George Lindemann Journal

"Immigrant Drama on Nine Screens" by Kelly Crow

In the late 1980s, Isaac Julien became a hit of London's contemporary art scene by projecting his lush films about poets and protesters onto multiple, dangling screens, rather than one. The video artist was among the first to ask viewers to move around his films instead of simply sitting down.

The George Lindemann Journal

Fine art helps sell real estate in South Florida

By Ina Paiva Cordle

icordle@MiamiHerald.com

George Lindemann Journal - www.georgelindemann.com

Not So Fast: Italian Church Is Halted on Its Way to PS1

Francesco Vezzoli’s Art Show Hits a Snag

Alfonso Di Vincenzo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The church packed for its planned trip to New York.

By TED LOOS and GAIA PIANIGIANI

Published: November 25, 2013

It was a typically elaborate, provocative move by the Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli in a career full of them: He had contracted to buy the ruins of an old deconsecrated church in the southern Italian town of Montegiordano and had planned to ship them to New York, brick by brick, for exhibition in the courtyard of MoMA PS1. His videos would be shown inside.

But “The Church of Vezzoli,” as the exhibition was to be called, was canceled Monday in the midst of a legal imbroglio in Italy; some of the ruins now sit in containers at the Port of Gioia Tauro, while others lie stacked in plastic at the chapel site, on an estate in Calabria.

Local prosecutors are evaluating whether Mr. Vezzoli was trying to export items of artistic and cultural value without authorization, a crime carrying a fine or jail time up to four years. No formal charges have been filed against him, but they could come later.

“All of a sudden, it all exploded, and I feel I was hit by a tornado,” said Mr. Vezzoli, 42, from his home Milan. “I’m in a state of shock.”

Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens, said he had learned of the troubles from Mr. Vezzoli about six weeks ago and that the museum has been left scrambling. “Part of curating is to come up with new ideas — and I started this morning,” Mr. Biesenbach said on Friday.

Mr. Vezzoli, a native of Brescia, Italy, is used to a high level of celebrity and he has been known for his cheekiness in addressing religion in his art. His 2011 show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, “Sacrilegio,” featured images of weeping Madonnas, each with the superimposed face of a supermodel, including Cindy Crawford’s.

His best-known work, the 2005 film “Trailer for the Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula,” featured Helen Mirren, Courtney Love and a fleet of barely clad actors. In 2006, he made himself the subject of a fake version of an E! channel “True Hollywood Story” show that purported to detail his own scandalous behavior.

Now, a real potential scandal is nipping at his heels.

Mr. Vezzoli said that he identified the Montegiordano ruins, about 300 miles southeast of Rome, a year and a half ago, and went about contracting to buy what he called “a skeleton of a building” for around $100,000 from the owner, who had built a new church in front of the old one. The artist said that he had the blessing of the town’s mayor.

“It was falling down the hill,” he said. “We almost felt we were doing some good.”

The deconstruction process had been going on for six months when, in late October,   a passer-by wrote to complain to the Ministry of Culture, and the superintendent in charge of the Calabria region blocked it.

“I got a phone call that I am under criminal investigation,” Mr. Vezzoli said.

Mr. Vezzoli’s lawyer, Massimo Sterpi, argued that in an examination of the estate in 1988, the regional superintendent had not found the church to have cultural or historical value as a monument. But Francesco Prosperetti, the current art superintendent of Calabria, said on Monday, “Under Italian law, the owners should have asked for an authorization to remove the decorative elements from any historic building,” regardless of cultural value.

Mr. Sterpi, the lawyer, says that the artist is not even the legal owner of the ruins. Mr. Vezzoli’s preliminary contract stipulates that the deal is final only when the church is dismantled, provided that the building had already been deemed free of any restriction on legal, religious or national heritage grounds.

“We never managed to sign the final contract,” Mr. Sterpi said, adding that the export process had not been initiated because the ruins were not entirely dismantled. “I am confident that Mr. Vezzoli will prove his innocence and good faith,” he said. “However, the show is over.”

