christie's priciest works Tuesday—dealer Paul Gray was the lone bidder on a $22.6 million Pablo Picasso —and around a third of Sotheby's offerings on Wednesday went unsold. Sotheby's failures included a Picasso portrait of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, expected to sell for at least $15 million.

But the same collectors who sniffed at Sotheby's art trophies turned up in force the next day for its sale of lower-priced material. It was a clue that this seasoned subset of collectors is willing to bid—but at price levels below $5 million, unless the art on offer is truly museum-worthy.

New York collector Donald Bryant thought he had hit his limit at Christie's on Tuesday after he offered $6.1 million for Constantin Brâncusi's toaster-size stone sculpture of a kissing couple, "The Kiss." But when he bowed out, he got a nudge from his wife, Bettina, and jumped back in at $7.2 million. "Is it because of her?" auctioneer Andreas Rumbler asked, adding with a grin, "She's the boss." The extra effort didn't pay off, though: The Brancusi sold to another bidder for $8.7 million.

Auction specialists say the art market has seen this divergence in collecting categories before. Decades ago, Old Masters enjoyed top billing until Impressionist and modern art became fashionable among wealthy collectors. Suddenly, its roster of artists such as Claude Monet began fetching the kinds of prices once reserved for Rembrandt and Canaletto. Now the art market appears to be shuffling again: With the majority of Impressionist and modern masterpieces now tucked away in museum collections, new buyers are finding it difficult to amass an enviable collection in a short time.

Many Asian collectors are still trying. At least eight of Sotheby's pricier works on Wednesday went to Asian collectors—including a $19.2 million Henri Matisse view of a woman painting at her easel, "The Afternoon Session."

Dealers say the art market will undergo its greater stress test this week, when both houses, plus boutique house Phillips, hold their sales of contemporary art. In recent seasons, auction prices for contemporary artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Christopher Wool have quadrupled—a pace that's encouraged speculators to buy up even younger artists in hopes of profiting later in resales.

Last November, Christie's sold a yellow Francis Bacon triptych for $142.4 million, almost $60 million above its estimate and the most ever paid for a work of art at auction. Next Tuesday, the house will offer up a seafoam-green Bacon triptych, 1984's "Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards," for an estimated $80 million. The seller is computer-chip maker Pierre Chen.

Mr. Chen's Bacon carries a third-party guarantee. This means the auction has promised him it will sell—to an outside investor who has pledged to buy it for an undisclosed sum if no one during the sale offers more. If the guarantor is outbid, he or she will reap a share of Mr. Chen's potential profits and take home a financing fee from Christie's no matter what. (Sotheby's doesn't offer financing fees.)

Unlike Impressionist and modern art, next week's contemporary sales are swimming in guarantees—at least $650 million worth across the three houses. The amount eclipses Sotheby's entire guarantee portfolio for 2008, the last market peak.

Both Christie's and Sotheby's say they feel comfortable with their volume of guarantees.

For the Tuesday sales, third-party guarantors claim a financial interest in 39 of Christie's 72 contemporary artworks, which means that 54% of the estimated $500 million sale will change hands whether anyone even shows up with a paddle. This includes Andy Warhol's "Race Riot," a red-white-and-blue silk-screen that recently belonged to a trust of dealer Bill Acquavella's family and that Christie's estimates will sell for around $45 million.

All this means that contemporary collectors, unlike buyers of Impressionist and modern art, are going to unprecedented lengths to keep fueling their segment's momentum, even if they must bankroll the offerings themselves ahead of time. If the strategy works, it could reshape the way art gets auctioned, with sellers essentially preselling their art privately but angling for a higher, backstop price at auction. If the broader financial markets sour suddenly, bidders could get spooked, and these deal makers may be left owning art at prices that may appear inflated. Stay tuned.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Strolling an Island of Creativity" @nytimes By KEN JOHNSON and MARTHA SCHWENDENER

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Christie’s First Spring Sale Drops Prices Back to Earth" @nytimes By CAROL VOGEL

A Modigliani portrait from 1919 was sold for $17.6 million, above its high estimate of $12 million, at Christie’s on Tuesday. Credit Christie's Images, 2014

After all the predictions that prices were only going one way — up — the spring auction season got off to a tepid start at Christie’s on Tuesday night, where some examples of Impressionist and modern art by Picasso, Kandinsky and Dalí brought far less than expected; others barely skimmed by, and two classic works by Degas were left unsold, victims of estimates that were simply too high.

