"Hong Kong Welcomes the Art World" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

The George Lindemann Journal

Jessica Hromas/Getty Images

“Sacrilege (2012),” a blowup version of Stonehenge by the English artist Jeremy Deller, is part of the “Inflation!” exhibition at Mobile M+ in Hong Kong.

 By JOYCE LAU

 

HONG KONG — There were no art fairs to speak of in this metropolis before 2008. But this year, Hong Kong, once derided as a cultural desert, nabbed a prize coveted by cities across the region — serving as Art Basel’s only Asian outpost.

The inaugural Art Basel Hong Kong, which opens to the public Thursday, has drawn planeloads of collectors and gallery bigwigs from the West, lured here in part by the growing, glittery market. It’s billed as a mutually beneficial arrangement: Art Basel capitalizes on the moneyed collectors heading to Hong Kong, while giving international credibility and exposure to local artists, galleries and the city itself.       

But as Hong Kong welcomes its new guest for four days of openings, parties and lunches, there are also some backstage jitters about finally being on the world stage, as well as trepidation that an event that started as ART HK will lose its distinctively Asian flavor. Art Basel has taken over ART HK, which began as a local fair in 2008 with about 100 galleries and quickly doubled in size, reflecting the city’s growing art market. (Hong Kong is planning to pour billions of dollars into developing a cultural district in West Kowloon.)

“You can feel the difference in the air — there’s a lot of anticipation,” said Nicole Schoeni, a local gallery owner. “Art Basel is a very well-established professional art fair with immense knowledge. We can benefit and learn from it.”

But, she added, “Who knows how it will go this week?”

To try to ease concerns, Art Basel retained Magnus Renfrew, Art HK’s director since its inception, and he has taken pains to maintain its roughly 50-50 division of Western and Asian participating galleries. Art Basel, in a nod to the local culture, also abandoned its original plan to hold the event in February, when it would have run up against Lunar New Year.

Still, Art Basel’s influence is easy to spot.

The week started with the first art gala to be held at the Asia Society Hong Kong headquarters, which opened last year. On Monday night, as a tropical storm lashed the $50 million complex, a renovated 19th-century British Army compound, about 200 invitees rubbed shoulders with major dealers and artists like Takashi Murakami. At one table, exquisitely bejeweled Korean women plotted which dealers to meet, while lamenting how hard it was now to hit both Frieze New York, which ended last week, and this newly ascendant fair (which was at least closer to home).

The fair has an iPhone app and a catalog “like a telephone directory,” Mr. Renfrew said. “The quality is really a step up. The architecture is much improved. We have a huge V.I.P. lounge with views of the harbor. The expectations of the visitors are higher, and there is increased interest from collectors, both from the U.S. and around Asia.”

Local galleries planned their best shows, installations and openings for this week. But of the fair’s 245 galleries — chosen from more than 600 applicants — only 26 have a permanent presence in Hong Kong, and many of those are relatively recent imports like White Cube, Gagosian, Ben Brown and Lehmann Maupin.

Even a few local boosters will admit that the paucity of Hong Kong galleries is largely a reflection of the weakness of the local art scene. In past ART HK events, pride of place went to Western galleries, mostly from London, showing celebrity artists like Damien Hirst.

“They made an effort to include Asian galleries, but, of course, they have to choose the right galleries,” said Pearl Lam, an eccentric violet-haired dealer who made a splash last year when she timed the opening of her new Hong Kong space with the 2012 ART HK fair. “What we need is to increase standards so that our own galleries can compete with Western galleries. It’s not good enough to just have Art Basel here.”

To that end, Ms. Lam hosted a lunch for collectors on Tuesday with Paul Moorhouse of the National Portrait Gallery in London, who is curating the abstract painter Zhu Jinshi’s first solo show in Hong Kong, opening at Ms. Lam’s space this week.

Another problem is a lack of plain old experience. While there are now almost 100 galleries in Hong Kong, only a few were around when the Chinese art scene first boomed in the 1980s.

Ms. Schoeni, who took over her gallery from her father, Manfred Schoeni, is one of those who have seen the changes. “When dad started 20 years ago, there were only a handful of galleries in Hong Kong,” she said. “It wasn’t until 2004 that auction houses started paying attention to contemporary Chinese art, and that’s when the big market boom — the big gallery boom — came.”

But even now, exposure to the West remains limited. Ms. Schoeni points to the Hong Kong artist Hung Keung, whom she chose for an interactive solo show during Basel.

“He’s garnered international attention among critics and has been collected by the Hong Kong Museum of Art, but he hasn’t had much exposure on the commercial level,” she said. “He will be teaching participants about Chinese characters and inviting people to create their own characters, which will then be animated and digitized for his next work.”

Many gallery owners are not worried. Henry Au-yeung of Grotto Fine Art, which represents local artists, said of Art Basel, “They did the right thing in being more inclusive, in presenting Hong Kong art, and not just using Hong Kong as a platform for selling.”

“If you go to a fair in New York,” he added, “there will be a lot of New York galleries. Same for London. And, hopefully, it will be the same for Hong Kong.”

"Going for the Remix" @wsj - The George Lindemann Journal

The George Lindemann Journal

Robert Wright for The New York Times

Clockwise from top right, work by Tamera Leigh Staten; ChiLab; Milton Glaser; Lladró Atelier’s Dazzle collection; Dirk Vander Kooij. More Photos »

 By JULIE LASKY

Published: May 22, 2013

The 25th International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which ended Tuesday, offered many surprises. There were dollhouse-size candelabra inserted into hanging glass bulbs like ships in a bottle and a coffee table whose base was sheathed in python. There was even wallpaper inspired by a 1909 New York Times article about a monkey in a bathhouse.