Mr. Vezzoli said that the decision about the church’s status as a possible artistic treasure would take at least four months.

“Even if we win, it’s a Pyrrhic victory,” he said. “We won’t need it by then.”

The MoMA PS1 show was meant to be the third leg of “The Trinity,” a multicity retrospective of Mr. Vezzoli’s work. “Galleria Vezzoli” just ended this past weekend at the Maxxi museum of contemporary art in Rome. “Cinema Vezzoli” is now scheduled to open in April at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Mr. Biesenbach said he and Mr. Vezzoli would meet to look for a new way to show his works at the museum later in 2014. But Mr. Vezzoli said he was not ready to consider another building.

“It’s like love — if this church turns you down, you can’t fall in love again right away,” he said. “My Juliet is being kept captive.”

Mr. Biesenbach suggested that the legal troubles, while unfortunate, dovetailed in some strange way with Mr. Vezzoli’s work. He added that the controversy had aspects of “a real-time performance.”

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A version of this article appears in print on November 26, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Not So Fast: Italian Church Is Halted on Its Way to PS1.

George Lindemann Journal - www.georgelindemann.com

George Lindemann Journal

The Liam Gillick and Louise Lawler show at Casey Kaplan.

By KAREN ROSENBERG

Published: November 21, 2013

525 West 21st Street, Chelsea

Through Dec. 21

In their first collaboration, Liam Gillick and Louise Lawler stay within their comfort zones but manage to nudge us out of ours. Their familiar methods of institutional critique (photographic in Ms. Lawler’s case, sculptural for Mr. Gillick) combine to form a dynamic, disorienting installation.

Mr. Gillick’s contribution is a text piece composed of cutout aluminum sentences, which hang from the ceiling in neat rows and lure readers deeper and deeper into the gallery. Gradually, it reveals a vague and halting narrative about workers at a defunct factory (the Volvo plant in Kalmar, Sweden, as the news release tells us).

Ms. Lawler contributes a striking background, a long vinyl wall sticker that links the three rooms of the gallery. The image printed on it is a stretched-out version of some of her earlier photographs of artworks in bland white-box settings; here, pieces by Degas, Richard Serra and Gerhard Richter, among others, are distorted beyond recognition.

The collaborative ethos of the show, the references to the socialist history of Volvo production, the relentless conveyor belt of the installation and the content of Ms. Lawler’s photographs (individual artworks by top-selling male artists, blended into a single seamless strip) all signal discomfort with the rah-rah capitalism of the current art market. But no alternatives are proposed, and the installation leaves us with a haunting vision of a factory in limbo. As Mr. Gillick’s text puts it, “No one has secured the building, and no one has wrecked it either.”

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George Lindemann Journal

Rosemarie Trockel’s sculpture “Copy Me,” in her show at the Gladstone gallery, may look velvety but is cast in steel.

515 West 24th Street, Chelsea

Through Dec. 21

This exhibition of new work by the internationally admired German conceptualist Rosemarie Trockel has three parts, one good, two not so good. Best is “Copy Me,” a modern sofa cast in steel, with a velvety looking, rusty surface. Nearly 14 feet long, it resembles seating for an institutional waiting room. It’s divided into two parts, each exactly like the other but in reverse; they’re mirror images. It also has a sheet of transparent plastic draped over it, which brings to mind plastic-wrapped furniture in the living rooms of some obsessively clean homeowners.

As a deflating response to industrial steel sculpture like Richard Serra’s, “Copy Me” scores some feminist points, but it’s deceptive formal complexity and deadpan surrealism saves it from being an ideological one-liner.

Less provocative are works resembling Modernist stripe paintings, which, on close inspection, turn out to be made of lengths of colored yarn. Though visually attractive — except for the ugly, plexiglass boxes containing most of them — they add little to the Postmodernist tradition of critique by parody.

Installed in a separate room are sculptural pieces in which cuts of meat cast in plaster — some painted pale colors, some unpainted — are attached to variously shaped, transparent plexiglass panels. Like the yarn works, they’re didactic, albeit obliquely so. They seem to point to a butcherlike relationship between capitalistic humans and the rest of nature. They are visually wan; they could use some of the visceral horror of Paul Thek’s meat sculptures.