Christie’s was kicking off two weeks of sales, including the more buoyant segment of the market, postwar and contemporary art, and expectations were running high. The opening night could be seen as a reality check.

“The market continues to be discerning at the highest level,” said Conor Jordan, deputy chairman of Christie’s Impressionist and modern art department. The evening was not without its bright spots. A portrait of a russet-haired young man with blue eyes that Modigliani painted in 1919 brought $17.6 million, well above its $12 million high estimate. It had last been on the market in 2002 at Sotheby’s, where it was sold by Robert C. Guccione, publisher of Penthouse magazine. Back then it brought $8.4 million.

Christie’s had high expectations, having secured several of the season’s high-profile estates, including that of Huguette Clark, the reclusive copper heiress who died in 2011 at the age of 104. Both her father, Senator William A. Clark, and his second wife, Anna, loved all things French, including their art. The most expensive painting was Monet’s dreamy “Nymphéas,” or Water Lilies, painted in 1907 and inspired by the artist’s garden in Giverny. Mrs. Clark had bought it in 1930 from the Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York, and it had not been seen in public since. Four bidders went for the painting, which sold to Elaine Holt, a Christie’s expert in the Impressionist and modern art department based in Hong Kong, who bid on behalf of a client. She paid $27 million, above its $25 million low estimate but far short of its $35 million high.

Asian bidders, especially from mainland China, helped fuel many of the auction’s higher prices, Christie’s officials said. Of the evening’s 53 works, six went unsold. The evening totaled $285.9 million. It had been estimated to bring $244.5 million to $360.4 million.

(Final prices include the buyer’s premium: 25 percent of the first $100,000; 20 percent of the next $100,000 to $2 million; and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

Also coming to auction were three paintings by Renoir, including “Jeunes Filles Jouant au Volant” (“Young Women Playing Badminton”), painted around 1887. Mrs. Clark had purchased it in 1958 for $125,000, a high price at the time, when the Minneapolis Institute of Arts deaccessioned it; on Tuesday night it sold with only one bid at its low $10 million estimate, or $11.3 million with fees. (The painting had been on loan to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington.)

But another Renoir saw some action. “Les Deux Soeurs,” a colorful scene of two sisters with wide-brimmed hats reading, painted around 1890 to 1895, sold to Sumiko Roberts, from Christie’s in London, who was taking bids on behalf of a client. She paid $8 million, well above its high $6 million.

Works from the estate of German collectors Viktor and Marianne Langen brought fairly solid prices and also some bargains. A 1942 Picasso, “Portrait de femme (Dora Maar)” of the artist’s lover and muse, regally posed in purple, was estimated at $25 million to $35 million. Paul Gray, one of the owners of the Richard Gray gallery in Chicago and New York, snapped it up for $20 million, or $22.6 million with fees. “Le Modèle,” one of Braque’s Cubist interiors, this one from 1939, that was expected to sell for $8 million to $12 million, sold for $9.1 million including fees. And a colorful 1909 landscape by Kandinsky sold to a telephone bidder for $17.1 million, above its low $16 million estimate.

Works on paper were in demand. The Langens’ Picasso watercolor, “Composition: Nu sur la Plage,” which he painted on July 13, 1933, was estimated at $1 million to $1.5 million but brought $2.5 million. Five bidders went after a gouache on paper of a Surreal setting — a giant leaf rising and round white ball — with two tiny people in a landscape that Magritte created in 1963. It had been expected to fetch $700,000 to $1 million, and sold for $1.25 million

As the crowd was pouring out of the auction house afterward, people were trying to draw conclusions from the evening’s results. “People are selective,” said Christophe Van de Weghe, a New York dealer. “Yes there’s a lot of money around — but the market is getting smarter.”      

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Fight Over Guggenheim’s Legacy Roils Her Palazzo" @nytimes by DOREEN CARVAJAL

The names of two New York donors next to that of Peggy Guggenheim outside her museum palazzo in Venice. Credit Laia Abril for The New York Times

VENICE — The battle now raging over the Peggy Guggenheim Collection started with just a few words written in brass letters above the sculpted lions that guard the 18th-century palazzo turned art museum here.

