British painter Glenn Brown's current show in New York offers a rare stateside look at his latest work. © Glenn Brown/Gagosian Gallery/

Authors like Maurice Sendak try in their books to conjure the real terror that children often feel about the hidden creatures they imagine crouching in the pitch-black night.

Most adults later dismiss such fears. Not Glenn Brown.

The London-based artist revels in the uneasy beauty of the monstrous, a quality that infuses his latest Gagosian Gallery show, through June 21, in New York. Since the early 1990s, Mr. Brown has built an international reputation painting unearthly renditions of other artists' works—borrowing ideas from the floating, sci-fi cities of Chris Foss to the surreal landscapes of Salvador Dalí to the powdered-wig portraits of Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

Over time Mr. Brown's reimagined versions take on a deep-sea strangeness: His Fragonard girl might have mustard-colored skin and vacant, cataract eyes. His flowery still lifes rot.

Mr. Brown's latest works mainly depict overripe bouquets and portraits of zombie-eyed old men dressed in velvety fashions he has cribbed from the Baroque. The artist, age 48, sees memento mori in the combination. "Flowers are at their prettiest just before they die, and men are at their wealthiest just before they die," he said. "I think there's beauty in something that's not quite dead yet because that means it's still transforming."

Collectors must agree, because they have paid as much as $8.1 million at auction for his paintings. His colorful sculptures, in which he slathers lumpen blobs of paint atop kitschy copies of bronzes by artists like Auguste Rodin, have sold for up to $500,000 at auction as well. Mr. Brown's work has been exhibited in major museums like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

In a marketplace that covets mirrored surfaces and aspirational imagery, Mr. Brown's morbid oeuvre stands apart. So does his glacial working pace. Mr. Brown said he rarely finishes more than a half-dozen paintings a year; the 13 canvases in his Gagosian show took him more than three years to finish, he said. That is partly because a few are so big. "Necrophiliac Springtime," which depicts an array of wilting chrysanthemums letting off decaying vapors, stretches 10 feet wide.

Others, like "Cactus Land," appear straightforward at first glance but aren't. The saint he has painted is looking heavenward, but the figure has minuscule gaping mouths and eye sockets peppered throughout his beard, a Boschian hell hidden beneath the halo.

From a distance, Mr. Brown's curly brush strokes evoke the thickly painted impasto of abstract masters like Frank Auerbach or Willem de Kooning, but his surfaces are actually glassy smooth. Such dexterity was prized in Rembrandt's day but is rare now. Mr. Brown said he honed the technique while studying art in 1990s London, when his peers like Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn were making "shock art" using rotting meat and frozen blood. Painting was considered passe, so Mr. Brown decided he would need to master the form before he could use it to say anything new.

The artist also relied on his own upbringing for inspiration. In rural Norwich, England, where he grew up, Mr. Brown said his workaday parents didn't pay much attention to art—but they did ply him with gothic novels and folk tales about the Green Man who supposedly haunted the woodlands nearby. The artist's father was also fond of the Transcendentalist philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and encouraged his son to think about the unseen, spiritual forces that may be at work in the world.

Mr. Brown remains particularly fond of the Pre-Raphaelites and the wall-size history paintings at London's Tate museums. Initially, he tried to match their grandeur in his own canvases, but bog-like creatures and eerie eyeballs kept popping up. "It's likely my father's fault," he said, with a grin.

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

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "A Mogul Shrinks His Art Focus" @wsj by Kelly Crow

Few collectors buy art with the single-minded focus of Leslie Wexner, a Columbus, Ohio, retailing billionaire who has over the past four decades whittled his once-varied art holdings down to primarily works by a single artist: Pablo Picasso.

Mr. Wexner, the 76-year-old founder and chief executive of L Brands, formerly Limited Brands, earned a reputation in the 1970s and 1980s as one of the country's top collectors of Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Jean Dubuffet and Willem de Kooning; he still owns de Kooning's seminal "Pink Lady." But at one point, Mr. Wexner had an epiphany: He said he realized that no other 20th-century artist had influenced art history to the same degree as Picasso, and as a result, Mr. Wexner began "trading out" his larger roster and collecting Picasso in-depth.

The reasons behind Mr. Wexner's one-man metamorphosis will be explored in "Transfigurations: Modern Masters from the Wexner Family Collection," an exhibit set to open this fall, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of Columbus's Wexner Center for the Arts, named for Mr. Wexner's father, Harry. The show, which opens Sept. 21, will include examples by a handful of other artists remaining in Mr. Wexner's collection, including Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet and his wife Abigail's favorite artist, Susan Rothenberg--but the bulk of the show will focus, like them, on Picasso.

Recently, Mr. Wexner agreed to discuss the winnowing. Below, an edited transcript:

"When I was a kid, I could draw reasonably well, but my mother said she would only agree to let me study art if I would also take piano, so we stalemated. I never got art lessons.

Then in the early 1970s, Alfred Taubman, the landlord for some of my stores, and I got into an argument about leases, and he invited me to Detroit to debate it out in his office. Then he invited me to have lunch at his house, and that was the first time I saw art in a private home. It never occurred to me that people lived with significant art. Al suggested I start going to galleries and museums to see what appealed to me. That was daunting.

What I responded to first was the New York School, the abstract artists of the 1940s and 1950s. The Old Masters just seemed old, but the colors and expression of the New York School were interesting to me. So during the first 10 years, I built a reasonable collection of Rothko, Kline and artists of that ilk. I bought a large Henry Moore single figure and a cubist Georges Braque. I lived with different things, René Magritte, Joan Miró. I was experimenting, but the collection felt adrift.

Then one day in the early 1980s, I went to an art fair in Chicago and saw a Picasso drawing. It was a 1920s picture of a seated woman; it was just remarkably moving and very different than the New York School and the abstract things I'd been buying. That was transformational for me because it started me in a very different way. I started looking closer at Picasso's work. My feeling was, and still is, that when you look at Picasso, you realize that he was the true founder of modern and contemporary art. That idea intrigued me. I was also taken by how often he reinvented himself. Picasso was classically trained, but he used his imagination to shift from the representational styles of the Old Masters to something new and authentic. His bandwidth of creativity outmatched all artists who came after him. I made a conscious decision to follow him.