George Lindemann Journal

Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon were rivals as well as friends. That scratching sound you hear is Freud clawing at his coffin at the news last week that Bacon’s 1969 portrait of him, a triptych titled “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” went for $142.4 million, making it the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.

The painting it displaced (sold for $119.9 million in 2012) is Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Which is perfect, because that’s the face Freud would have made. He’d have preferred it the other way around, that his 1951 portrait of Bacon smash the record. That’s some painting, as well. Robert Hughes compared Bacon’s face in it to “a hand grenade on the point of detonation.”

Too bad it was stolen from a Berlin gallery in 1988 and hasn’t been seen since, except on “Wanted” posters.

I don’t mean to make Freud sound insecure and vile. Geordie Greig does a handy enough job of that in his new book, “Breakfast With Lucian,” a volume of prying and sabotage dressed up to resemble a book of love.

Freud, whose sexually loaded and densely impastoed portraits made him probably the most important British artist of the second half of the 20th century, died in 2011 at 88. He was intensely private. He granted few interviews and fended off at least one potential biographer, Mr. Greig reports, with the help of hired goons.

Until we have a proper biography, we have this book, written by the editor of The Mail on Sunday, whom Freud admitted into his circle in the final years of his life, or at least far enough that they had breakfast together more than a handful of times. Freud was old and feeble; he let his guard down. Bad move, old bean.

“Breakfast With Freud,” Mr. Greig writes in a mystifying author’s note, was composed “mostly by BlackBerry.” (Even if this were true, why would you admit it?) It displays little feeling for Freud’s work. Its history is patchy. Its tone is frequently what you’d get if you set Robin Leach loose at the Tate Modern.

There was “a Hollywood glamour to this brown-eyed temptress,” we read about one of Freud’s early lovers. Freud and Caroline Blackwood, a Guinness heiress, who would become his second wife, were “the most talked-about young lovers in London, with hidebound society agog.” Young Freud and another temptress “canoodled.”

“Breakfast With Freud” is seldom boring, though, which is something. It is so force-fed with gossip and incident — brawling, rutting, gambling, cuckolding, exacting revenge — that Freud comes off as equal parts Cecil Beaton (society dandy) and Charles Bukowski (crusty bum). He was the original werewolf of London.

The lunatic details start early and keep coming. You turn each page the way a rat hits the little lever for another pellet of crack.

Who knew, for example, that Freud had an obsession “with a Johnny Cash song about swapping his brain with a chicken when the chicken was robbing banks”? (This unlistenable novelty is “The Chicken in Black,” but never mind.) Or that he was caught naked dancing to “Sunday Girl,” the Blondie song?

It’s pretty well known that Freud gave Kate Moss a tramp stamp, made up of two tiny swallows. (Freud supplies to Mr. Greig the unlikely detail that this went down in the back of a London cab.) It’s probably less well known that Freud could imitate a whale masturbating.

At 84, Freud “chucked breadsticks at a man who used flash to take a photograph in the Wolseley,” a London restaurant. That fellow got off easy. A boxer when young, Freud loved to thump or head-butt his fellow Britons. One of his daughters recalls, “Dad used to hit taxi drivers and punched people in the street if he didn’t like the look of them.”

My favorite anecdote, melee division — it’s about the art dealer Jay Jopling — goes this way: “A dapper Old Etonian with signature ‘Joe 90’ glasses, Jopling had been having a quiet drink in Green Street, a dining club in Mayfair, when Lucian entered the room and attacked him. ‘He kicked me on the shins, grabbed the girl I was talking to and walked out with her,’ he said.”

Freud leapt on women (and occasionally men) throughout his life as if he were a flying squirrel in paint-flecked work boots. This volume goes long on his “serial sexual opportunism,” his playing of “musical beds on a grand and anarchic scale.” He married twice, and has many acknowledged and unacknowledged children, but always had overlapping lovers. These women had to poke though his work in progress to see whom else he was sleeping with.