On a wall facing the Grand Canal, the names of two Long Island art donors appeared last summer in letters nearly as large as those naming Guggenheim, who bequeathed her home, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, and vast art collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York before her death at 81 in 1979. It was a step too far for some of her relatives.

“I will sue. I will sue. I will sue,” Sandro Rumney, her grandson and a former art dealer, vowed when he confronted the museum’s director during festivities for the Venice Biennale last summer, family members say.

And so they have. Seven descendants who live in France are pressing a lawsuit in a Paris court, with a hearing scheduled for May 21. They charge that the foundation ignored Peggy Guggenheim’s last wish for the collection, which consists mainly of Cubist, Surrealist and abstract postwar art: that it be displayed in the palazzo in its entirety and without additions.

They say the museum has removed nearly half the works and added pieces donated by Rudolph B. and Hannelore B. Schulhof, the parents of Michael P. Schulhof, now a foundation trustee. The relatives are seeking to revoke Guggenheim’s donation if the collection is not restored to its initial state, a requirement that they say was stipulated by the heiress in a 1969 letter. They are demanding that the posted names of the later donors be removed, and that their artworks be taken out of the palazzo and garden.

The family also contends that rentals of the museum garden to well-heeled donors desecrate Guggenheim’s grave. Her remains are interred there in a wall alongside a tribute to “my beloved babies,” as she called them, 14 dogs with names like Cappuccino and Sir Herbert.

The foundation counters that its actions are faithful to Guggenheim’s memory, and that she attached no conditions to the donation. But the family says the foundation is violating her principles by pursuing a New York-centric corporate strategy, including aggressive merchandising of the collection. The museum boasts a new mascot, a bright yellow vinyl “Cappuccino” named for one of Guggenheim’s Lhasa apsos that is being sold in a limited edition for 140 euros ($195) each.

“They are absolutely running Peggy’s collection as a corporate enterprise,” said Sindbad Rumney, 27, a great-grandson and filmmaker who sniffs at the mascot, saying it is more appropriate for Disneyland. “In her lifetime, she would open her house for free to make it accessible,” he said in a phone interview. “She was not a merchant. She was an art lover, a patron. She did not want to be involved in commercial things.”

Peggy Guggenheim lived at the palazzo for the last three decades of her life and was one of the last people in Venice to maintain a private gondolier. The child of Benjamin Guggenheim, who died in 1912 in the sinking of the Titanic, she inherited her fortune in 1919, when she turned 21. After buying the palazzo in 1949, she amassed a 326-piece collection that included paintings and sculptures by modern European and American masters including Picasso, Kandinsky, Miró and Calder.

She began opening her private collection to the public on a seasonal basis in 1951. After her death, the Guggenheim Foundation opened it year round and began expanding the museum by buying up neighboring buildings. The annual number of visitors has since increased to almost 400,000 from 35,000, according to the foundation.

The New York-based foundation, which oversees the Peggy Guggenheim collection, was founded by her uncle Solomon in 1937. The institution owns and controls the Venice museum and exhibitions, which the family acknowledges; what is in dispute is whether managers have respected her wishes as described in the letter.

“The foundation’s efforts have only honored, preserved and enhanced the memory and reputation of Peggy Guggenheim, “ said Betsy Ennis, a spokeswoman for the foundation in New York, noting that none of the works that she collected have been sold, and that they have been carefully conserved. She added that while the family objects to the nature of the garden parties, family members have attended some of them in the past.

But the family’s criticism of the Guggenheim Foundation’s corporate style and ambitions tends to resonate in Europe, where the Guggenheim proposes to create a new €130 million ($180 million) branch in Helsinki and opened a satellite in Bilbao, Spain, in 1997. Another branch is under construction in Abu Dhabi.

The lawsuit filed by the family seeks more financial information about the Venice collection, saying that the foundation has not issued an annual report about it since 2011 and does not disclose information about its revenues. On Monday, the foundation filed a response of nearly 100 pages to the suit in the Paris court, emphasizing that in a 1976 gift deed, no conditions were attached to Peggy Guggenheim’s donation.