I still own some Giacometti, because he is a disciple of Picasso in a different form, and Jean Dubuffet as well. Once when I was in London in my 30s, I was walking down Bond Street, and there was a crowd around an art show. I went in, and the paintings were so good. The prices were $10,000 to $20,000, which was a hell of a lot of money to me back then, and a man told me they were already sold, so I didn't get one. The artist was Francis Bacon. I had no idea who he was at the time, but I knew he was extraordinary.

Picasso still wins, though. Without Picasso, there wouldn't have been a Bacon. I'm sure of that."

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

At ICFF and Beyond, Designs That Shine

Credit Evan Sung for The New York Times

After walking the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, the annual showcase of new design that ended its 26th run at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on Tuesday, I have just one word to say. Are you listening?

Horsehair.

That was the most surprising material I found integrated into a light fixture. Which is saying a lot.

As light emitting diodes have grown cooler in temperature, warmer in color, dimmable and programmable, they have been combined with a startling range of materials to create luminous sculptures otherwise known as lamps. Sometimes you can even read by them.

At this furniture fair, I thought I had seen it all: LEDs embedded in resin pigeons, in classical busts, in paper bags. Then I caught sight of the Horsehair sconce by the New York design studio Apparatus: twin hanks of hair suspended like pigtails from a brass arc, each ending in glowing frosted glass.

Gabriel Hendifar, Apparatus’s creative director, described the light as a “muscular thing, nonchalantly hanging from a hook.” Asked whether you could trim your fingernails by it, he said, “I conceived of it more as an art piece that hangs on the wall.”

It was only recently (in other words, pre-2008) that a global wave of “design art,” or small-batch expressive work with limited or nonexistent functionality, was the subject of debate. Some loved and collected it. Others called it pretentious.

But there were no apologies for the small-batch expressive lighting, some of it quite beautiful, that I saw this year at the Javits and beyond. Throughout the citywide group of exhibitions and other events known as NYCxDesign, designers argued for the importance of setting a mood in a room, or creating a showstopper. If the word “art” didn’t turn up in these conversations, “jewel” often did.

And more than ever, lighting looked like a young designer’s pursuit, particularly for a knot of professionals who have emerged out of Brooklyn and matured together as collaborators and friendly competitors.

Bec Brittain, for instance, was all over town. The 33-year-old Brooklyn lighting designer showed her angular fixtures at the Javits, while her toothy Seed chandelier was part of a Midtown exhibition by the Brooklyn lighting company Roll & Hill. Downtown, the SoHo design gallery Matter featured Ms. Brittain’s wonderfully weird collaborations with Hilda Hellstrom, a London designer who works in a mottled resin called Jesmonite.

At the same time, Jamie Gray, 46, Matter’s founder and creative director and now a newly hatched lighting designer, was introducing Discus at the furniture fair. This LED system has a language of illuminated circles meant to fit anywhere, floor to ceiling, in homes or offices.

Also at the Javits, Rich Brilliant Willing, a seven-year-old Brooklyn design studio, presented an LED collection that included Mori, a pendant lamp made from a wire skeleton spray-coated with a thin layer of material. At Sight Unseen Offsite, an invigorating new design show in SoHo, it showed a big scribble of a chandelier called Palindrome. And several weeks ago, the company, which has produced all manner of furnishings, announced that it would confine itself to lighting in the future.

“It’s where we think our best ideas are,” said Theo Richardson, 31, one of the three founders.

Jason Miller, 42, who started Roll and Hill four years ago after creating a ceramic lamp cast from deer antlers that became an emblem of Brooklyn design, believes it is only to be expected that young New York designers would find their way to lighting.

“It fits the business of an independent designer well,” he said, explaining that economies of scale prevent small design companies from producing and selling their work cheaply. They need to make premium goods that consumers won’t balk at, and lighting is looked at as a justifiable luxury.

“That’s the sculpture over the table,” Mr. Miller said. “That’s the jewelry.”

No one thinks of a couch as jewelry, he added. “It’s a practical thing.”

Which is not to say that other kinds of items at ICFF lacked pizazz. My husband, who accompanied me to the show one afternoon, pointed out the impressive number of stylish bathtubs, including a turquoise model from the Italian company Teuco with black, gray and gold stripes.

Decorative surfaces were the order of the day. MT Casa, a Japanese brand of “low-adhesive-strength” tape, set up a booth demonstrating how the exuberantly colored and patterned material can be applied to your walls.

And Trove, a wallpaper company never satisfied with being merely pretty, presented Allee, a fantasy image of a misty formal garden inspired by the 1961 film “Last Year at Marienbad.” (Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the film is about many things, but chiefly ambiguity.) The 12-foot-tall panorama was shown in the muted graphite of a pencil sketch being erased.

“I think things are starting to look a little softer,” said the New York interior designer Benjamin Noriega-Ortiz about his impressions of ICFF. “Design has become romantic.”

In his view, Brooklyn designers fitting together raw hunks of wood have long set the tone for the show, but this year a subtler handling of the material was in evidence.

“Even Ross Lovegrove did this beautiful chair in wood,” Mr. Noriega-Ortiz said, referring to the Anne chair commissioned from the Welsh designer for the 125th anniversary of Bernhardt. “That was romantic,” Mr. Noriega-Ortiz added. “And it was comfortable.”

Those descriptors also applied to a standup desk by the German company Stilvoll, with compartments neatly stashed under the top. Of course, you have to pay for these virtues: in this case, about $8,300 for the walnut version, and $15,000 for the rosewood.

But affordable design was on view as well. Sauder, an 85-year-old company near Toledo, Ohio, that pioneered ready-to-assemble furniture made of particleboard, presented a modish collection of pieces, none selling for more than $650. (Its Objeti table by Joseph Ribic, for example, with a black-and-white painted pattern and compartmentalized top, was about $300.)

ICFF takes the initial standing for “international” seriously. Once again, there were group displays from Britain, Spain, Austria and Norway, among other countries. But Wanted Design, a satellite exhibition in Chelsea, now in its fourth year, was also an inspiring venue for global talent. A small but eloquent division of Latin American pieces was an eye opener, with collections from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Puerto Rico and Chile. Bravo! from Santiago, for instance, showed hollowed-out river rocks of appealing purity.

Another highlight of Wanted was “Nasz,” Polish works curated, and in many cases designed, by Studio Rygalik in Warsaw. “The name means ‘ours,’ ” said Gosia Rygalik, who leads the company with her husband, Tomek. “We didn’t want ‘Poland’ in the title.”