In Mr. Greig’s account, he could be a sadist. “He became quite vicious, really hurt breasts and things,” a lover comments. He liked anal sex with women, an acquaintance reports, because it was redolent of utter domination. In restaurants, he grabbed at waitresses’ thighs.

He liked his girls young — as young as 16, 17 or 18. He got them to his home by offering to paint them, often obtrusively naked. A 22-year-old managed to fend him off, and we read about an early painting session: “He started walking up and down and gesturing as he undid his belt.” After a fight with one lover, he mailed her “a postcard with a crude drawing of her defecating.” No dummy, she held onto it.

Freud painted with agonizing slowness and required his models to be present for every brush stroke. Sessions could drag on for more than a year. After sitting for four months for a Freud portrait, of her breast-feeding her son by Mick Jagger, the model Jerry Hall was late for a session or two. Freud got revenge, we read, by erasing her from the painting. He inserted a man in her place. “Lucian liked to have a pet hate or feud,” Mr. Greig observes.

We do witness Freud commit acts of kindness and generosity in this well-illustrated book, but they are few and far between. In the stray details accumulated here, sinisterly speckled onto the page like Ralph Steadman’s ink blots, he is mostly cruel, loutish, self-centered.

Freud probably was all of these things, some or most of the time. But there is never a sense of seeing him whole in “Breakfast With Lucian.” Mr. Greig turns him into a cartoon, a man without texture.

Almost our last image of Freud here, appropriately enough, is of him two years before death, during a photo shoot, impulsively bopping a wild zebra on the nose. The animal bolted, and he clung to it. He was sent to the hospital with a groin strain, though many feared he’d been hurt much worse.

It all worked out, sort of. Kate Moss showed up, we read, and gave the wicked genius “a cuddle in bed.”

The Museum of Modern Art’s grand, sometimes grating 40-year survey of the German sculptor Isa Genzken is a disturbance in the force of the New York art world. It counters the season’s trend of big retrospectives devoted to male artists and increases from a paltry four to a still paltry five the number of full-dress sixth-floor retrospectives the Modern has bestowed upon women since taking back its expanded building nine years ago.

“Isa Genzken: Retrospective” also makes the museum feel alive and part of the art world, rather than a tourist destination where everyone lines up for the Magritte show or throngs the modernist parts of the collection even as galleries devoted to overthought, pleasure-averse displays of recent art stand virtually empty. The dour, largely color-free sampling of art since 1980 in the museum’s large second-floor galleries is a perfect example.

Upstairs, the best parts of the Genzken show present a markedly different species, one that is brash, improvisational, full of searing color and attitude and that decimates taste and frequently looks nothing like art. Inspired by popular culture and historic events, and influenced by its creator’s many annual trips to New York, Ms. Genzken’s mature efforts are bristling assemblages and installations that she began making in 1997, using cheesy materials and objects to concoct a raw, unapologetic beauty and a weirdly elliptical if literal-minded social commentary, often about the United States, power and war. Their seemingly jerry-built components run to office furniture, tiny toy soldiers and cars, baking pans, torn beach umbrellas, mirrored foil, metallic tape, ribbons, jewelry, fabric and all manner of bright colored plastic — flowers, chairs, rain boots, American eagles, bowls, buckets. Architecture is a frequent inspiration and reference.

Ms. Genzken, who turns 65 next week, has spent so much time in New York that she might almost qualify as a German-American artist. It is hard to imagine her work without the city’s skyscrapers, street life, trash and style, not to mention Canal Street and its rich vein of cheap shiny materials and job lots, already exploited by artists across generations and as diverse as Lucas Samaras, Lynda Benglis and Steve Keister. And while it may be largely a coincidence, most of her best work has been done since the Sept. 11 attacks, which she witnessed during a visit here and has made one of her themes, especially in the superbly assured works in the show’s final and strongest gallery.