But it also submitted a 1974 agreement spelling out her vision for the collection, including conditions outlined in the 1969 letter to her cousin Harry Guggenheim, then the president of the New York foundation. In the letter, she asked that “the collection be kept as a whole in the palazzo.” She was so detailed that she also directed that her earrings should be kept on display. The foundation argues, though, that the accord was not legally executed by lawyers.

It is not the first legal skirmish between the foundation and Peggy Guggenheim’s descendants. In 1992, they sued in a French court over museum displays in Venice that they said clashed with the collector’s vision. The two sides negotiated a settlement that led to the creation of a family committee to keep the descendants informed about museum activities.

Eleanor Goldhar, a spokeswoman for the Guggenheim Foundation, said the committee was “purely symbolic” and did not hold formal meetings, although descendants “received regular communications and updates from the director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.” Relatives contend that communications broke down, and that when some of the grandsons began suffering from ill health, they were ignored.

Santiago Rumney, 22, a son of Sandro who worked as an intern at the Venice museum, suggested that the latest clash began with a series of slights. After relatives were startled by the waterside sign bearing the Schulhofs’ names, he said, he was initially denied entry to an evening gathering in the house. Members of the Schulhof family attended that party to celebrate the donation, but the two sides did not mix, he added.

Hannelore Schulhof died in 2012, and her husband, Rudolph, died in 1999. Michael P. Schulhof, their son, who is now a member of the advisory board of the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation as well as a trustee of the New York-based foundation, declined to comment on the dispute.

The advisory body includes no Guggenheim descendants, something that Santiago Rumney said he wanted to change. “We want to recreate the advisory board with people who care about art, so it is not just for businessmen,“ he said.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "A Romp in Gossamer, 8 Tons’ Worth" @nytimes by HILARIE M. SHEETS

The ceiling has been reinforced. The guards have been retrained. Touching is allowed. Swinging like Tarzan is not.

After almost a decade of institutional effort and expense, an installation by Jesús Rafael Soto, a pioneer in the Kinetic art movement, is finally ready to open at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Now come more challenges.

Ethereal and pristine, “The Houston Penetrable,” as it is called, may not remain that way for long after it makes its public debut on Thursday, in soaring Cullinan Hall, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1958. Sixty visitors at a time will be allowed into its sea of 24,000 glistening clear plastic tubular strands hanging 28 feet from ceiling to floor and spanning the open mezzanine. Floating within is an orb of radiant yellow created by strands painted to compose a perfect ellipse. Viewers can activate the perceptual maze of vibrating light and color by playing among the tubes, as the work’s artist intended.

Born in Venezuela in 1923 and based after 1950 in Paris, where he exhibited alongside Alexander Calder and Jean Tinguely, Soto made over 25 Penetrables in his career; he died in 2005, at 81. A blend of geometric abstraction, Minimalist sculpture and playground, these simple grids of colorful PVC tubing were usually suspended from free-standing frames and often placed outside. Soto always considered them ephemeral, and only a handful have survived the inevitable wear and tear.

Mari Carmen Ramírez, the Houston museum’s curator of Latin American art, commissioned a Penetrable for its permanent collection when Soto visited the museum for its landmark survey of Latin American Modernism, “Inverted Utopias,” in 2004. Soto completed this site-specific design — his largest piece and the only Penetrable to have a painted image — just weeks before his death.

“I have always seen this as an end-of-life work, with this sublime ellipse in the middle as a kind of presence,” Ms. Ramírez said, noting that all the previous Penetrables had been monochromatic.

The museum has tried to stay true to the artist’s free spirit toward his Penetrables while carrying out its essential job of preserving artworks. This year, the piece will stay up through Labor Day.

“This is an important thing to do, because many of Soto’s Penetrables, just like other works of Kinetic artists, whether they be Latin American or French or American, have deteriorated,” said Edward J. Sullivan, an art history professor specializing in Latin American art at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. “There’s been a great deal of debate in conservation circles and in academic circles about how to restore these things and how to display them.”

Ms. Ramírez said, that because Soto’s artworks “really require the viewer to complete the piece,” the museum has “a responsibility to both the artist and audience to figure out how to show those works.”

“Contemporary artists have made it a point to erase the division between art and life and to make their work a participatory experience,” she added. “These works are leading museums to make commitments that would have been unheard-of a few decades ago.”

