The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "An Artist Who Let His Ideas (and Others) Do the Work" @nytimes By A. O. SCOTT

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

A Minimalist Master Returns

A Minimalist Master Returns

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

Credit By Oresti Tsonopoulos on Publish Date May 4, 2014

Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

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

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

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

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

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A Minimalist Retrospective

A Minimalist Retrospective

Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Lindemann Journal By George Lindemann "Sotheby's, Third Point Reach Settlement" @wsj by David Benoit

Sotheby's expects Picasso's 'Le Sauvetage' will fetch at least $14 million at auction on Wednesday. Sotheby's

Sold!

Activist investor Daniel Loeb and auction house Sotheby's reached a settlement on Monday that concluded his seven-month campaign to shake up the company a day before shareholders were to vote on his board candidates.

The pact gives Mr. Loeb three board seats by expanding the board to 15 people rather than having Mr. Loeb's candidates go up against company nominees. The deal also caps Mr. Loeb's stock ownership at 15%. His hedge fund, Third Point LLC, currently owns about 9.6%, but it had sought the ability to go to 20%, a request the company had blocked, leading Third Point to sue.

On Monday, Sotheby's shares closed up 3.25%, or $1.41, to $44.80, at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange trading.

Settlements, even just hours before a scheduled vote, have become more common for activists and their targets because advisers believe it is better to hammer out a deal than risk a divisive shareholder vote.

Through last week, there have been 20 settlements between companies and activists so far this year, tied for the most to date since 2009, according to FactSet SharkWatch, a data provider.

In a joint statement on Monday, Mr. Loeb said: "As of today we see ourselves not as the Third Point Nominees but as Sotheby's directors, and we expect to work collaboratively with our fellow board members to enhance long-term value on behalf of all shareholders." Sotheby's Chairman and Chief Executive William Ruprecht also said the last-minute agreement "ensures that our focus is on the business."

The agreement came after a Delaware judge blessed Sotheby's so-called poison pill that limited how much stock Third Point could acquire. Beyond that legal issue, a court hearing last week in the suit enabled Third Point to surface internal board emails showing support for Mr. Loeb's point of view; also disclosed were inflammatory comments by Mr. Loeb. The airing of the various remarks added to the drama of a campaign that had captivated Wall Street and the art world.

Mr. Loeb is not a stranger in board rooms where he has spent time publicly attacking. At Yahoo Inc., YHOO +0.51% Yahoo! Inc. U.S.: Nasdaq ^$37.10 +0.19+0.51% May 6, 2014 1:23 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 8.24M P/E Ratio 30.58 Market Cap $37.15 Billion Dividend Yield N/A Rev. per Employee $383,012 37.2037.0036.8036.6010a11a12p1p2p3p 05/05/14 Sotheby's, Third Point Reach S... 05/05/14 Box Still Targets Microsoft, G... 05/05/14 CMO Today: Facebook Getting Ag... More quote details and news » YHOO in Your Value Your Change Short position before he joined the board, he waged a several-month war that saw a newly hired CEO fired. Yahoo's shares rose more than 85% during the time he was on the board, which was just over a year.

New York-based Sotheby's had criticized his exit at Yahoo in its presentations to shareholders, just one of the points of contention that will now need to be put aside in the auction house's boardroom.

In one such instance, according to a Friday court ruling, Mr. Loeb had emailed allies that he was waging a "holy jihad," with the plan being to "undermine the credibility" of Mr. Ruprecht. Mr. Loeb said the email was intended as a joke and not meant to offend.

Mr. Ruprecht referred to Mr. Loeb as "scum" to another board member and said the campaign was about "ego," the judge's ruling said.

But other directors worried Mr. Loeb's criticisms were on point and raised concerns about the company's spending and Mr. Ruprecht's compensation, according to court testimony.

Putting such distractions behind the company is "good for shareholders," Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analyst David Schick wrote on Monday, because it allows the firm to get back to focusing on its auction business.

That will include Sotheby's spring series of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art sales, which are expected to total at least $684 million during the next two weeks. Mr. Loeb has argued that Sotheby's has fallen behind rival Christie's International PLC in selling contemporary art. Christie's contemporary sale on May 13 is expected to bring in at least $500 million.