Slide Show | ‘My Work Is Very Difficult to Understand’ A look at the work of the German artist Isa Genzken, the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

The first comprehensive Genzken exhibition in an American museum, this show has been organized by Laura Hoptman, the Modern’s curator of painting and sculpture, and Sabine Breitwieser, its former curator of media and performance art and now director of the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Austria. They collaborated with curators at the museums to which it will travel: Michael Darling of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Jeffrey Grove of the Dallas Museum of Art. Ms. Genzken is unusually prolific, and the group’s effort provides plenty to look at and only improves as it goes along, cycling and recycling through an extraordinary range of postwar styles, from Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism up to the present.

This exhibition is a one-artist celebration of the increasingly loose-jointed, detached form of assemblage that may be the central, most robust aesthetic of our time. This tendency was explored in 2007 at the New Museum with “Unmonumental,” a broad survey of 30 assemblage artists. As the oldest participant in “Unmonumental” by at least 14 years, Ms. Genzken was its presumptive éminence grise. Yet her originality and influence, while often alluded to, are rarely parsed in detail, and the Modern’s catalog continues this habit. I don’t doubt her influence on many younger, especially European artists. But she is one of a host of women who began in the late 1980s to view assemblage — the piecing of disparate parts into unruly wholes — as an expansive, unbounded, antiheroic mode that could be simultaneously personal, political and formal.

Several of these women — including Jessica Stockholder, Cady Noland, Sarah Lucas and Rachel Harrison — actually began expanding assemblage before Ms. Genzken. Sadly, the catalog essays associate Ms. Genzken only with established names like Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter (to whom she was married in the 1970s and ’80s), Eva Hesse, Dan Graham and a few others. It omits Sigmar Polke, whose pop-culture-based, often tawdry paintings are at least a precedent, and Rosemarie Trockel, another female German artist of her generation struggling in a field that was and maybe still is unusually male. Whether by the writers’ choice or Ms. Genzken’s directive, these omissions perpetuate the myth of the artist as isolated genius unconnected to a crowded field. The same questions apply to the catalog, which does not mention that her grandfather — whom she may have met only once — was a Nazi, which is strange for an artist for whom catastrophe is a theme.

But back to the show, which begins by setting the teeth on edge with 12 raucous new sculptures in the form of bizarre looking “Schauspieler” (“Actors”) mannequins. Clustered a bit too densely outside the entrance, they are garbed in strange combinations of garments and headgear and festooned with swaths of fabric and various masks. Forming a very mixed gathering that evokes the homeless, loners, extreme fashionistas, transvestites and members of other subcultures, these beings pay tribute to difference, eccentricity and imagination. Yet they are so outlandish that the mannequins also serve as pedestals for the assemblage sculpture they wear.

And as if this weren’t enough, the walls behind them are covered with posters for her previous exhibitions. Impressively large, some feature photographs of her, including one in which she slouches in a chair in a black jacket and pants. Suggesting a well-known image of Marlene Dietrich in a tuxedo, it is evidence of the cool, clearly competitive, sexually ambiguous persona Ms. Genzken often presents.

In the galleries, the works move in roughly chronological fashion, in distinct, often startling series, presenting an artist who seems to become younger and more vital with each decade, as her work becomes more spontaneous and grounded in reality. Sleek, painted-wood, low-lying floor pieces — evoking futuristic weapons or spaceships — and a few feints at found objects and Conceptual art give way to rough ruinlike structures from cast concrete and paint. While not terribly original, they strike a haunted emotional note and, shown with a series of translucent resin pieces resembling French windows, turn the show’s largest gallery into an eerie indoor Monument Valley.

Around the edges of these early series are undistinguished paintings, some openly derivative of Mr. Richter’s work, and glimpses of spontaneity: a few small aggressively modeled forms in plaster, one garnished with bits of trash and two wiglike formations of bright epoxy resin poured over cloth, slowly rotating on motorized iron poles, looking a little like severed heads.

Some of these pieces reveal a talent for conjuring competing senses of scale and reality, the way painters often combine contrasting notions of space. First, the concrete pieces have high steel pedestals that enable them to loom above the viewer. In later works, she juxtaposes everyday objects with small figures that give them a monumental scale. In one of the “Ground Zero” works, a stack of plastic, basketlike tables becomes a vast, alienating parking garage with the addition of rows of minuscule cars.