“The Houston Penetrable” is another in a long line of big-production experiential museum installations in recent years that have included the roof garden environments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Dan Graham (its current exhibition) and Doug and Mike Starn’s labyrinthine Big Bambú, in 2010; James Turrell’s immersive light piece filling the rotunda of the Guggenheim last summer; and Random International’s “Rain Room” at the Modern in 2013.

Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, compared the scope of the Soto undertaking to the efforts to mount Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass,” a mammoth boulder installed outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2012. (Mr. Tinterow declined to give the cost of the project.) Few museums would have dedicated its resources to an artist who, though acclaimed in Latin America and Europe, has little name recognition here. The Houston museum, however, has invested over $50 million in its Latin American program since 2001.

With the artist no longer present, the museum had to assume the primary role of producer. It reached out to Soto’s longtime collaborators in Paris, Paolo Carrozzino and Walter Pellevoisin, for technical expertise. Since no Penetrable had been painted before, they had to do extensive tests to determine what kind of pigment would adhere well to the plastic tubes. (Diluted silk-screen ink was the solution.) Several artisans worked for close to three years hand-painting and labeling the 18,000 elements composing the yellow orb. (Misplace a length of yellow, and it’s no longer a perfect ellipse.)

Mr. Carrozzino, an architect, designed a steel grid with 240 modules, each threaded with 100 strands, that affixes to the ceiling of Cullinan Hall. Other Penetrables were intended to last a few months. “When the museum explains they’re going to keep this for years and years, you need to think about the handling and organization just to mount, dismount, store and remount,” he said. “It’s almost sacred elements that will be part of the collection. It changes the attitude you have.”

Another complication was the weight. Cullinan Hall was designed by Mies so that art could be suspended from the ceiling. But tests showed the hanging points could not support the Penetrable, which weighs more than eight tons. The ceiling had to be reinforced with steel beams, which necessitated asbestos removal. The fund-raising and execution added several more years to the timeline.

Now that the transcendent playground is finally ready, no one knows if the ellipse will warp from the tubes stretching, or how stable the materials will be over time. Cleaning will not come until it’s removed in September for storage.

Ms. Ramírez envisions the Penetrable as a summer perennial. “We hope it will become a cult thing,” she said.

The museum has 400 spare tubes on hand, just in case.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Minimalist Retrospective Gets a Master’s Touch" @ wsj by RANDY KENNEDY

A Minimalist Master Returns

A Minimalist Master Returns

Carl Andre is one of America’s greatest living sculptors. He has been mostly absent from the American art scene for decades, but recently returned to oversee the installation of a new retrospective.

Credit By Oresti Tsonopoulos on Publish Date May 4, 2014

Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Carl Andre, a father of Minimalism and one of the greatest living American sculptors, decided to retire a few years ago, in his mid-70s. And for an exacting artist who usually insisted on arranging and installing most of his pieces himself, on site, retirement had a special ring of finality.

“People ask me what I do now,” Mr. Andre said recently. “And I tell them I do something most Americans find very, very hard to do: I do nothing.”

He was so determined to do nothing, in fact, that when the Dia Art Foundation began more than two years ago to plan a huge, long-overdue retrospective of his work — the show opens on Monday at the foundation’s outpost in Beacon, N.Y. — he told a reporter that he had informed the curators in no uncertain terms: “I can’t stop you from doing it, but don’t expect me to do anything to help.”

But over the last several weeks, to the foundation’s surprise — maybe even to his own — Mr. Andre has been making treks from his Manhattan apartment to Beacon to help oversee the installation, emerging from a kind of self-imposed seclusion that had begun long before his retirement; sightings of him in the art world, for more than two decades, were rare occurrences.

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A Minimalist Retrospective

A Minimalist Retrospective

Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

In part, this absence came about because of what happened early one morning in 1985, when Mr. Andre’s third wife, the promising Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, fell to her death from a bedroom window of their 34th-floor Greenwich Village apartment. She had had an argument with Mr. Andre, who later told the police he was not in the room when she fell.