Mr. Loeb is among an emerging class of hedge-fund executives and art collectors who frequent both the major auction houses, ratcheting up prices for contemporary artists and quickly reselling their purchases for a profit.

The average holding period for contemporary art works has shrunk to about two years from at least a decade previously, according to a former Sotheby's specialist.

—Kelly Crow contributed to this article.

Write to David Benoit at david.benoit@wsj.com and Sara Germano at sara.germano@wsj.com

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "A Day in the Life of Artist Dan Colen" @wsj by Christopher Ross

FARM BOY | Colen at his property in upstate New York, where many of his large-scale pieces are constructed. Photography by Tim Barber for WSJ. Magazine

THE 34-YEAR-OLD ARTIST Dan Colen lives in Manhattan's East Village, but the majority of his work is made either at his new studio in Brooklyn's Red Hook, overlooking a blue expanse of the Upper New York Bay, or at his 40-acre farm in Pine Plains, New York, where roosters crow and the air smells of manure.

These are not his native environments: Raised in Leonia, New Jersey, he came to fame in the mid-aughts as a member of a gritty, decadent clique of artists (including Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley) who helped define the New York downtown arts scene and whose bacchanalian exploits are still legendary. Colen is sober now, and the location of his studios says something about the scale, direction and pace of his work these days. "Walking out of your studio and seeing water instead of the Holland Tunnel, that's going to affect how you create," he says.

This month, the Brant Foundation, in Connecticut, is mounting a comprehensive exhibition spanning his entire career. His trademark pieces blending abstraction with low materials—paintings made from bubble gum or resembling bird poop, papier–mâché boulders covered in graffiti—will be displayed alongside newer works that seem to reflect his change in scenery: small landscape paintings, a heap of scrap metal occupied by canaries. Preparing for the opening, he lopes around the museum with a rangy energy, wearing a tight-fitting jean jacket and Chuck Taylor All-Stars. Sporting a terrifically cowlicked head of hair, he sometimes resembles an overgrown boy. His irreverent former self appears in flashes, like when he mentions, as a cop car passes his Range Rover on the highway, that there is currently a warrant out for his arrest (he missed a court date for carrying a type of knife that's illegal in New York City).

Descending from a line of makers—his father sculpts with wood and clay, and his grandfather was a mechanic and inventor—it's not surprising that Colen now nearly resembles a construction foreman. In the course of a day, he consults with riggers installing an outdoor piece at Brant and discusses with foundry workers how to move boulders. At his farm, one member of his crew is strapping an ash-wood barrel shut while another is tinkering with guitar cases. He counsels his staff of artisans and workers not to focus so much on formal perfection as on an intuitive process of discovery. "I tell them it's not about virtuosity," he says. "It's about commitment."

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Sotheby’s Poison Pill Is Upheld by Delaware Court" @nytimes By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED AND ALEXANDRA STEVENSON

Steve Marcus/ReutersDaniel S. Loeb is seeking a seat on Sotheby’s board.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Camille Henrot: An Art World 'It Girl'" @wsj by Ellen Gamerman

RESTLESS ART Camille Henrot says she's inspired by eBay, turtles and nail polish, among other sources, for her videos, like 'Grosse Fatigue,' above. © Camille Henrot/ADAGP/Silex Films/kamel mennour, Paris

Turtles figure prominently in artist Camille Henrot's ambitious video chronicling the history of the world in 13 minutes. She sees the creatures as symbols of a prehistoric past and a burdened future. "The turtle, she's slow because she is carrying this massive round thing—it's like a figure of Atlas," she says.

Thinking hard about reptiles—and most everything else—is a hallmark of the 35-year-old French intellectual's work. On the heels of that video, "Grosse Fatigue," which won her the Silver Lion award for most promising young artist at the recent Venice Biennale, the artist is unveiling her first comprehensive U.S. museum exhibit. "Camille Henrot: The Restless Earth" opens Wednesday at the New Museum in New York.

The show features her abstract video telling the story of humankind through quick cuts of images like turtles and eyeballs, dead birds and oranges, fizzy water and the cosmos. Other pieces on view include her works on paper and a new installation of literature-inspired Japanese ikebana flower arrangements.

This spring, the New Museum is dedicating separate floors to three young artists rather than doing a group show. "It's a way to give exposure, to show the artists who are changing how art is being made," says curator Gary Carrion-Murayari. "Camille was a very easy choice for us in that respect."