The second half of the show is more or less explosive. Ms. Genzken breaks into her assemblage style, first with a group of modest hanging mobiles from 1997 made of shiny aluminum kitchenware punctuated with a burst of spray paint, then with a series that sends up the Bauhaus (from 2000, with an unprintable title). It combines splintery plywood bases, neon colors and disjointed buildinglike forms, one covered with seashells and tiny architectural-model trees. She circles back to Minimalism, with corrupting elegance, in the next series, tall squared-off columns covered in various sheets of mirror metal and wood veneer. Then follow small tableaus, on pedestals at eye height, of calamities and conflicts, piled with debris and sometimes manned by the toy soldiers. Finally, there are the “Ground Zero” sculptures, whose shiny forms read as resilience.

Although Ms. Genzken sometimes seems to change ideas and approaches rather than develop them, her work accumulates with an insistent force and momentum that will keep you alert to what turn she will take next.

“Isa Genzken: Retrospective” runs from Saturday through March 10 at the Museum of Modern Art; moma.org.

George Lindemann Journal

Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum, was proudly escorting a reporter through the main gallery of his institution's new Renzo Piano-designed addition when his smile suddenly faded. Velázquez's "Don Pedro de Barberana," the full-length portrait installed in front of the glass wall at the far end of the expansive 7,100-square-foot south gallery, appeared to have lost his pulse. Mr. Lee quickly summoned one of his staffers to lower the second of the window's two layers of gray-scrim window shades. No longer upstaged by the sunlight behind him, Don Pedro quickly sprang back to life.

More challenging than the complexities of achieving proper levels of natural light (also regulated via adjustable, preprogrammed louvers on the roof) may be deciding how Mr. Piano's expansive, flexible yet in some ways prescriptive spaces can best be adapted to the diverse types of art they will contain.

Loosely subdivided by movable walls that appear to touch neither the ceiling nor the floor, the temporary layouts devised for the inaugural installations in the Piano galleries lure you forward and sideways to works in the next groupings. Covered by the same ivory fabric used on walls that subdivide the galleries in the original Louis Kahn-designed building, the Piano Pavilion's interior walls will be reconfigured or eliminated, depending on what's being shown there.

Although the pavilion's inaugural display consists of European, Asian, African and Oceanic art from the Kimbell's celebrated permanent collection, in February its main gallery will become the new home for the museum's rich, varied program of temporary loan shows, beginning with Samurai armor from the Dallas-based Barbier-Mueller Collection, to be followed next fall by French Impressionist portraits from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

The space requirements of such loan shows were the driving force behind the new glass-and-concrete, freestanding Piano Pavilion: For many years, the 41-year-old Kimbell has desperately needed permanent space for its superlative and growing permanent collection, much of which had to be hauled into storage whenever the museum mounted major exhibitions, such as this year's acclaimed "Bernini: Sculpting in Clay," co-organized with the Metropolitan Museum.

Visitors who traveled from afar to see a broad representation of the Kimbell's roughly 350-work trove often had to settle for a small selection of its must-sees, such as signature works by Duccio, Caravaggio, de La Tour and Cézanne, which have been joined by stellar recent acquisitions of newly rediscovered early works by Michelangelo and Guercino.

Just as architecture aficionados will inevitably compare the physical attributes of Mr. Piano's pavilion with those of its acclaimed 1972 sister structure, so museumgoers are likely to compare how art is experienced in the two buildings. Whereas the Kahn's closed, barrel-vaulted spaces feel chapel-like, inspiring an almost religious reverence and awe, Mr. Piano's airy, open spaces are transparent, populist and unintimidating.

The ethereal, silvery glow of Mr. Kahn's light is the museum equivalent of Carnegie Hall's gold-standard acoustics. Measured against this high bar, the effectiveness of Mr. Piano's elaborately engineered illumination solution for his pavilion will likely receive intense scrutiny.