But nothing caught the eye like the colossal head of William Shakespeare emerging from an African carpet.

Shakespeare in Africa, part of a rug collection by Milton Glaser for the Spanish company Nanimarquina, reflects the 83-year-old graphic designer’s efforts to yoke together disparate subjects in a way that avoids scrambling the brain. “I wanted to take two things that have no relationship with each other,” Mr. Glaser said, “and do what art does: to unify the apparently unrelated.”

He wasn’t alone in his shoehorning. Two booths away, another Spanish company, Lladró, presented several of its porcelain figurines, including a classic macaw, wrapped in World War I-era camouflage. A news release for the collection, which is called Dazzle, explained the concept as “the art of disguise, of the unrecognizable and the imperceptible.”

Add to that the art of the remix. In design, as in any creative endeavor, mashups paradoxically represent inexhaustible possibilities as well as the plateau of invention. You can cover a macaw in any number of patterns, but the real challenge lies in moving beyond the bird. Given Spain’s economic trials, Lladró may be forgiven for making cosmetic adjustments to existing pieces rather than hiring designers to produce a new collection and investing in new molds.

But Dazzle wasn’t just a mash-up; it was also a mascot. The furniture fair — along with a host of exhibitions and openings taking place over the re-branded 12-day festival called NYCxDesign — showed that design is all over the map, its contours muddled and its direction uncertain.

To be sure, when more than 500 exhibitors from around the world put on a show, as they did at ICFF, you can expect diversity. But you should also be able to pick out coherent strains of form, material or style.

Apart from a mysterious eruption of bronze and copper objects, and Swarovski’s ongoing search for another household product in which to embed its crystals, those strains weren’t clear. Several years of recession have taken their toll on innovation. And while there were many goods to admire, few had the uplifting effect of groundbreaking design.

“I’m not seeing a lot of new ideas,” said Noel Wiggins, the founder of the New York design company Areaware, which is known for producing whimsical objects by local designers and this year showed a new version of a radio dock by Jonas Damon with an app for tuning in only public radio stations. “The design languages of the last five years are still with us.”

And yet there were nascent signs of what may be next. With each ICFF, more emissaries show up from the frontiers of technology to demonstrate how computer-controlled tools will transform the look, price and environmental impact of objects.

For example, the British designer Tom Dixon, who previously showed teams assembling lighting fixtures to demonstrate how easy it is to produce one’s own designs, this year appeared with a digital laser cutter and other tools to create what was, in effect, a portable pollution-free factory making lacy metal pendant lamps.

And Dirk Vander Kooij, a young Dutch designer, showed the Chubby chair, made with a robotic arm that extrudes brightly colored recycled plastic in a continuous line. Each chair takes about a half-hour to produce, Mr. Vander Kooij said, and sells for around $400. He also showed Chubby coat hangers, created from the variegated material the robot spits out when Mr. Vander Kooij changes the color of the plastic. The hangers are about $130 for a set of eight.

Chubby may not look like a revolution, but it is approaching one. Compared with the five-figure prices attached to 3-D-printed furniture a decade ago — pieces that took hours, if not days, to produce — Mr. Vander Kooij’s work is snappy and affordable. And it doesn’t have the brittle, ethereal quality of early 3-D printing. He drives home this point on his Web site, where he describes Chubby as: “precise as toothpaste. Heavy like oak.”

In another wing of the Javits show, Massan Dembélé, a master weaver from Burkina Faso, sat at a loom constructed from logs bound with twine and wove handspun cotton cloth decorated with West African totems, part of a program organized by the nonprofit British European Design Group to assist artisans in making goods for export. Mr. Dembélé operated the loom with his bare feet and wove his crocodiles and fish from patterns embedded in his brain.

Craft and small-batch production are ripe to produce something new as well. Though artisanship is often touted as an antidote to digital culture, Mr. Vander Kooij and Mr. Dembélé are more alike than different. Both men control the fabrication process, and that’s no small thing. With the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh renewing concerns about remote factory conditions, there is added value to the idea of designers producing locally and autonomously.

The furniture fair and the coterie of New York design week events offer a stage for such efforts. This year, for example, Wanted Design in Chelsea presented “The Carrot Concept,” a show of furniture produced in El Salvador by local designers, architects and entrepreneurs, working with Jerry Helling, the president and creative director of the American furniture company Bernhardt.

And though conceptual depth was rare, this design week did offer some of it, as when students of the Products of Design M.F.A. program at the School of Visual Arts appeared at Wanted Design with tools that helped visitors think more deeply about objects. A digital microscope, for instance, magnified surfaces 170 times to expose an alien world of beauty and order within everyday materials. In a related project, a series of brief recorded messages purported to express the viewpoints of the items on display.

Startling design innovation often follows material innovation. Nothing extraordinary happened on this front, either, but it is always enjoyable to watch designers at play.

At the Javits, John Eric Byers, a furniture maker, displayed gouged hardwood pieces that he painted and lacquered the color of sable and accented with 24-karat gold. At Wanted Design, Sinje Ollen, a knitter whose needles never left her hands while she chatted, showed an Egg chair by Arne Jacobsen sheathed in bumpy emerald green wool and a modular rug made of zipped strips of knitted fabric. At “NoHo Next,” a show of young designers’ work curated by the organizers of the three-year-old NoHo Design District, Souda from Brooklyn displayed textured, irregularly shaped porcelain vessels cast from leather molds. At Collective .1, a new design show on a Hudson River pier, Kyle DeWoody’s Grey Area gallery included work by Scott Campbell, a tattoo artist: fragrant wood panels burned with ornate patterns. And at BKLYN Designs, which returned to Dumbo after a hiatus, John Randall of Bien Hecho in the Navy Yard offered a water cooler shingled with wood from a New York City water tower.