Ms. Henrot created "Grosse Fatigue" during an artist fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington last year. She scoured the collections, filming employees opening drawers of exotic-bird specimens, flipping through files filled with dead bees, and so on. The film advances quickly through time by using overlapping windows on a computer desktop—search results from the Smithsonian's database. She incorporated her own footage and studio shots of brightly painted fingernails—a nod to her discovery that even the weightiest words in a Google search often seem to match the name of a nail polish.

It wasn't a solitary effort: Ms. Henrot worked with a cinematographer and film editor, as well as a makeup designer, models and production assistants. A writer created the text, which is performed like a spoken-word poem, and her partner, a musician named Joakim Bouaziz, created the score.

Ms. Henrot finds inspiration from disparate sources including eBay, where her purchases range from firemen's boots to nude vintage photographs. Sometimes she buys an item just because she likes the picture of its seller. After moving from Paris to New York in late 2012, she says the cargo container with all her stuff was held up by authorities for months—she suspects because its contents were so weird.

As a child, she wanted one day to have a "real job," eager to distinguish herself from her mother, an artist. Nevertheless, she attended art school in Paris, studying animated film. She took a job in an advertising agency, where she learned tricks like how to shoot a piece of cake to make it look more delicious (blow it with a hair dryer so it seems fluffy). Along the way, she was making films on her own, including an inventive music video for the band Octet in which the musicians were rendered as half-real, half-animated bodies. The film was shown in a 2005 exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, a contemporary art center in Paris, and her career as an artist was launched.

Ms. Henrot didn't grow up traveling—she says her mother was afraid of flying—but now her experiences in foreign cultures feed directly into her work. The videos featured at the New Museum include "Coupé/Décalé," an experimental film illustrating a coming-of-age ritual on Pentecost island in the Vanuatu archipelago where young people jump into a void while being held by liana vines around their ankles.

Sometimes her images can be hard to watch. Those turtles in "Grosse Fatigue" are featured with close-ups of their slick tongues and stony eyes. Ms. Henrot, who as a child had a pet turtle named Zoe that escaped through a window of her Paris home, shot the creatures during a vacation in the Seychelles. She filmed a little girl giving a huge turtle a banana and included the footage in her video. "I was interested in the stupidity of man feeding wild animal," she says.

Ms. Henrot brought home a souvenir from that trip: A scar on her hand from a turtle that bit her when she too tried to feed it.           

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Secret Power of Synonyms" @nytimes by KEN JOHNSON

‘Mel Bochner: Strong Language’

Credit Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Words have been the subjects and primary constituents of the enigmatic yet acerbically provocative paintings Mel Bochner has been creating over the past 12 years. “Mel Bochner: Strong Language,” an elegantly produced exhibition at the Jewish Museum, gives them their due and traces their roots back to text-based works that Mr. Bochner created in the ’60s and early ’70s, when he was one of New York’s pre-eminent Conceptual artists.

Mr. Bochner wasn’t alone in his preoccupation with language then. Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson and many other avant-gardists at the time made word art. Also, like Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Smithson, Mr. Bochner wrote critical and theoretical essays with a rigorous, analytic fervor determined to extinguish sloppy, sentimental thinking and writing about art.

The new paintings still revolve around philosophical issues that were dear to the Minimalists and the Conceptualists of the ’60s. The way they flip viewers back and forth between seeing visual forms and reading verbal texts prompts rumination about different modes of perceptual and cognitive consciousness.

They feature lists of synonyms, many gleaned from Roget’s Thesaurus, and often colloquial and vulgar ones. While some are made with a brushy touch, others are neatly lettered in juicy colors and in horizontal rows on flat, colored backgrounds, like Modernist stripe paintings. “Crazy” (2005) offers more than three dozen synonymous words and phrases in rows filling a 5-by-6 1/2-foot brown rectangle, with each word a different color. The list begins with “crazy,” continues with “nutty,” “daffy,” “dippy,” “dizzy” and “loopy” and ends with “foaming at the mouth.” “Die,” also from 2005, runs from “decease,” “expire,” “perish,” “succumb” to “push up daisies” and “sink into oblivion.”