He was acquitted of second-degree murder. But the death and highly publicized trial created a deep divide in the art world. It caused museums to shy away from him and his work for years and cast a shadow over a career that had been difficult to begin with, composed of work that, as much as any made in the 1960s and ’70s, occasioned the sometimes angry question “Why is that art?” (Asked in a 2011 interview about the effect of Mendieta’s death on him and his career, Mr. Andre said only: “It didn’t change my view of the world or of my work, but it changed me, as all tragedy does. But I have people who love me and believe in me.”)

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During an era when many artists were pulling sculpture off the plinth and making it part of the world in a new way, Mr. Andre went further, taking it all the way to the ground, in pieces made up of metal tiles arranged simply in grids, lines or triangles, meant not only to be looked at but also walked on and experienced with the body. And while other artists were finding beauty and new meaning in raw industrial materials, Mr. Andre used such materials barely altered: aluminum ingots piled in pyramids; firebricks in rectangular stacks; timbers in dimensions available from the sawmill, arranged in basic geometric shapes.

“He was interested in the matter of matter, in what was right underfoot,” the sculptor Richard Serra said. “For me, when I first started out, that was enormously important.” He added: “I hope that Carl’s work is given the recognition that it deserves. And I really hope that younger sculptors pay attention to it.”

While Mr. Andre’s work is in many prominent public collections, there has not been an American survey of his career in more than 30 years, and awareness of his pioneering role in an important postwar sculptural movement has diminished along with his public presence. More than most artists of his generation, his presence was also integral to his art: He worked without a studio, traveling the world to galleries or places that commissioned pieces and often finding the materials to make the works in whatever city he was in. The sculptures were decisively human scale; Mr. Andre usually chose components sized so that he could move them all himself.

“It’s always been easier for me to do it myself, rather than to explain to somebody what to do,” Mr. Andre said, sitting one recent morning, looking at a 1979 piece composed of 121 square pieces of Douglas fir. “But I must say, as I have grown older, my physical capacities have been very much reduced. So I used to be able to sling those timbers around like nothing at all. And I don’t want to try nowadays.”

Asked why he decided to become personally involved in the installation of the retrospective, he shrugged. “People keep un-retiring me,” he said, “and eventually I just give in.”

Mr. Andre — who was raised in Quincy, Mass., and once worked as a railroad brakeman to pay his bills — is slightly unsteady on his feet these days. But he is as quick-witted and dryly caustic as he was said to be in his youth, when he was known as a kind of philosopher-scourge of SoHo, a Marxist who chafed at the commercial art world and being “a kept artist of the imperial class.” At 78, he looks like a Melville-ian sea captain, with a thick white beard under his chin and blue bib overalls, a utilitarian uniform he has worn for years, varied only by the occasional addition of a loose blue sweater vest knitted for him by his fourth wife, the artist Melissa Kretschmer, who is usually at his side.

Yasmil Raymond, Dia’s curator, said the prospect of installing more than four decades’ worth of his work without his input would have been daunting. Before his arrival one recent weekday, she and others had arranged a 2005 work of copper plates and graphite blocks, intended to be placed along a floor with a look of randomness.

“He might just laugh when he sees this,” said Ms. Raymond, who organized the show with Philippe Vergne, Dia’s former director, and the curator Manuel Cirauqui. “I’m trying to make it look random, but I’m looking at it and I’m seeing too much order.” (Upon arriving, Mr. Andre didn’t laugh; he suggested some changes and sympathized with the curator: “Even listing random numbers is hard, you know? Patterns start appearing.”)

Surveying the vast space allotted to his work inside Dia:Beacon, a former box-printing factory, Mr. Andre seemed a little daunted himself. “My work isn’t so big,” he said, almost plaintively. “It’s not big enough.” But he allowed that the diffused daylight coming in through angled skylights was ideal for seeing his sculpture as he intended, with a degree of directness that might seem simple but is never easy to achieve. “People want to spotlight things, and I hate that,” he said. “I like even light, shadowless.”

“No melodrama,” he added, waggling his fingers in the air.

Later, as Mr. Andre stood outside the museum supervising the re-creation of a 1968 piece, “Joint,” which consists of nothing more than hay bales he uses to “draw” a straight line on the earth, joining woods to field, it became apparent just how difficult simplicity can be. The line kept stubbornly curving, as workers laid the bales up the incline into the woods. “How many people does it take to make a straight line?” Ms. Raymond whispered to Mr. Andre.