All these events were staged under the new moniker NYCxDesign (pronounced “NYC by Design”). An initiative of City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, this 12-day assortment of some 200 activities covered all five boroughs and touched various design disciplines, from graphics to jewelry to architecture. The mission, Ms. Quinn has said, is to create jobs in these industries while attracting visitors to New York, much as they flock to the city for Fashion Week.

In its first year, NYCxDesign was mainly a marketing campaign, providing street banners, a Web site with listings, a scheduling app and a presence on digital billboards in Times Square. Designers should be grateful for that much. Design doesn’t get out and strut around like fashion, and it needs more visibility. Milan comes alive when design is celebrated, but New York design week gets lost in the urban shuffle.

As long as people can get past the confounding abbreviation, NYCxDesign is poised to help both design and the economy. Now that the festival is over, Ms. Quinn said, the Economic Development Corporation is studying its economic success and growth potential. She added that she is confident the initiative will continue and hopes she will be around to lead it, something that depends on the success of her mayoral candidacy.

“Whoever the next mayor is, they’ll have NYCxDesign,” she added. “There’s no question in my mind.”

"George Lindemann Captures Frieze" @Cultured_Mag - George Lindemann Journal

George Lindemann Captures Frieze

 

George with Rob Pruitt whos signing The Last Panda T-Shirt

George with Rob Pruitt, who’s signing The Last Panda T-Shirt

The second edition of Frieze has come and gone, but so long as the tent is still up on Randall’s Island, we’re still enjoying looking back on the art and design filled week, anchored by that fantastic fair.

George Lindemann—a great collector of design and art and President of the Bass Museum’s Board—shares his impressions of Frieze, the inaugural Collective design fair and a few auctions and gallery openings in between.

Gerhard Richter in front of one of his works at Frieze

Gerhard Richter in front of one of his works at Frieze.

Tom Friedman at Luhring Augustine at Frieze

Tom Friedman at Luhring Augustine at Frieze

Jeff Koons at Sothebys

Jeff Koons at Sotheby’s

More Koons at Sothebys

More Koons at Sotheby’s

Kusama chess set

Kusama chess set!

Playwright Edward Albee at the Half Gallery opening

Playwright Edward Albee at the Half Gallery opening

At Collective a desk by Wendell Castle

At Collective, a desk by Wendell Castle

A necklace by Ugo Rondinone

A necklace by Ugo Rondinone

At the opening of Maria Pergays new show at Demisch Danant

At the opening of Maria Pergay’s new show at Demisch Danant

Amy Cappellazzo at Christies with a work by Ruth Asawa

Amy Cappellazzo at Christie’s with a work by Ruth Asawa

Dan Colen at Sothebys

Dan Colen at Sotheby’s

"Anish Kapoor Strikes While Hot" @wsj

Anish Kapoor Strikes While Hot

The English sculptor on today's art boom and tilting his Berlin retrospective toward the future

Mumbai-born sculptorAnish Kapoor—the man behind the beloved bean-shaped "Cloud Gate" sculpture in Chicago's Millennium Park—wants everyone to know that his abstract art has no inherent meaning, and he has nothing to say about it.

Anish Kapoor/VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013

'Symphony for a Beloved Sun' (2013)

"What we call 'abstract art' plays a game with you. There is a dialogue between you and a thing," the 59-year-old artist said this week while scrambling to install around 45 works for one of his largest exhibitions ever, which opens in Berlin today. "There isn't a meaning, but you come to a meaning. If I had something to say it would get in the way all the time."

Mr. Kapoor's show, which runs through Nov. 24 at Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau museum, features works dating from 1988 to the present. They're made from a range of materials including wax, stone and pigment powder. He included many new pieces, he said, to balance the show's retrospective quality. "You can tell the difference between something that is pushing toward some kind of inner process and something that is trotted out," said Mr. Kapoor, who lives in London.

His often large, striking pieces are well known for their technical precision and their creator's ability to hint at subjects such as violence without ever explicitly confronting them. In "Shooting Into the Corner," a work that has toured London, Vienna and Mumbai and appears again in Berlin, he and his assistants shot large pellets of blood-red wax from a miniature cannon into a museum corner.

A multiwork installation at Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau

Mr. Kapoor concedes that the museum's location exerted a major influence on his selection process. He says he chose a fair number of pieces that address violence. "My God, we've got that museum of death right next door," he says, referring to the Topography of Terror Museum, which sits on the former Gestapo and Nazi SS headquarters. "You can hardly do something in this building and not be aware of the weight of those histories." The highlight of the exhibition is his new work, "Symphony for a Beloved Sun." A 30-foot-wide red circle is supported by stilts and surrounded by conveyor belts that drop blocks of red wax onto the floor with a resounding thud.

Born in 1954 to a Jewish mother and Hindu father, Mr. Kapoor emigrated to London in 1973 and won the Turner Prize in 1991 for an untitled set of tan blocks of sandstone that had attracted the interest of art critics. But it was his colorful sculptures that first made him popular with the general public.

Such a piece is "Wound," a fire-engine-red pigment work in the Berlin show. Two stones, their interiors carved out and coated with red powder, flank a sliver of red pigment. The red crawls up the wall and protrudes into the room, seemingly suspended in the air. Another piece on display, "Blood Mirror IV," is a massive, concave aluminum dish. The 2013 work has a playful feel that is at odds with its sinister title. From a distance, it appears to be flat. Yet as one walks closer, it becomes evident that the sides of the dish curve and seem to exert a pressure on the viewer's ears.