Seeing the simple, pale furnishings, one would be challenged to identify their origins, with the possible exception of a folkloric-style carpet adorned with a picture of an urban scene.

Like the new Sight Unseen Offsite and the two-year-old Collective fair, which ended last week, Wanted Design showed the advantages of concentrating smartly selected, well-arranged design under a single roof. Not everything was of comparable quality, but there was enough excellence to reward making the trek over. More important were the connections and reverberations established among various designs — the way Poland, for instance, converses with Mexico in the language of objects.

Even ICFF, despite the terrible ambience native to convention centers, had many bright spots from its more than 600 exhibitors. O.K., maybe not the aluminum lamp in the shape of a tiny man playing a guitar.

But that did make me laugh.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Gleeful Museums Unpack a Bequest" @ nytimes by CAROL VOGEL

John Frederick Peto’s “Still Life with Cake, Lemon, Strawberries and Glass,” from 1890. Credit National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon

The final group of paintings, drawings and sculptures bequeathed to museums by Paul Mellon before his death in 1999 have at last begun to arrive. Hidden away for decades, many are rarities that had never been seen by curators.

The group includes more than 200 works — examples by such artists as van Gogh, Degas, Gauguin, Monet and Seurat — that were only recently removed from the walls of the Mellons’ many homes, where they were enjoyed by his widow, Rachel Lambert Mellon, who died in March at 103.

Mellon, the son of Andrew W. Mellon, one of the world’s richest financiers and the founder of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, supported the National Gallery, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond for decades and left each institution a substantial trove. Some works were delivered at his death and others just recently. The latest gifts held some of the biggest surprises, curators report. “I knew most of these works but only from black-and-white photographs,” said Kimberly A. Jones, associate curator of French paintings at the National Gallery, which recently received 62 of the works left to the museum that had remained at the homes. “This was the art the Mellons lived with and treasured.”

This final group from the Mellons’ vast art holdings reflects the personal tastes of a fiercely private couple who kept homes in New York, Cape Cod, Paris and Antigua as well as Oak Spring Farms, their 4,000-acre primary residence in Virginia horse country. Together, experts estimate, the works are worth close to $1 billion.

“When Paul Mellon was interested in something, he collected in depth,” said Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery. “We just received 12 oil sketches by Seurat, and when you see them together, they are truly amazing.” In 2016, he added, the museum plans a big exhibition of highlights from the Mellon gift timed to coincide with the institution’s 75th anniversary.

Mrs. Mellon, who was known as Bunny, would occasionally surprise an institution with a painting, drawing or sculpture as she started closing some of her homes in recent years. Last December, she unexpectedly gave the National Gallery a van Gogh, “Green Wheat Fields, Auvers” from 1890, considered one of his most important landscapes.

Now, it has another “historically important” van Gogh, Ms. Jones said: “Still Life of Oranges and Lemons With Blue Gloves” (1889) is among the 62 works that arrived this month. It is to go on view June 8 in the museum’s West Building with its other van Gogh paintings and one loan, his “The Postman Joseph Roulin” from the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands.

Ms. Jones said the Mellons’ taste was not strictly conventional. For example, when other collectors were scooping up classic Impressionists of the 1870s, she said, the couple went for earlier examples. Included in the current round of gifts is Monet’s “Still Life With Bottle, Carafe, Bread and Wine” from 1862-63, a subject not generally associated with him.

At the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, sporting art and French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works donated over the years by the Mellons are at the core of the collection, said Mitchell Merling, head of the European art department there. The museum has just received 25 more works, including a still life painted by Gauguin in Tahiti around 1892 and a Degas canvas, “At the Milliner’s,” from around 1882-85. “We already have nine waxes by Degas, and now we have this important painting, which is a profound statement of modern life in the 1880s,” Mr. Merling said. Over the decades, he said, the Mellons gave the museum examples of “every important artist, moment and style in French Impressionism.”

Yet their taste didn’t end there. The couple also had an eye for American painters like Winslow Homer, John Frederick Peto and Raphaelle Peale. And for everything British: Mellon created the Yale Center for British Art, which opened in 1974 and has the largest collection of British art to be found outside Britain. The center just received 90 additional works, including four by Alfred Munnings, known for his horse paintings. “We’ve had a steady stream of art coming to us over the last few years,” said Amy Meyers, the museum’s director. “What is particularly special about these last things is that they are coming off the walls of their houses.”

Star among the Mellon gifts to the Yale University Art Gallery is Degas’s “Four Jockeys,” a painting from around 1889 in which he depicts horses and jockeys in motion. Mr. Mellon had a lifelong passion for horses: He rode them, bred them and watched them win races from the Kentucky Derby to the Epsom Derby.

But as extensive as these gifts to museums have been, a great deal of the Mellon estate is still up for grabs, including jewelry, decorative arts and paintings by artists including Seurat, Braque, Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn.

Sotheby’s and Christie’s have been pitching hard for the business, perhaps hoping to hold sales as early as this fall, but officials close to the Mellon estate say no decision has been reached.

THE BOOK OF HOURS, WRIT LARGE

For the last four summers, the Morgan Library & Museum has installed contemporary sculptures in its soaring glass atrium, from large steel works by Mark di Suvero to hundreds of carved and painted Chinese characters spelling out the word “bird” by Xu Bing. Now, Spencer Finch, the Brooklyn artist whose commission for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum recently went on view, is creating a site-specific installation inspired by the Morgan’s renowned collection of medieval Books of Hours.

The hand-painted Books of Hours served as prayer books for different times of the day and periods of the year. Mr. Finch, whose work often incorporates light, color and memory, said he plans to apply films of color in groupings to the atrium’s windows, with each palette corresponding to a time of year. He is effectively creating a kind of calendar based on the movement of the sun. He will also hang clear panes in the center of the atrium to increase the reflectivity of his colored light.

Isabelle Dervaux, the Morgan’s curator of modern and contemporary drawings, said she invited Mr. Finch to the museum after viewing photographs of an installation he did at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. “When he saw the medieval Book of Hours, he got the idea of using 365 squares of color,” she said.

The installation, on view from June 20 through Jan. 11, 2015, will also be visible from the street.      

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Art School Creates a New Reality" @nytimes by RANDY KENNEDY

Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Kevin Yu in his studio at the New York Academy of Art in TriBeCa.

The New York Academy of Art, long an organizational mess, torn by internal dissent, has been slowly digging its reputation out of the ditch.