Almost every painting is devoted to more or less negative words, as indicated by titles like “Nothing” (2003), “Useless” (2005), “Contempt” (2005) and “Obscene” (2006). An especially unsettling one is “Jew” (2008), which lists anti-Semitic labels in impulsively printed yellow letters on a brushy gray and black background, colors that pointedly evoke those of the Star of David armbands that the Nazis forced European Jews to wear. (Mr. Bochner, born in 1940, grew up in an observant Jewish household.) More lighthearted, though also rendered in yellow on black, is “The Joys of Yiddish” (2006), where you find words like “nudnick,” “nebbish,” “schmoozer” and “schlemiel.”

There’s an accusatory feeling in some pieces. One made of brushy white letters on a dark brown ground begins with “Liar,” “prevaricator,” “fabulator,” “dissembler,” “deceiver,” “hypocrite.” Who is addressed by these names, you might wonder? Am I the accused? “Silence!” “Cool it!” “Gag it!” “Swallow it!” commands one of the show’s biggest paintings — it’s 10 feet wide — in neat, cheerfully colored letters, as if to cut short your protestations of innocence. Several paintings say only, “Blah blah blah blah,” sarcastically reflecting, presumably, the sort of empty blather produced by advertisers, politicians, government bureaucrats, talk show personalities, journalists, pundits, bloggers and art critics.

The exhibition, which was organized by Norman Kleeblatt, the museum’s chief curator, also includes a selection of Mr. Bochner’s word-based works from the 1960s and ’70s. Among these is a series of small verbal portraits of other artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Dan Flavin and Eva Hesse, made of letters and words composed in configurations that formally reflect the subject’s art. “Portrait of Eva Hesse” (1966) has words like “wrap-up,” “secrete,” “cloak,” “bury” and “obscure” inked in concentric circles, mimicking the circular forms of some of Hesse’s sculptures.

But the newer paintings have a visual and affective impact that Conceptual art of the ’60s and ’70s rarely had. Far from coolly analytic, they’re hotly assertive, charged it seems with crotchety indignation and furious exasperation. And therein lies the crux: What are they so worked up about? It’s hard to say.

Taken one at a time, the paintings are lushly sensuous and bracingly punchy, but seeing many of them together is enervating. The volume is always turned way up; you feel as if you were being yelled at by a word-mad autistic savant. Styles and techniques may vary — some recent pieces have letters with the thickness of cake frosting applied to velvet — but the format of listed words,forcing you repeatedly to read left to right, and top to bottom, enhances a bullying effect.

At the same time, it seems that some of the paintings are mocking themselves. With “Babble” (2011), which begins with “babble,” “blather,” “blabber” and ends with “ad nauseum” (the painting spells it this way), it’s as if it were making fun of its own logorrhea. As with the blah blah paintings, there’s a hint that the artist himself might be wrestling with some kind of inner conflict, possibly between his imaginative, creative self and his skeptical, critical self. It’s hard to say for sure, though. The paintings are resolutely impersonal.

In this regard, a Conceptual piece from 1970 that Mr. Bochner has recreated for the exhibition is worth considering. Irregular letters chalked on a black background painted directly on the wall state, “Language is not transparent.” This might be true literally, if it makes any sense at all. Taken metaphorically it’s debatable. We do speak of some writings as clear and others as impenetrable. Reading Tolstoy you can feel as if you were “seeing through” the words on the page to the characters, landscapes and events they describe. Paintings often are metaphorically transparent, too; they can be like windows onto other worlds or into the depths of an artist’s psyche.

But that sort of transparency is not to be found in Mr. Bochner’s paintings. They are adamantly opaque, both literally and metaphorically. Whatever psychological dynamic animates them is hidden behind their optically aggressive and verbally peevish surfaces. It’s frustrating. You suspect that there’s something deeper activating them, something that would explain their splenetic moods, but you don’t know what it is. What’s he repressing?

As if sensing such questions might be on viewers’ minds, one of the last works in the show demands in loosely written white letters on a small, silver-painted canvas, “Do I have to draw you a picture?” As if you were an idiot for asking. You might want to say: “Well, sure, maybe a picture would help. Maybe all those words are just getting in the way.”

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Whitney Edits a Tale of a Nation" @nytimes by CAROL VOGEL

A year away from opening, the new home of the Whitney Museum of American Art is still a construction site, but it is already a vivid presence in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, and curators have mapped out months’ worth of exhibitions there.