It's a feeling "not unlike when you're descending in an airplane and your ears want to pop," says Alex Branczik, a senior director in Sotheby's BID +2.77%contemporary-art department, which has sold four of Mr. Kapoor's top five works at auction. Christie's sold a red dish similar to "Blood Mirror IV" in 2008 for $2.14 million.

Mr. Kapoor's most expensive works remain the metal dishes and stone "void" carvings—luminescent sculptures made of alabaster and with holes, concavities or windows hand-chiseled into them that are also featured in the Berlin show. Sotheby's sold an untitled alabaster sculpture in 2008 for $3.9 million, his most expensive work ever auctioned.

Both types of works are highly recognizable and trade fairly regularly at auction, a strategy by collectors known as "flipping" that many artists find insulting. Mr. Kapoor remains serene about both his branding and auction sales, saying that wild speculation in contemporary art is an inevitable result of the continuing economic crisis.

"It's as hot as can be," he says of the current art market, which saw Christie's pull in the highest total in auction history Wednesday night in New York, where it sold $495 million in postwar and contemporary art. "If in art we can find meaning and value, it's got to be a good thing."

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

A version of this article appeared May 16, 2013, on page D8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Anish Kapoor Strikes While Hot.

"Christie's opens survey exhibition dedicated to American artist Ruth Asawa"

Ruth Asawa and Wire Sculpture and Shadows. Photo: Imogen Cunningham.
 
 
NEW YORK, NY.- Christie’s presents a survey exhibition dedicated to one of America's most talented artists of the 20th century, Ruth Asawa. Objects & Apparitions is Asawa’s first major solo show in New York in over 50 years. This curated exhibition will feature an extraordinary grouping of approximately 50 works including sculpture and works on paper — for private sale or on loan— and will afford a rare and comprehensive view of the artist’s body of work. This exceptional three-week exhibition will take place on the 20th floor of 1230 Avenue of the Americas, at Rockefeller Center in May 2013. The exhibition coincides with the New York Post-War and Contemporary Art auctions in May of this year, and will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue, with original texts by poet and art critic, John Yau, and Nicholas Fox Weber, Executive Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. At the May 15th evening sale auction, Christie’s will offer a major sculpture from the Ruth Asawa Family Collection.

“It is an honor to present this survey of amazing and singular works by Ruth Asawa. The exhibition will trace Asawa’s artistic journey from her works on paper, created while studying with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, to her career as a pioneering modernist sculptor currently gaining international recognition. The large scope and stature of Asawa’s work will come into vivid focus in this exhibition that I had the pleasure of assembling with the assistance and guidance of Asawa’s incredible family. We are privileged to be able to present thirty-four sculptures and fourteen works on paper, with additional documentary source materials including vintage photographs of the artist and her work taken by the renowned photographer Imogen Cunningham. This exhibition is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City in over fifty years and Christie’s is pleased to be able to host this incredible event” stated Jonathan Laib, Christie’s, Senior Specialist, Post-War & Contemporary Art, curator of the exhibition.

On a journey to Mexico in the summer of 1947, Asawa was captivated by the looped wire baskets used in markets to sell eggs and other produce. Intrigued with wire as an exploratory medium for her own studies, she began to loop and twist wire in a similar fashion. Asawa began creating threedimensional forms that played with their surrounding space using one continuous line made of wire. These looped wire sculptures with their multi-layered exterior and interior forms invoke a sense of wonder that immediately turns to a curiosity about how they were made. These sculptures rely on the language of transparency that is associated with the formulation of modernism and design
promoted by the Bauhaus.

Asawa's looped wire forms were often executed in her home, with her six children surrounding her, creating a poetic narrative in which life intertwines with art. The maternal character of Asawa’s art recalls the organic forms of another important 20th century female artist, Louise Bourgeois, whose oversized outdoor bronze spider sculptures possess a similar sense of labored domesticity. Both artists touch on the notion of a mother figure weaving and threading her way through art and life as a means of reflecting upon personal experience. Similarly, Asawa's process and rhythmic wire loops bring to mind the early “Infinity Nets” created concurrently by Yayoi Kusama in the 1950s and 1960s. Though Kusama's nets were primarily graphic works on canvas, her paintings, like Asawa's looped wire sculptures, were created through the infinite repetition of a single calligraphic motion. Like Yayoi Kusama, Ruth Asawa creates mystery and profundity through deceptively simple means while giving form to the ineffable.

If Asawa became a groundbreaking modernist sculptor of abstract forms, she was first an extremely talented painter. The exhibit will present a series of works on paper from her time studying at the famed Black Mountain College and additional works created during her residency at the legendary Tamarind Institute. These works feature variations and meanders, bird and chevron motifs, and overlapping forms, creating multiple optical illusions, a vocabulary inspired by her studies with Josef Albers.

Evening sale Post-War and Contemporary Art - May 15, 2013
A major work from the Ruth Asawa Family Collection will be offered at auction on May 15. Estimated at $250,000-350,000, Untitled (S.108, hanging, six lobed, multi-layered continuous form within a form) — illustrated on page 2 — is one of the artist's largest and most intricate sculptures, incorporating her best-known form-within-a-form motif. With a length of 137 inches, Untitled (S.108) exists essentially as a drawing in space, an intertwining network of brass and copper wire. It was exhibited in the American Pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair.

Ruth Asawa has lived a rare and unique life as an artist. Her life, like her art, has been shaped by social and political impositions, unjust restrictions on her liberties and supposed inalienable rights. As a teenager in the early 1940's, Asawa and her family were sent by Executive Order to an internment camp along with approximately 120,000 fellow Japanese-Americans. Under the tutelage of professional artists who were also held captive in the camps, Asawa began exercising freedom through her art while the government stripped her of her civil liberties. Despite the suffering she endured. Asawa exhibited great humility and harbored little resentment more than fifty years after the event, saying, "I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the Internment, and I like who I am."

By 1946, Asawa had been recruited by fellow student Ray Johnson to attend Black Mountain College where, for the next three years she was mentored by such visionaries, as Josef and Anni Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Merce Cunningham and Buckminster Fuller. From the teachings of these legendary artists, Asawa absorbed fundamental lessons that instilled a “less is more” approach to art making. Asawa gained prominence with her wire sculptures in the 1950s. Her work appeared several times in the annual exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in the 1955 São Paulo Art Biennial, but also in solo and group shows at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Oakland Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. She had major solo retrospective exhibits at the San Francisco Museum of Art (1973), the Fresno Art Center (1978 and 2001), the Oakland Museum (2002), the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum (2006), and the Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, 2007). Her work can be found in major collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She has received numerous awards including the Fine Arts Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects and the Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts from the Women’s Caucus for Art. In 1982, February 12th was declared Ruth Asawa Day in San Francisco. The same year she was the driving force behind the creation of the public high school for the arts, which is now the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts.

"Sussman Videos Offer Dark View of Modern Life" @bassmuseum

George Lindemann Wins Inaugural Better Beach Award - George Lindemann

George Lindemann Wins Inaugural Better Beach Award

March 26, 2013

georgelindemann-for-website
Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce has awarded George Lindemann the award of Citizen at Large at the inaugural Better Beach Awards. This award was given to Lindemann based on his for his prolific and impactful role in growing, branding and leading the Bass Museum of Art for the past 5 years. As the President of the Board of Directors of the Bass Museum of Art, George Lindemann has not only been one of the few original members of the Board of Directors, but helped grow the board from 3 members to the current 23 current members of the Board creating a diverse and dynamic group of leaders for the Bass Museum of Art. Lindemann also helped conceptualize the current mission statement of the Bass Museum of Art, “we inspire and educate by exploring the connections between our historical collections and contemporary art”.
Along with the City of Miami Beach, George Lindemann’s generous donations and commitment to education, he created the Lindemann Family Creativity Center at the Bass Museum of Art. The Lindemann Family Creativity Center is the home of the museum’s IDEA@thebass program of art classes and workshops. Developed in conjunction with Stanford University’s acclaimed Institute of Design, IDEA classes employ a method of teaching known as Design Thinking, an open-ended method of problem-solving that allows children to brainstorm, work in teams and engage in creative play. The Creativity Center is also the home of the Art Club for Adults, lectures, film screenings, and teacher training workshops. Additional programming includespre-school art classes, after school and weekend art classes (children ages 6 to 12), and experimental programming designed by the museum’s Stanford Fellow and other experts in the field of arts education.

Congratulations, George Lindemann!

"Women on the Verge" @wsj - The George Lindemann Journal

By ELLEN GAMERMAN and MARY M. LANE

A lady in a bonnet is shaking up the art world.

When "After Lunch," Berthe Morisot's portrait of a doe-eyed woman, sold for $10.9 million in February, it set a record as the most expensive work ever sold by a female artist at auction. It also helped power a wave of interest among collectors and dealers looking to identify undervalued female artists.

SB10001424127887323309604578430932517007190Yayoi Kusama/David Zwirner, Victoria Miro Gallery, Ota Fine Arts, Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc.

YAYOI KUSAMA: The 84-year-old is the top-selling living female artist of all time, fetching $118 million total at auction.

A woman's signature in the bottom corner of a painting has long spelled a bargain—men in the same artistic school or period can fetch more than 10 times the price of a woman's best sale. While an age-old debate rages over whether talent, sexism or lack of promotion has held many women out of the art world's boys club, everyone agrees that prices for female artists have always lagged behind those of their male counterparts.

Today's flourishing art market—marked by last year's record-setting sale at auction of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" for nearly $120 million—has lifted prices for male and female artists alike. As the supply of great pictures diminishes, more collectors are priced out of blue-chip works and are combing the market for previously overlooked names. A number of highly regarded women artists are seeing their prices rise as a result.

"Remember 'plastics' from 'The Graduate'? It should be 'women,' " says Tony Podesta, the Washington lobbyist who is one of a handful of collectors aggressively buying work by women artists.

This winter, a painting by Berthe Morisot sold for $11 million--the most ever paid for a woman's artwork at auction. Along with other big art-market moments for women in recent years, the record has auction houses and dealers re-examining this historically undervalued niche. Ellen Gamerman reports.

The records are toppling. Nine of the top 10 auction sales of work by women occurred within the last five years. The last two years marked record-high prices at auction for artists including Joan Mitchell, Tamara de Lempicka, Louise Bourgeois, Irma Stern, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Helen Frankenthaler, Rosemarie Trockel and Louise Lawler.

Auction experts and collectors are anxious to see how three Morisot paintings will sell next month during Impressionist and modern sales in New York, two at Sotheby's BID +2.20%and one at Christie's.

"Whereas before we looked at female artists as the land of opportunity, with prices like these, collectors say the window is closing for gender-specificity bargain buying," says Gabriela Palmieri, a senior vice president and contemporary-art specialist at Sotheby's.

imageCindy Sherman/Metro Pictures

CINDY SHERMAN: In 2011, the artist was the auction world's highest-priced photographer, male or female, with a $3.9 million sale. Here, the artist models in an untitled portrait.

Spanning centuries and a wide variety of styles, work by women is hardly a cohesive market category. Still, some collectors eagerly seek out female artwork.

Prominent women like Wal-Mart WMT +1.47%heiress Alice Walton, pop queen Madonna and songstress Barbra Streisand have long collected work by women. Barbara Lee, a national activist for women in politics, has filled her collection almost entirely with work by women partly to support artists she believes are underrepresented by museums and galleries. She recalled visiting Louise Bourgeois's studio in the early 1990s. "It was filled with sculpture from every period of her life—no one had purchased it," says Ms. Lee.

Others have less-altruistic motives. "A lot of collectors look for undervalued groups of art, and women could easily be considered the last big group," says Michel Witmer, a New York collector and board member of the European Fine Art Fair.

Dealers and auction experts are using several tactics as they scour the market. One is to find female artists whose works, backgrounds or artistic movements mirror those of prohibitively expensive male artists. These artists include: Joan Mitchell, who worked in the shadows of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock; Natalia Goncharova, one of the turn-of-the-century Russian artists led by Wassily Kandinsky; and Agnes Martin, who forged a path in a male-dominated period led by minimalists like Donald Judd.

Others track female artists whose works have hovered just under $1 million at auction, expecting them to pop into seven figures. Among those attracting attention: conceptual artist Sherrie Levine, known for appropriating photographs by artists like Edward Weston and Walker Evans; and Barbara Kruger, who plasters black-and-white photographs with loud slogans. Both their prices have been dwarfed by the multimillion-dollar sums fetched by fellow contemporary artists like Richard Prince or Christopher Wool.

Another contender: Helen Frankenthaler. There's some debate over the merits of the late abstract expressionist's work compared with those of the men who came before her—like Pollock, whose biggest auction sale topped $40 million—but collectors have shown they're ready to bet on her. Frankenthaler's auction record is just under $1 million, but her early work was recently featured in a show at New York's Gagosian Gallery, where a canvas sold privately for $3 million, according to a gallery official.

The evolution in the market for Joan Mitchell's work illustrates how collectors have recently "discovered" an artist long in the shadows of her male counterparts.

Mitchell, the late Chicago-born painter known for splattering strokes and bold colors, operated just outside circles of older abstract-expressionist peers like de Kooning and Pollock. In 1951, she exhibited alongside them in New York, but by the 1960s she had exiled herself to France.

In 2006, as the art market boomed, a 1970s de Kooning sold for $27 million at Christie's. A Mitchell work fetched $2 million, a big sum for the artist at the time, but one that suddenly had the whiff of a good deal in the Christie's salesroom. New York art adviser Abigail Asher remembers the scene: "A client turned to me and said, 'Wow, doesn't that seem inexpensive?' " she recalled of the collector, who had just bought a Mitchell privately earlier that week.

By 2011, Mitchell's market had climbed as hedge-fund managers and other trophy hunters pegged her work as a good investment. Ms. Asher recalled chasing a Mitchell canvas past its $6 million high estimate against another bidder at Sotheby's. The piece, a large-scale canvas in a riot of colors, sold for $9.3 million—her highest sum ever at auction. Ms. Asher, who lost out, slumped in her seat after the hammer fell: "It was the feeling of: 'The cat's out of the bag.' "

Last year, Mitchell's canvases were the two most expensive works by any woman artist sold at auction, according to auction database Artnet. Her work now hangs in museums around the world, including Ms. Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. A 1958 Mitchell painting will be on the block next month at Christie's.

A number of theories exist for why women have languished in the art world's bargain basement. Experts point to the smaller supply of work by women from certain periods—after all they're called Old Masters, not Old Mistresses—which limits the frequency of sales and holds down prices. Women also are underrepresented by major museums, where purchases and exhibits boost prices. Famous artists like Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo do appear in museum shows, but the permanent modern art collections of most major institutions are comprised largely of work by male artists.

Others say women haven't marketed themselves as well as men. "Male artists are much more pushy and power-related," says Eva Presenhuber, a Zurich-based dealer who noted she recently threw a toned-down party for the artist Karen Kilimnik because the artist doesn't like to promote herself with splashy events.

Indeed, the upper echelons of the art world still belong to men: All of the top 100 works ever sold at auction were created by male artists, and fewer than 3% of auctioned works over $1 million last year were by female artists, according to Artnet. No living woman has cleared $10 million at auction to date, compared with scores of men.

One reason Morisot took off, experts say, is because she and artists like Mary Cassatt have styles similar to those of famous male painters of the period, in this case Manet and Renoir. They also have recognizable brand looks that are easy to live with. "It's no coincidence that the art you see reproduced in doctors' waiting rooms is [their] type of Impressionist work," says Philip Hook, a senior specialist in Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art department.

Morisot and Cassatt were prolific artists, but most of their work is ferreted away in museums, making those paintings that do crop up on the market highly sought-after.

In a packed Christie's salesroom in London last February, the Morisot canvas, "After Lunch," sold for roughly three times its high estimate after a protracted back-and-forth between two telephone bidders from Russia and the U.S. The piece is believed to have gone to an American.

The market prizes other female artists because of artistic styles and cultural sensibilities that translate well over time. Tamara de Lempicka, a Polish-born artist with a booze-and-party-fueled lifestyle, moved to Hollywood in 1939 and became a wild fixture on the movie-industry scene. Her Art Deco paintings, brimming with men in tuxes, busty blondes and lesbian trysts, draw famous admirers today—and have reached record auction prices in recent years. Sotheby's will feature a moody Manhattan skyline by the artist during next month's sales.

Madonna, who owns at least two de Lempickas, has collected her for decades and considers her work a source of inspiration, a spokeswoman confirmed. When the singer's "Vogue" video came out in 1990, featuring Madonna's de Lempickas in the background, it sent a frisson through auction houses and art galleries. For years later, whenever anyone had a de Lempicka to sell, the reaction was always the same: "Everyone said, 'Oh, offer it to Madonna,' " says David Norman, Sotheby's co-chairman of Impressionist and modern art world-wide.

Other avid collectors include Barbra Streisand, who was first drawn to the artist's paintings in the 1970s when she was building a house in Art Deco style. "I found Lempicka's work to be so original," Ms. Streisand said in an email, praising the artist's style and technique. "The fact that she was a woman artist made her even more intriguing."

The gender gap narrows within smaller niche markets like photography. Cindy Sherman, a 59-year-old chameleon who spends years planning portraits of herself in various personae, briefly held the title as the auction world's highest-priced photographer, female or male, in 2011. An image of herself splayed across a brown linoleum floor sold for $3.9 million. Ms. Sherman's works, which sold for $1,000 at her long-standing gallery Metro Pictures in 1981, now typically fetch $450,000 at the gallery and are collected by art-market heavyweights such as Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad and Christie's owner François Pinault.

An older generation of women artists sees a much different art market today than the one they grew up with. Pat Steir, a 74-year-old New York artist who pours paint down her monumental canvases, recalled one summer in 1964 visiting a friend whose father was an abstract painter. One of his guests was Mark Rothko. Ms. Steir approached him, explaining that she had just gotten out of art school. "I said, 'Mr. Rothko, you're such a great artist, I admire your work so much,' and he said, 'You're a pretty girl. Why aren't you married?' "

Ms. Steir's art now hangs in most major museums across the U.S., including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"Partner Without the Prize" @nytimes - George Lindemann

Partner Without the Prize

 

By ROBIN POGREBIN

 

Twenty-two years after being passed by, the architect Denise Scott Brown, 81, said at an awards ceremony for women in architecture last month that it was time she share in the 1991 Pritzker Prize that was given to her design partner and husband, Robert Venturi, with whom she had worked side by side.

 

Arielle Assouline-Lichten, foreground, and Caroline James started the Pritzker petition.

“They owe me not a Pritzker Prize but a Pritzker inclusion ceremony,” Ms. Scott Brown said. “Let’s salute the notion of joint creativity.”

Her remarks prompted two students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design to start an online petition demanding that the panel that administers architecture’s highest prize revisit that decision.

The petition has now drawn 9,000 signatures, many of them from the world’s most famous architects, including six prior Pritzker winners. And it has reignited long-simmering tensions in the architectural world over whether women have been consistently denied the standing they deserve in a field whose most prestigious award was not given to a woman until 2004, when Zaha Hadid won.

“The progress of recognizing the place and the contribution of women in architecture has been incredibly slow,” said Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. “It’s been thought to be boys’ stuff.”

The prize organization has long defended its exclusion of Ms. Scott Brown on the ground that back then it honored only individual architects, a practice that changed in 2001 with the selection of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. They are among the architects who have signed the petition, along with fellow Pritzker winners Richard Meier, Ms. Hadid, Wang Shu and Rem Koolhaas, who called the exclusion of Ms. Scott Brown “an embarrassing injustice which it would be great to undo.”

Mr. Venturi, 87, also signed the petition, but Ms. Scott Brown said he was not well and unable to comment. When he won in 1991, she did not attend the award ceremony in protest.

The Pritzker winner is chosen annually by a panel of a half-dozen or so independent jurors. There was one woman on the panel in 1991 and there is one woman on the panel today, Martha Thorne, the Pritzker’s executive director.

“Jurors change over the years, so this presents us with an unusual situation,” Ms. Thorne said of the inclusion request. “The most that I can say at this point is that I will refer this important matter to the current jury at their next meeting.”

The ceremony for this year’s Pritzker winner, Toyo Ito, is to be May 29 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. The $100,000 prize, financed by the family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain, has been awarded since 1979.

While about half of architecture students in the United States are women, only a quarter of employees of architecture firms across the country are female, according to 2011 data from the American Institute of Architects. The number is smaller — 17 percent — when counting principals or partners in architecture firms.

Design professionals cite many reasons, including the sense that architecture involves business and construction, which have both been traditionally considered the province of men. And still persistent is the mythology of the architect as a solo male genius — the Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s “Fountainhead.”

“It’s embedded and the Pritzker Prizes embed it,” said Beverly Willis, an architect who founded the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, which supports women in architecture. “They’re totally outdated, they’re totally passé and if they continue trying to isolate the Howard Roark man, they’re totally irrelevant.”

Ms. Scott Brown is one of the rare female architects to have achieved prominence.

“Denise Scott Brown is sort of like architecture’s grandmother,” said Arielle Assouline-Lichten, a Harvard design student who started the petition with Caroline James. “Almost all architecture students have studied her in school. Everyone grew up with her as the female professional who’s always been around and never really gets the recognition.”

Ms. Scott Brown, who was born in Zambia, met Mr. Venturi in 1960 at the University of Pennsylvania, where they were on the faculty and began working together. They married in 1967. She joined his firm that same year.

“Some people said, ‘She married the boss and thought she could get ahead,’ “ Ms. Scott Brown said in a telephone interview from her home in Philadelphia. “But if anyone was the boss, I was. We really were colleagues and we taught together. It was a very, very wonderful collaboration for both of us.”

Since 1960, she and Mr. Venturi have teamed up on buildings like the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London and Franklin Court, a museum and memorial to Benjamin Franklin in Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. They have run a practice together — Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates in Philadelphia, now VSBA — written books together, taught classes together and jointly developed groundbreaking theories about architecture and planning.

“You can’t separate them,” Mr. Bergdoll said. “It’s one of those great partnerships.”

The couple is known in large part for upending Modernism by embracing the vernacular of neon signs and kitsch as legitimate design. Their work with a class of Yale architecture students in Las Vegas in 1968 — examining casinos, parking lots and fast-food restaurants — resulted in their 1972 book, “Learning From Las Vegas” (written with Steven Izenour), which became an influential design treatise and helped usher in the period known as postmodernism.

Ms. Scott Brown said she was moved by the recent outpouring of support. “There needs to be some kind of corrective action,” she said. “Let’s not say corrective — let’s say inclusive.”

Several design school deans have signed, including Mohsen Mostafavi at Harvard, Sarah Whiting at Rice and Jennifer Wolch at the University of California at Berkeley.

“The initiative on the part of the students is something that I really value,” Mr. Mostafavi said. “I hope they will be this proactive when it comes to their own futures.”

Robert A. M. Stern, the dean of Yale’s Architecture School, said he declined to sign the petition because he objected to its use of the word “demand,” but that he backed it in principle. “It would be wonderful for the Pritzker committee to review the situation and to offer her the prize,” Mr. Stern said. “The nature of the collaboration was so intense on every level.”

Architects say the Pritzker is unlikely to reverse its decision, in part because several members of the jury at that time are no longer living, including Ada Louise Huxtable, J. Carter Brown and Giovanni Agnelli.

The Web site ArchDaily on April 1 posited the counterargument that Mr. Venturi was awarded the Pritzker based on projects completed before Ms. Scott Brown joined the firm, like the Vanna Venturi House (1964). Yet the award citation directly acknowledged Ms. Scott Brown’s contributions.

“His understanding of the urban context of architecture, complemented by his talented partner, Denise Scott Brown, with whom he has collaborated on both more writings and built works, has resulted in changing the course of architecture in this century,” the citation said, “allowing architects and consumers the freedom to accept inconsistencies in form and pattern, to enjoy popular taste.”

For Ms. Scott Brown, the sting remains fresh. “When we married I suddenly was being told, “Look, let’s just keep this photograph of architects,’ ” she recalled. “I’d say, ‘I am an architect and they’d say, ‘Would you mind moving out of the picture, please?’ “

"Coastal cities ponder how to prepare for rising sea levels" @miamiherald

   A lone person walks the water line in Long Beach Mississippi

By Erika Bolstad

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON -- Americans in coastal areas, particularly on the East and Gulf coasts, will confront challenging questions in the coming years as they determine how to protect millions of people in the face of rising sea levels and more intense storms.

Should cities rebuild the boardwalks in New Jersey shore towns? Should the government discourage people from rebuilding in areas now more vulnerable to flooding? How much would it cost to protect water and sewer systems and subways and electrical substations from being inundated in the next storm?

Leaders from coastal communities along the East Coast gathered in New York City on Wednesday to talk about the consequences of Hurricane Sandy, as well as how they’ll address future sea level rising. The conference was sponsored by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit, nonpartisan science advocacy group.

"What we really got a glimpse at was our collective future," said Joe Vietri, who heads coastal and storm risk management for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and is heading up a comprehensive study of Sandy.

Rising sea levels caused primarily by global warming could worsen the effects of storms such as Sandy, particularly when it comes to storm surge. Since 1992, satellites have observed a 2.25-inch rise in global sea levels.

Just before Sandy, sea surface temperatures were about 5 degrees Fahrenheit above the 30-year average for the time of year. Scientists who studied the storm determined that about 1 degree was likely a direct result of global warming.

With every degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature, the atmosphere can hold 4 percent more moisture. As a result, Sandy was able to pull in more moisture, fueling a stronger storm and magnifying the amount of rainfall by as much as 5 percent to 10 percent compared with conditions more than 40 years ago.

Coupled with higher overall sea levels, the intense storm meant more water surging onshore and penetrating farther inland. The storm’s effects prompted officials in Wilmington, N.C., to look at its vulnerabilities if seas rise up to one meter by the end of the century.

"People are listening, people are ready to take some actions," said Phil Prete, a senior environmental planner for the city.

The officials spent less time discussing the cause of rapid sea level rise: how to slow the carbon emissions that are heating up the Earth and warming the oceans. Many public officials in coastal communities instead are focusing on what they say are the consequences of global warming.

They have no choice, said Kristin Jacobs, mayor of Broward County, Fla., where extreme tides during Hurricane Sandy washed out portions of Fort Lauderdale’s iconic beachfront highway.

"Almost all of us are living in very low-lying areas," she said. "There are many lessons in South Florida already learned from multiple hurricanes. We have learned from those hurricanes, we have learned to plan for the future, and we’ve learned that this is our new normal."

The causes are also a settled question in Hoboken, N.J., where an estimated 500 million gallons of Hudson River water inundated the town and stayed for nearly 10 days, said Stephen Marks, Hoboken’s assistant business administrator. He called on the federal government and states to take a leadership role in addressing climate change, particularly in communities that are vulnerable to its effects.

"The debate about climate change is essentially over," Marks said. "Hurricane Sandy settled that for, I would say, a majority of the residents in our city."

But coastal populations are particularly vulnerable, and growing. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last month issued a report showing that already crowded U.S. coastal areas will see population grow from 123 million people in 2010 to nearly 134 million people by 2020. That puts millions more people at risk from storms such as Sandy.

People may be aware of the consequences of climate change, but it hasn’t seemed to have stopped anyone from moving to the beach – or hurt property values, said Vietri, of the Army Corps of Engineers. He noted that communities suffered far less damage if there were sand dunes or other protective measures, such as substantial setbacks for homes.

"You still have communities rebuilding almost exactly where they were prior to the storm coming," Vietri said. "You continue to have a situation where we have a tremendous population density living in high-hazard areas."