Andy Warhol, who knocked painting off its pedestal by introducing it to mass production, is not the first person who might spring to mind as a defender of art’s academic traditions, particularly fusty-sounding ones like cast drawing and anatomical study. But he was a classically trained draftsman. And in the late 1970s, he helped found what became the New York Academy of Art, a bastion of figurative training that was swimming decidedly against the current, even at a time when Neo-Expressionism had brought painting the human form back into vogue.

For most of its existence, the graduate school, which began life in an old church in the East Village and later moved to TriBeCa, did little to help — and a great deal to hurt — its contrarian cause. It was often an organizational mess, torn by internal dissent and embroiled in litigation with one of its founders. Two of its financial officers (one of whom was known for keeping a pet boa constrictor in his office) were accused of embezzlement over the years. And in 1994, an educational consultant hired to assess the school concluded that it lacked even the most basic features of an educational institution.

But over the last several years, the academy has been slowly and steadily digging its reputation out of the ditch. As it graduates its most recent class Thursday, it finds itself increasingly sought-after by young painters and sculptors, and in the middle of an orbit of successful representational artists, cutting across generations — Philip Pearlstein, Eric Fischl, John Currin, Jenny Saville, Dana Schutz, Aurel Schmidt — who serve as lecturers, critics and supporters. The school’s rise has coincided with and benefited from another upswing, over the last decade, in the perennial up-and-down fortunes of figurative painting. And a few of its recent graduates have quickly made their way into established galleries.

“When I tell someone what I do,” said David Kratz, a painter who took over as the school’s president in 2009 after having studied there, “I can always tell by the look on their face if they knew the school from years ago, or if they know the school now.”

The two-year program, which accepts about 50 new applicants a year and is supported by trustees who are concentrated in the worlds of fashion, jewelry and art, draws an increasingly international student body. And it has attracted many young artists who say they do not necessarily intend to work in a figurative style but want to know more about traditional technique and find themselves camped happily with an easel in front of plaster casts of classical and Renaissance sculpture that once belonged to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“When I was in college, I was going to galleries, and I wasn’t very happy about what I was seeing,” said Ali Banisadr, a graduate who is now represented by the Sperone Westwater Gallery on the Bowery, “because there was this huge push toward de-skilling in painting.”

“It was something I wasn’t interested in at all,” said Mr. Banisadr, who grew up in Iran and California, and now works in Brooklyn. “I wanted to learn how to paint to be able to convey clearly what I wanted to say and to know how I wanted to break away from those skills.”

Peter Drake, a painter who has served as the dean of academic affairs for the last four years after teaching for many years at Parsons The New School for Design, said that for much of the academy’s history “there was almost a hiding-your-head-in-the-sand quality to many of the graduates.”

“It had this real atelier feeling,” he said, adding that the prevailing mood was “almost as if working figuratively precluded looking at the 20th century.” But the school, which received accreditation last year from the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, has significantly increased its focus on critical theory. And it has worked to broaden students’ awareness of the contemporary art world — a strategy that has worked at least well enough, Mr. Drake said, to make the school a consistent feeder to the vast factorylike Chelsea studio of Jeff Koons, who employs legions of assistants to make his paintings. (“They don’t end up staying there for very long, because it’s kind of soul-numbing,” Mr. Drake added. “It’s very prescribed.”)

On a recent day at the school, housed in a hulking five-story industrial building packed with more than 90 small painting and sculpture studios, students were at work on pieces that would soon be subject to professional critiques, but that would be tested beforehand in an even more daunting real-world way. During its bad years, the school was known by many in the art world primarily as a place that gave great parties, and its annual TriBeCa Ball remains a celebrity magnet. But that ball, held in April, has also become a kind of hunting ground for major collectors and dealers, so students were trying not only to finish significant pieces but also to prepare themselves to be on display.

Camila Rocha, 31, a Brazilian-born first-year student who saved money to attend the school by working as a tattoo artist, was putting the final touches on a moody portrait of a young man with his head against a wall. Elizabeth Glaessner, 30, a postgraduate fellow who will have a solo exhibition at the P.P.O.W. gallery in July, was sitting in front of a wall in her cubicle studio filled with recent small portraits on plexiglass that looked both domestic and post-apocalyptic. “I’ve learned not to be afraid of paint here,” she said. “I’ve grown to love the feeling of putting it down and being completely aggressive with it.”

Jacob Hayes, 27, a second-year student who grew up in a working-class family in rural Kansas, had just finished a series of small, obsessively repetitive portraits of the same haggard-looking man — his uncle — who did not pose willingly; the portraits were all based on mug shots taken over the years as he cycled in and out of the Kansas penal system. “I actually don’t know where he is right now,” Mr. Hayes said, “which probably means he’s in jail again.”

Of his own path to becoming a painter, Mr. Hayes said, it was hardly in the cards when he was younger; he is still occasionally shocked to find himself working in New York City. “I had to sell my truck and all the rest of my stuff just to get here,” he said.

A few weeks later, during the TriBeCa Ball, Mr. Hayes, who had cleaned up his studio and was wearing a freshly pressed shirt, had added a new series to his studio walls: mug-shot-based portraits of a cousin. “He’s had a much rougher go of it than my uncle,” he said. Alongside the new work, he had arranged a shelf with a few nice tumblers and a bottle of Kansas-distilled whiskey, which he offered to the well-heeled partygoers who crowded around him.

“You don’t really know who’s here to see art or just to be seen,” he said. “But I’m ready for anybody.”

Bass Museum in Miami Beach celebrating 50th anniversary

From Egypt to Renaissance Europe to contemporary works, the county’s oldest municipal museum showcases its past as it forges a cutting-edge future.

Like the city’s skyline, Miami’s cultural landscape 50 years ago would be almost unrecognizable today.

In 1964, virtually none of the art institutions we are now familiar with existed, until the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach opened that year, becoming the first city exhibition space in the county. (The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami was the first art museum in South Florida, opened in the 1950s, but it is not a municipal institution.)

Now in its golden jubilee year, the Bass has come a long way since its birth — and like the metropolis itself, sometimes with fits and starts.

During the 1960s and ’70s, the museum showed mainly the 500-piece collection donated to the city of Miami Beach by John and Johanna Bass, which focused on Renaissance and Baroque works, in the old library building off Collins Avenue.

Fast forward to 2014, when the Bass opened its year with a symphony in a newly refurbished park that now holds significant outdoor public sculptures, outside a building remodeled by Arata Isozaki. Inside, the work of internationally acclaimed Polish multimedia artist Piotr Uklanski took over the second floor; on the first floor a Romanian performance troupe had recently reenacted some pieces from museum’s initial Renaissance painting collection, giving the centuries-old masterpieces a contemporary twist. Clearly, the Bass had come of age and stature.

There have been growing pains, with the museum sometimes closing and renovations taking longer than expected, but today it is one of Miami’s major cultural landmarks.

And the changes may continue in unexpected directions.

The talk of the art town has been the potential merger of the Bass and North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art, which would bring MOCA’s more-mature contemporary art collection to the Beach, making the Bass a heftier institution.

But the merger has become mired in technical and legal difficulties since MOCA announced its intentions and has faced stiff resistance from North Miami, which has housed the public, nonprofit museum since its inception. For now, the merger is on hold.

When John Bass ran the nascent museum from 1964 to 1978, it was a small, regional space, attracting a local crowd who came to see the mainly Renaissance and Baroque painting and tapestry. After Bass died in 1978, the authenticity of some of the works was called into question, and the city closed the museum. When a slightly refurbished building reopened, the Friends of the Bass membership group was incorporated, and a professional director, art historian Diane Camber, was hired in 1980.

During Camber’s tenure, the museum started to focus on traveling exhibits and expanded its artistic repertoire.

“From the beginning, I was determined to professionalize the institution,” the Miami Beach native recalls, by getting the museum accredited and developing the collection to include design and architectural aspects. Her first big splash came from the “Precious Legacy” exhibit of European Judaica collected by the Nazis from a museum in Prague. “It illustrated that we could be an important cultural destination, and highlighted the need for an expanded facility,” she says.

The collection grew to about 3,000 pieces, the Isozaki-redesigned building opened in 2001, and the museum was now capable of mounting large shows. But structural problems plagued the facility, and it had to close several times. The struggle for funding was unending. “There are battle scars, but it was all worth it,” says Camber, who retired in 2007 and was named director emerita.

When Silvia Karman Cubiña took the reins in 2008, the Bass was ready for its next big leap. The recession was well under way, but Cubiña expanded the museum’s scope, bringing in important contemporary exhibits, furthering the emphasis on design and fashion to reflect the nature of Miami Beach itself, and literally “busting it outdoors,” she says.

For years the park that extends from the museum’s front door to Collins Avenue had sat derelict, while visitors entered at the rear. Art Public opened up four years ago during Art Basel, with sculptures from international artists populating the newly renovated park during the December extravaganza. The popular sculptural exhibit now runs for four months each year.

From an anemic number of members on its board of directors, the Bass now has 23 under president George Lindemann, who has been instrumental in expanding the educational programming. Support from the Knight Foundation has brought funding for the museum to the next level; and last year the city approved a $7.5 million grant for further expansion, which will begin in 2015. Out will go the huge ramp that leads from the first floor to the second and has been considered a waste of space, and in will come more room for art and additional educational programs.

The museum will have to close again while the work is done, but Cubiña says it will be worth it because the museum will gain almost half again as much programmable space as it now has. “That’s the biggest 50th anniversary present of all,” she says.

Surrounded by the phenomenal works of Ghana-born artist El Anatsui, whose metal bottle-cap tapestries make up the current exhibit at the Bass, Cubiña says part of her mission is to push the Bass to be “part of the international dialogue” on the art stage. “I want to make sure we have a finger on the pulse of what is going on globally.”

To that end, she has brought in some groundbreaking exhibits, including two stunning video installations: Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves, and another video thriller, Eve Sussman’s Rape of the Sabine Women, both presented during Art Basel Miami.

Other exhibits with acclaimed contemporary international artists have tied the Bass to its history by playing off the Masters’ works in the collection, such as the six projects interpreting classical themes, combined in The Endless Renaissance. Or the solo outing by an early member of the Young British Art movement, Matt Collishaw, whose still-lifes looked like tweaked Baroque reincarnations, and who incorporated a classic altar from the Bass collection into his show.

In 2010, the museum created a room to permanently show the works of Egyptian art that had been in the Bass collection but not prominently displayed before. Featuring a sarcophagus and ancient mummy, 13 objects of antiquity are now on view daily in the dimly lit downstairs enclave.

The museum also instituted the temporary contemporary program, which in conjunction with Miami Beach exhibits temporary outdoor installations, many by local artists. Outside the museum right now are the whimsical and hefty sculpture Self Portrait as the Barefoot Mailman by local artist Christy Gast, whose mailman’s head is buried in the ground; and the pinewood “decks” by Emmett Moore that visitors to the Bass park are encouraged to lounge on.

And Cubiña is surrounded by more art professionals than during her early days with the Bass. One is the new curator of exhibitions, Jose Carlos Diaz, who has put together the official 50th anniversary exhibit, set to open Aug. 8, titled Gold, appropriately. This will not only include artists who work with gold but those who work with the ages-old associations of the metal, power and wealth, in contemporary forms such as video, installation and photography as well as painting and sculpture.

The Bass will continue to explore the relationship between visual arts and fashion, such as last year’s extensive From Picasso to Koons, which included 135 artists’ sculptural jewelry; and this year’s Vanitas, avant-garde, ready-to-wear and couture curated by the director of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.

In other words, says Cubiña, in the museum’s 50th year she wants to continue to “open up the Bass” to a variety of art forms, locations (indoors and outdoors), international trends and curatorial visions, to be “a conduit to what’s happening in the world.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/05/15/4119773/bass-museum-in-miami-beach-celebrating.html#storylink=cpy

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Rearranging Warhol’s Legacy" @nytimes by BLAKE GOPNIK

The front entrance to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Credit Abby Warhola        

PITTSBURGH — Andy Warhol was, chronologically and by his own description, a nose picker, a pimp and a water guzzler. He was also (or therefore) one of the most various, complex and impressive talents the art world has produced. All those claims, however unlikely, can be confirmed by a visit to the Andy Warhol Museum here in his hometown. In honor of its 20th anniversary, the museum has been rethought from top to bottom, and the results are now being revealed to the public. There may not be another museum that digs as deep into a single artist, and gets as much out of the excavation.

“We want people to know that there’s much more to Andy Warhol than Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyns,” said Eric Shiner, who took over as director in 2011. He started his career as an intern at the museum in 1994, and sitting in his office one day in April — the same space where he once sorted books — he said of Warhol, “He changed just about everything.”

Curators set out to show how life and art were perhaps more closely entwined for Warhol than for any other artist.

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Top, the new lobby is lined in silver foil to echo Warhol’s 1964 Factory. Below, the same space before it was remodeled. Credit Top, Abby Warhola; Bottom, The Andy Warhol Museum

The museum used to mix works from various periods in an attractive scattershot, but now all seven of its floors have been reconceived as an orderly survey of just about everything that Warhol got up to, from the 1950s as a leading commercial artist to his work as an impresario with the Velvet Underground in the later ’60s to his landmark films — and the first video art — right through to his place deep within MTV culture in the 1980s. Where other artists of his generation, such as Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, used pop culture to feed their high art, Warhol plunged right in and became part of that culture.

“It really is a new Warhol; it’s much more about him,” Mr. Shiner said, noting especially the trove of archival documents and early art, much of it on loan from local relatives.

Forget Elizabeth Taylor and Brillo boxes and even Edie Sedgwick. To understand the true greatness of Andy Warhol (1928-87), we may want to start with two early images by and of him. The rethought galleries now feature a little-known student painting from 1948 in which Warhol uses the latest in expressionist brushwork to portray himself, nude, with a finger stuck up his nose, pushing past the limits of good taste and fine art even while still in college. Near that artwork hangs a rare family snapshot that includes a baby-bonneted Andy, maybe 2 years old, also with his finger in his nose. Could there be any other artist whose art so closely tracks his life?

We can make do knowing little about Giotto or Vermeer; we can manage without the details of Monet’s life. But Warhol, by being who he was, as much as by making what he made, put himself “at the very heart of what we know as art in the 20th century,” Mr. Shiner said. That art had often tried to bridge the gap between art and life; when Warhol came along, he backfilled the chasm. Figures such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons have waltzed across after him.

Last year, a record 120,000 people visited the museum, helping boost its revenue. The budget for the anniversary rehang was $500,000 — less than some museums spend on one show. A new lobby is lined in silver foil to echo Warhol’s 1964 Factory on East 47th Street in Manhattan, and comes complete with a bar meant to get visitors hanging out and to make the important art-historical point that Warhol was as notable as a catalyst for new ways to hang out as he was a maker of precious objects.

The museum is asking a lot, however, if it wants us to imagine that what goes on in its lobby could have much of a link to Warhol’s wild times. The fun that went on in his studio was so serious, it could almost be fatal.

Later, in America’s disco days, Warhol’s mere presence at Studio 54, as much as the portraits he did of his pals there, were what made him matter to our culture, as revealed in a show about Warhol and his designer friend Halston now filling special-exhibition spaces on the new second floor. (Future exhibitions there will dwell on how contemporary artists were influenced by or even reacted against Warhol.)

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Andy Warhol in Flushing, Queens, amid black-eyed Susans near the 1964 World’s Fair, with a freshly completed Flowers painting in the background. Credit William John Kennedy/KIWI Arts Group

The idea of a “post-object” Warhol — we might now think of him as the godfather of such “relational” artists as Rirkrit Tiravanija — was a big part of how he came across in his own day. The rehang includes a 1969 issue of “Esquire” in which Warhol explains that his next work will be to rent out his followers to all comers, turning himself into a kind of art-world pimp.

Recent scholarship has also latched onto this idea of Warhol as performer. “There’s this conception of Andy Warhol’s most important artwork as his construction of the self, as it changed over the years,” said Nicholas Chambers, curator of art at the museum. Many of the new galleries where he’s hanging Warhol’s well-known canvases also include photos that show Warhol constructing a forever-new “self” that ranged from tie-wearing upstart to leather-clad undergrounder to preppy social climber and disco king.

The one Warhol persona that is slighted in the new installation is his presence as one of the first notably gay artists to reach mass attention. The museum is open about Warhol’s homosexuality, displaying his “Studies for a Boy Book,” a series of pre-Pop drawings from the 1950s, and mentioning boyfriends in wall text. But it never digs into how important he was for the history of gay culture, and how vital his gayness was for his art.

Yet there’s a risk that too much attention paid to who Warhol was could distract from the art he made, according to Christopher Bedford, the director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, who recently presented a show on Warhol’s use of photography. Warhol’s ideas about art may have expanded to include aspects of his life, but they are still ideas about art; Mr. Bedford said he felt that the museum has to be careful not to present Warhol as just another “fascinating social figure.”

You can sense the museum trying to strike this delicate balance in its rehang. If anything, however, recent stratospheric auction prices have focused public attention away from Warhol the man and onto his handmade, salable “masterpieces”: The catalog for Christie’s latest contemporary art auction in New York featured a “White Marilyn” from 1962 on its cover, as oligarch bait.

Mr. Shiner, the museum’s director, doesn’t deny the instant appeal of the paintings. Touring through the collection, he stopped to admire an immense 1963 silk-screened canvas of Elvis Presley called “Elvis 11 Times,” now given its own wall. Warhol wrote that he liked the silk-screen technique for its “assembly-line” effect, “the way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple — quick and chancey.”

Mr. Shiner emphasized that it’s easier to recognize the radical flair of Warhol’s classic pieces when they are seen near his more challenging work in moving pictures, as they are in the new installation. “Film is equal in his oeuvre to the paintings,” Mr. Shiner said.

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This vintage glass vase, etched in red in the 1920s or ’30s, is one of many objects from Andy Warhol’s personal collection on view for the first time. Credit The Andy Warhol Museum                    

Next year will mark five decades since Warhol became the first artist to make video art. (His landmark piece, “Outer and Inner Space,” featured Edie Sedgwick on film, keeping company with a second image of herself on video, and it beat Nam June Paik’s first video work by several weeks.) One of the rehang’s highlights is a fourth-floor media gallery where, for the first time, the public is offered on-demand, uncut access to about 130 of Warhol’s films, videos and TV programs, mostly unfindable until now. “Movies, movies and more movies,” Warhol later recalled. “We were shooting so many, we never even bothered to give titles to a lot of them".

Greg Pierce, a curator of film and video at the museum, is presenting one piece barely known even to experts: Warhol’s 1971 video called “Water.” It was made for an exhibition organized by Yoko Ono, and offers a 33-minute close-up on the tank of the water cooler in Warhol’s Union Square studio, as he and his irregulars stand around nattering and drinking from it. (The audio is punctuated with the “glug-glug” of the cooler being used). The video takes off from Warhol’s earlier “durational” films — works that had him pointing a static movie camera at such things as the Empire State Building — and blends them with his budding 1970s “performance” as the world’s cattiest gossip and partygoer.

John W. Smith, now the director of the art museum at the Rhode Island School of Design, was at the Warhol museum from 1994 to 2006 as an archivist and then assistant director. He said one of the most provocative moves for any one-artist museum would be to acknowledge the weak works as a vital part of the story. He added, “I know the storerooms at the Warhol Museum, and there’s a lot of work that the market has tried to tell us is important but frankly, I doubt it.” He cited Warhol’s “Toy” paintings, from the 1980s, as pieces that might be displayed as examples of second-rate work.

The new installation does not show much sign of trumpeting any works as also-rans.

But Mr. Smith also notes the opposite happening, with works once considered minor now being universally recognized as great. He mentions the Warhol archives as such a case. Down on the museum’s third floor, those archives are going on display behind glass walls. Warhol had the habit of filling cardboard boxes with all the mail, mementos and leftovers from his daily life, including such things as wedding cake, a banana-shaped harmonica and naughty pictures. He called the results “Time Capsules,” and all 610 of them are now visible; at any given time, the contents of one will be spread out in vitrines.

The museum has unpacked Capsule No. 109, whose hundreds of artifacts include a poster printed from a bootleg photo of a naked Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (in good humor, she inscribed it “For Andy — with enduring affection — Jackie, Montauk”) and an autographed (but never opened) copy of Lou Reed’s “Coney Island Baby.” (In an obscure interview conducted in the studio in 1985, apparently with Warhol looking on, one assistant talked about the capsules: “He wants to sell them as a unit. I tried to make them really good. Each one has a T-shirt, a good art book, Godiva chocolates — things like that.”)

Matt Wrbican, chief archivist and a walking hard-drive of Warholian facts, said there are over 500,000 items in his care, with many only now being put on display. Even the couple of hours I spent in the archives last year instantly delivered fresh information — the fact, for instance, that after being shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968, Warhol, either down at the heels or simply cheap, had hoped to trade paintings for his doctors’ services. At today’s auction prices, that would have made it the most profitable medicine ever practiced.

“He always kept everything,” recalled the illustrator James Warhola, a nephew who stayed with Warhol for several weeks in the 1970s and witnessed his manic collecting. “His whole life’s work was made to order for a museum.”

George Lindemann Journal - "A Hong Kong Art Fair's Emerging Identity" @wsj by Jason Chow

Katsuro Funakoshi's Dancing as a pupa (Homage to a dancer), 2001 Katsuro Funakoshi/Beck & Eggeling

Art Basel made a splashy entrance in Hong Kong last year with its first fair in the city. Now, the Hong Kong edition of the global art franchise that's synonymous with glitzy parties and the global jet-set crowd is searching for an identity.

Art Basel Hong Kong, which kicks off May 15, is the third entry to the Art Basel calendar after Basel, Switzerland, and Miami Beach. The Swiss and U.S. shows are fixtures on the wealthy collector's calendar: The Basel fair, which takes place in early June, has become a hub for established European collectors wanting to snag a Hirst or Picasso; Miami Beach, scheduled in December, not only attracts deep-pocketed buyers but also serves as a warm escape for celebrity party-goers— Kim Kardashian, Kanye West and Demi Moore were just a few of those who attended last year.

But the Hong Kong fair hasn't yet attracted the A-list like Miami Beach, and the type of rich collectors who gather in Switzerland have yet to amass for a competitive buying spree in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong fair's calling card has yet to be determined.

Timing is part of its identity crisis. The four-day event falls in the middle of a very crowded art calendar, just a week after the Frieze Art Fair in New York and a month before the Art Basel show in Switzerland. Fair organizers, facing complaints from Western galleries and collectors that the May time slot makes it difficult for them to attend the Hong Kong event, have already responded by shifting the date of next year's show to March.

                                  

Bow Human, 2009 Pamela Rosenkranz/Karma International

Organizers also say they are trying best for the fair to reflect geography: More than half of the 245 galleries participating at Art Basel Hong Kong are from Asia. Most of the expected 65,000 attendees are from within the region, and many are young and recently minted wealthy collectors from second- and third-tier cities in China, Indonesia and other rising economies.

"Each fair develops its own identity," said Magnus Renfrew, director of the Hong Kong fair. "This fair represents an emerging market, not a mature one. They're learning very fast here, but it's still learning."

As a result, the buying behavior differs in Asia. Compared with the other Art Basel fairs, where established collectors line up at the entrance to be first into the show and so secure a desired Old Master painting, the buying is less frenzied in Hong Kong.

"The pace of the activity here is much more measured," said Nick Simunovic, Hong Kong director of Gagosian Gallery. "In Miami or Basel, you do so much more on the first day. Here, it's not a feast or famine approach where 90% of the business is done on the first day."

Mr. Simunovic said collectors' tastes are global—what clients are seeking to buy in Hong Kong is similar to that sought by buyers in New York. Asian collectors who have already bought works of Asia's top contemporary and modern artists in recent years are now looking for earlier works of those same artists, hoping to create a deeper understanding of their oeuvre, Mr. Renfrew said.

"The art fair ends up being a place to learn about art in the absence of a major institution and gallery," he said.

Write to Jason Chow at jason.chow@wsj.

George Lindemann Journal - "Exhibition in New York Gives New Perspective on Statue of Liberty" @wsj by  Kirthana Ramisetti

A portion of 'Danh Vo: We the People' is seen in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal

Viewed from most every vantage point, the Statue of Liberty is a large, dominant figure bearing a glowing torch, a symbol of American democracy.

But the Public Art Fund's newest exhibit, " Danh Vo : We the People," gives viewers a more intimate and abstract look at the statue.

"We the People" is a life-size replica of the Statue of Liberty broken into 250 components, such as Lady Liberty's ear, a curl of her hair and the folds of her drapery. The conceptual artist Danh Vo created the pieces over three years, using the same copper material and metalwork technique that French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi used to construct the monument nearly 140 years ago.

'Danh Vo: We the People' on display at City Hall Park in New York on May 13. Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal

The Public Art Fund is giving his work a special presentation that spans two boroughs. Beginning Saturday, 53 pieces from the collection will be shown at City Hall Park and Brooklyn Bridge Park, and since the two outdoor spaces are linked by the Brooklyn Bridge, visitors can cross from one park to another while taking in views of the actual Statue of Liberty.

Individual components, such as the ear, will be on display in City Hall Park, while Brooklyn Bridge Park will feature the draped sleeve of the statue's right arm. The arm, made of 13 pieces, will be assembled into three forms.

Mr. Vo said that his inspiration for "We the People" was learning an interesting fact about the statue that belied its immense size.

"When I found that the Statue of Liberty was only the thickness of two pennies, I thought that was very intriguing," he said. "Because you always think of this as, you know, a colossal thing, but in reality two millimeters is not that much."

Even before its formal opening, the exhibit is attracting attention. A small piece of the artwork, a chain-link design from the statue's foot, was stolen from City Hall Park some time between Wednesday night and Thursday morning, a law-enforcement official said. An investigation is under way.

The sculpting method involved laying thin copper sheets over a cast of the statue, which the artist hired a workshop in Shanghai to make. The pieces were then hammered into shape.

As for why he chose to re-create the statue in such a deconstructed way, Mr. Vo said he "wanted to do something that everyone had a relationship to, and make it a bit unfamiliar. It's kind of like creating a Frankenstein that gets its own life."

'Danh Vo: We the People' on display at City Hall Park on May 13. Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal

Andira Hickey, the Public Art Fund's associate curator, said the nonprofit group is excited to be presenting Mr. Vo's unique perspective.

"When you're looking at a massive piece of copper that you have a very intimate relationship [with] right in front of you," she said, "and see it completely transformed into a full figure that you can recognize in the distance, it's such an evocative metaphor for the multitude of perspectives you can have of an icon like that."

Some visitors, though, might find it hard to recognize individual pieces as parts of the Statue of Liberty they know. And some of the more recognizable parts of the statue are in private collections.

Mr. Vo said that in creating "We the People," it was important to him that, unlike the heavy symbolism associated with the Statue of Liberty, his work be open to interpretation.

"When Bartholdi created the Statue of Liberty...he created an image and a political agenda," he said. "What I'm doing with it is a shift of scale and shift of meaning."

He added that his work "is more a project that should evoke discussion in the place that it is exhibited. And we'll have to wait to see what that will be."

"Danh Vo: We the People" will be on view through Dec. 5 at City Hall Park and Brooklyn Bridge Park's Pier 3 Greenway Terrace.

—Pervaiz Shallwani contributed to this article.

George Lindemann Journal "Melva Bucksbaum on What Artists She's Collecting Now" @wsj by Kelly Crow

Melva Bucksbaum Keith Bedford for The Wall Street Journal

Growing up in Washington, D.C., in the early 1940s, Connecticut collector Melva Bucksbaum used to leave her Russian immigrant parents' grocery store and slip a nickel in the downtown-bound bus, so she could spend hours ambling through the National Gallery. "I wanted to be an artist," she said.

By the time she was married and studying art in Des Moines, Iowa, Ms. Bucksbaum said she realized that her peers were better than she. She put away her palette and started buying art instead. Since then, she has collected everything from Peter Paul Rubens to the Impressionists to James Rosenquist. Today, she and her second husband, former commodities trader Raymond J. Learsy, are best known for collecting contemporary art.

As vice chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Ms. Bucksbaum has also gained a reputation for the Bucksbaum Award, a $100,000 prize given every other year to one artist included in the Whitney Biennial. The latest winner is Zoe Leonard. The New York artist's biennial work, "945 Madison Avenue," transformed a 1,200-square-foot room of the museum into an oversize camera obscura with help from a lens placed in the space's lone window. The result is a real-time wonder-scape, an upside-down view of the buildings and people across the street projected onto the room's otherwise empty walls.

Enlarge Image Close

'945 Madison Avenue' by Bucksbaum Award winner Zoe Leonard Zoe Leonard/Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Murray Guy, NY/Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan.

Ms. Leonard, in an interview Wednesday, said the "life-changer" prize will let her explore a new body of work.

Ms. Bucksbaum said she has no say in picking prizewinners—alums include Mark Bradford and Omer Fast—but she's well known for championing female artists. With the Whitney Biennial set to close May 25, she agreed to discuss the latest additions to her collection.

Below, an edited transcript:

"Ray and I married in 2001, and it took me a year to get into his mind-set and appreciate emerging and contemporary art. When you're collecting younger artists, you have to do a lot of footwork by going to galleries and museums. Sometimes I like things that are maybe a little bit too cute and fanciful, but I'm learning to move away from pretty. We were just in São Paulo, and I bought two things, and one of them probably doesn't fit into our collection, but I'll keep it around. You make mistakes, you learn. You just keep going.

I'll never forget walking through the Whitney Biennial in 2008 and seeing Mika Rottenberg's 'Cheese.' It's sensational. 'Cheese' is based on the Sutherland sisters, this family involved with the Barnum & Bailey Circus, and they all had very long hair. Mika built this wooden shack and embedded videos all over it that show women washing their long hair, drying their hair and living in a rural area with goats and chickens. Here in Connecticut, we're in nature—it makes me want to keep goats in the yard. Or Lalanne sheep ( a favorite subject of sculptor François-Xavier Lalanne).

One of the great pieces we got in the last two years is 'The Hunting Party' by Rosa Loy and Neo Rauch —she did one-half of the painting and he did the other, and it's just absolutely wonderful. They're both from Leipzig, Germany, and they both paint haunting and spooky scenes of people or industrial buildings. You sense something strange is going on in their paintings, but you can't tell immediately. You have to study them for a long time. In ours, you see these rabbits with big, beautiful eyes, and it makes you wonder what those rabbits are thinking.

We're always adding pieces by Laurie Simmons to the collection, lately from her 'Love Dolls' series. They're magical. I started buying her photos 14 years ago, and we have the whole set from her 'The Instant Decorator' series. They look like 1950s and '60s magazine spreads—you think they're from Better Homes & Gardens—only she's superimposed other people in them. Her "Love Dolls" series explores this phenomenon where men buy life-size dolls that they treat like girlfriends. They're quite expensive, and you can order them by saying what hip size and waist size you want, but when you look at Laurie's photographs, you don't think they're even dolls. They look real."