The first show to go on view next spring — an opening date has not yet been set — will tell the story of 20th- and 21st-century American art entirely through the Whitney’s permanent collection. It will include many prominent favorites: Alexander Calder’s “Circus,” Edward Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning,” Andy Warhol’s “Green Coca-Cola Bottles,” Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Music Pink and Blue No. 2,” Jasper Johns’s “Three Flags.” There will also be plenty of work by artists of later generations — Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Kara Walker — who are “now considered pillars of contemporary art,” said Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s chief curator.

Using all 60,000 square feet of the gallery space, including outdoor terraces and rooms for film and video, the exhibition will even capture what American artists have been producing for the last decade.

The building, designed by Renzo Piano, calls for “an entirely new mind-set,” Ms. De Salvo said as she surveyed a capacious gallery, strewed with wires, that has high ceilings and views of the Hudson.

The new structure has more than twice the space of the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue, which allows the museum to take stock of its holdings, she said. “A lot of the collection will be a mystery to the public, either because things have not been on view for decades or, in the case of acquisitions, have never been shown at all,” Ms. De Salvo explained.

The exhibition, to remain on view for around four months, will explore how the meaning of “American” has changed over the years. Artists who live and work in the United States may have been born elsewhere (or vice versa) yet play important parts in an ever-expanding national mix.

The artworks will be arranged chronologically. Making its first appearance at the museum since 1994 will be “V-yramid,” a recently conserved sculpture and video installation from 1982 by Nam June Paik. The room-size piece consists of 40 television sets stacked like a ziggurat, with blurring images and a soundtrack of rock and traditional Korean music.

New acquisitions in the show will extend beyond today’s trendy names and help deepen the diverse narratives woven into the history of American art. For example, the Whitney plans to exhibit a terra cotta head from 1947 by the African-American sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, associated with the Harlem Renaissance. It has never been shown before.

More space will allow for more exhibitions. Scheduled for the fall and winter of 2015-16 is the first full-scale survey of paintings by another figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Archibald Motley, known for his colorful scenes of urban life in Chicago. Running concurrently will be the first full-scale Frank Stella retrospective in this country since the Museum of Modern Art organized one in 1970. (MoMA organized a smaller Stella show 17 years later.)

“A lot of younger artists are particularly interested in Stella’s work,” Ms. De Salvo said, “because of his formal innovation and unending willingness to explore color, form and space.”

Also planned for that period is a show of contemporary art from the collection of the married art advisers Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, who pledged their American art trove to the Whitney two years ago (and their holdings of European artists to the Pompidou Center in Paris). The exhibition will reflect the full range of their collection.

In the spring of 2016, the Whitney plans shows devoted to the artist and filmmaker Laura Poitras and to David Wojnarowicz, the painter, photographer, filmmaker and AIDS activist who was prominent in the East Village art scene of the 1980s.

Because of the complex logistics of the move, Ms. De Salvo said, the next Whitney Biennial will not take place in 2016, as it normally would, but a year later. She said the exact dates have yet to be determined. The current biennial runs through May 25.

THROUGH GOOGLE GLASSES

Always looking to embrace the next big thing, the New Museum says the Google Glass eyewear brand will be the lead sponsor of its 2015 Triennial, which opens next February.

The Triennial explores the work of emerging artists around the world, and this edition is being organized by Lauren Cornell, a curator at the museum, and Ryan Trecartin, the Los Angeles artist and filmmaker.

“The show is very much about the future,” said Lisa Phillips, the New Museum’s director. Neither she nor Janine Gianfredi, who oversees marketing for Google Glass, whose software connects to the Internet, would specify how much money Google was providing for the show.

They did say that the Glass eyewear would be available to visitors at the exhibition. How it will be used is still being discussed and tested, they added. Ms. Gianfredi said she imagined that the viewing experience might in some way replace the conventional audio tour.

Concerns have been raised about the potential of the Glass software to collect information in a way that invades users’ privacy, and the headwear has yet to achieve mainstream acceptance.

But Ms. Gianfredi said that through its apps and social media, Google had identified a consumer appetite for new ways of using technology to create, view and appreciate art. A onetime New Yorker, she said she considered the New Museum a good fit for a trial run. “It is very experimental,” she said.

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