Seen over two sunny-to-partly-cloudy days, the relative merits of each building's qualities of light are almost impossible to compare—not only because they're so different, but also because the skylights of each yield variable conditions, depending on the time of day and amount of cloud cover. But the Kahn's glow seemed richer in the early morning, while the paintings in Mr. Piano's building appeared more vibrant in the afternoon.

Each building succeeds better with particular kinds of art. The subtleties of color and composition of European Old Master paintings, mainstays of the Kimbell's permanent collection, seem overmatched and subverted by the cold gray concrete walls of the Piano Pavilion. Even Caravaggio's renowned "The Cardsharps" (c. 1595) seemed less vibrant there than in the Kahn building.

Temporarily displayed for a two-month run in Mr. Piano's new space, the Kimbell's Old Master paintings and sculptures will rejoin its 19th- and 20th-century holdings this March in the Kahn building, where the beige travertine walls provide a warmer, richer backdrop for Old Masters. Currently displayed there (through Feb. 16, 2014) is "The Age of Picasso and Matisse : Modern Masters from the Art Institute of Chicago." Opening last month, the show was an irresistible opportunity that arose on short notice because of the Art Institute's decision to close until April the top floor of its Piano-designed 2009 Modern Wing to make certain fixes. The Kimbell's officials had already decided that they preferred to inaugurate the new, untested spaces with their own familiar holdings.

The paintings that look best in the new space, as Mr. Lee noted, are those suffused with a bluish cast, most notably François Boucher's 1769 series of four monumental, fleshy Rococo renderings of Roman mythological subjects, which occupy one long wall in the new pavilion—the first time the Kimbell has been able to show them side-by-side.

Architectural concrete, an unaccustomed material for Mr. Piano, has seldom been used by museums for walls on which paintings are hung. Although the mixture devised for this project created an unusually smooth, light gray wall surface with a titanium-enhanced luster, its characteristic mottling, splotches and "telegraphing" (dark horizontal striations caused by metal reinforcing bars inside the concrete) distract from a focus on the art.

On the other hand, sculptural works with a dynamic physical presence make a stronger statement in Mr. Piano's austere surroundings than in the elegant Kahn building, where they compete with the pitted texture of the travertine walls. In the Piano Pavilion's main gallery, Houdon's gleaming 1779 white marble bust of a stout nobleman, Aymard-Jean de Nicolay, prominently holds court at the end of one of the two long main pathways created by freestanding interior walls.

In the smaller west gallery, home to Asian art from the collection, the concrete serves as a compatible backdrop for a gray schist stela, "Bodhisattva Khasarpana Lokeshvara" (Bengal, India; c. 11th-12th century). But it clashes with the delicacy of the gold-leaf, six-fold Japanese screen in the same gallery—"Spring and Autumn Flowers, Fruits and Grasses" (Edo period, 18th century).

At Tuesday's press preview, Jennifer Casler Price, curator for Asian and non-Western art, observed that too much light was leaking into the Asian art gallery, the only one without a skylight, where illumination was supposed to be kept very low to protect light-sensitive scrolls. The offending rays were coming from an unshaded expanse of glass along the corridor leading to the gallery. The glare made it difficult to view works installed on either side of the gallery's entrance, and it also reflected off the layer of glass protecting a Japanese hanging scroll, Shibata Zeshin's "Waterfall and Monkeys" (1872).

Selections from the permanent collection of Asian art will remain in the Piano building (as will African and Pre-Columbian art, in the north gallery), after the European paintings leave. The Asian art may sometimes be supplanted by temporary shows of other light-sensitive works, such as prints and drawings.

And George T.M. Shackelford, the museum's deputy director, who set up some provocative new dialogues among familiar paintings in the Piano installation, can be counted on again to reshuffle the deck, maybe even adding one or two acquisitions he has his eye on, once the European paintings return to the Kahn flagship.

Now, at least, the Kimbell has sufficient space for its vaulting ambitions.

Ms. Rosenbaum writes for the Journal on art and museums, and blogs as CultureGrrl at www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl.