The heirs of a French art dealer are demanding that a Norwegian museum return one of its featured paintings, a Matisse that was confiscated by the Nazis in 1941 in Paris.

The family of Paul Rosenberg, a prominent Parisian gallery owner, has documents showing that the painting, known as “Woman in Blue in Front of Fireplace,” or “Blue Dress in a Yellow Armchair,” was among those in the possession of the Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering in 1942. The documents include a long list, stamped with Goering’s initials, itemizing artworks taken from Mr. Rosenberg’s vault

But the museum, the Henie Onstad Arts Center, founded in 1968 by the Olympic skating champion Sonja Henie and her husband, the shipping magnate Niels Onstad, says Mr. Onstad bought the painting in good faith more than 60 years ago, giving the center ownership rights to the work under Norwegian law. The law requires a minimum of 10 years’ possession.

The museum, outside Oslo, said it did not know the painting had once been Nazi plunder, but it does not contest that, in light of the evidence. It says that it is continuing to negotiate with the heirs and to study the work’s provenance, and that it will discuss the family’s request at a board meeting next month.

“We need to investigate this matter properly,” said the museum’s director, Tone Hansen. “It is too early to draw any conclusions. We are in dialogue with the family and will continue to be so.”

She added, “This case has other aspects than pure legal aspects that have to be taken into consideration.”

The Rosenberg family became aware of the Matisse’s location last summer, when the Art Loss Register, an art-recovery company that had put the painting on its list of missing artworks, noticed that it was on loan to the Pompidou Center in Paris. The museum and the Rosenbergs have been negotiating quietly since.

Museum officials met twice with family representatives, first in Norway and then in New York. Marianne Rosenberg, a New York lawyer who is a granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg and took part in the second meeting, said a museum official offered to help resolve the matter by placing a plaque next to the Matisse, acknowledging that Paul Rosenberg had owned it. The family rejected the offer, she said.

A museum spokeswoman said she could not comment on the talks.

The Matisse was painted in 1937, the year Mr. Rosenberg bought it. According to documents gathered from Nazi files, as well as records kept by Mr. Rosenberg and his heirs, it was one of about 160 works that German soldiers were sent to seize from the Rosenberg Gallery’s vaults as part of a widespread confiscation of art owned by Jews.

“This is the most well-documented claim I have ever seen,” said Christopher A. Marinello, a lawyer and the director of the Art Loss Register.

By 1942, the painting was in the hands of a Paris collector, Paul Pétridès. In 1949, museum records show, it was in the possession of Galerie Bénézit of Paris, from which, museum officials said, Mr. Onstad bought it in either 1949 or 1950. Mr. Marinello said that a lawyer for the museum, Kyrre Eggen, informed the Rosenbergs that the museum was researching whether it was possible that Mr. Rosenberg, who returned to Europe after the war in an effort to recover his property, took part in a transaction involving the painting before its purchase by Mr. Onstad.

Marianne Rosenberg called the museum’s theory “complete and utter fiction.”

“Our family was deeply affected by the war,” she said, “and we do not make frivolous claims, and that assertion is frankly insulting.”

The museum said it had never tried to hide its ownership of the painting, which it has lent to several European museums.

Ms. Rosenberg said it was not surprising that her family had not discovered the Matisse earlier, given that it has been busy for decades trying to recover more than 400 items looted by the Nazis and scattered around the world.

“The onus is not on the claimant to have to go scooting around looking in every catalog and small museums hunting for their stolen art,” she said.

The Matisse is among the prized possessions of the arts center, which has two Picassos, two Matisses and works by Miró, Klee and several dozen other prominent Modernists that it refers to as its “core collection.”

The museum’s initial collection was largely the artwork given it by Henie and Mr. Onstad. Henie, who won gold medals in Olympics figure skating in 1928, 1932 and 1936 before becoming a Hollywood star, died in 1969. Mr. Onstad died in 1978.

http://http//www.nytimes.com/2013/04/06/arts/design/rosenberg-family-asks-norwegian-museum-to-return-a-matisse.html?ref=arts&_r=0

When it comes to staying connected, Twitter stands out from the social networking crowd for its constant flow of breaking news and pictures straight from the source. This Miami Art Week, Twitter can come in handy for more than just living vicariously though the lives of Miami's social butterflies. Whether you're looking for insider details on the art fairs, galleries, and parties you should be at, or simply looking to connect with likeminded individuals, it's all a click of a follow button away. Here are 27 Twitter accounts in no particular order you'll want filling up your feed during Miami Art Week.

1. Social media maven and Miami "It" girl Maria Arguello is your source for all the best happenings in town. Come MAW, she'll know where to go and where to eat, and she'll tweet you all about it.

2. We can only imagine how stocked Owen's inbox must be with the most sought after invites. We wouldn't expect anything less from the stylish, Loubuotin wearing publisher of Miami magazine.

3. Donnamarie Baptiste is the Events/Production Manager for Art Basel Miami Beach as well as an independent curator, organizing cutting edge exhibitions and events.

4. As the most fashionable man in Miami, The Webster's John Lin is automatically on the list of the most exclusive Art Basel events you only wish you could get into. Follow Lin for an insider point of view on the most fabulous goings-on during Art Week.

5. James Echols and Annette Peikert, the duo behind Soul Of Miami—the South Florida events and nightlife guide — are the most social couple in Miami. They're always at the scene of the best parties, gallery openings, and galas, all while providing a play by play, or shall we say a tweet by tweet?

6. Ocean Drive Magazine's Twitter bio saids it all. "The Bible of South Beach" will have your twitter feed buzzing with posts on the most fabulous MAW events.

7. Visit artist Jessy Nite's twitter feed, and you'll see she has some top-secret art installation in the works for Basel this year. Hit follow to see what she has up her sleeve.

8. The Webster's darling CEO Laure Heriard Dubreuil is also head of Miami's fashion Clan—she'll undoubtedly be hanging with the best dressed crowd throughout the week. It's only natural for those with a penchant for fashion to be curious about what she's wearing up to.

9. Publicist, writer and art lover Galena Mosovich is your gal for insightful tweets on the best of MAW art and where to have a cocktail.

10. Local urban-pop artist Ruben Ubiera is one of the collaborating artists for this Art Basel season's Pop-Up Piano Miami, a public arts project that brings awareness to Miami's music scene by having eight Steinway & Sons pianos painted by local artists set up throughout the city for "pop-up" concerts.

11. Bardot is providing the stage for artists in the likes of Neon Indian and Nicolas Jaar during Art Basel. Get the lowdown on all the dates and times for a post art fair show.

12. Dinners, parties, book signings, and installations. The Standard hotel has a promising agenda for the week, not to mention a spa to relax at post mayhem.

13. Just in time for Art Week, the cocktail bar is slated to open permanently at the beginning of December. Hit The Broken Shaker's follow button for the anticipated opening date, that way you're assured to be one of the first to sip on one of their magic elixirs.

14. Figuring out where to eat in the midst of Art Week mania can leave one feeling hopeless. Let The Chowfather ease things for you with his insightful tweets on where and what to eat.

15. Stay up to date on MOCA's Art Basel offerings—from parties to tours to exhibits.

16. Did you know the Bass Museum of Art offered an Art Pass for Art Fair Week? Tips and information like this are tweeted daily.

17. The official twitter of Art Basel Miami Beach provides news and details on exhibitions, artist talks, tours, and more.

18. Between Johnson’s eye for all that is up and coming and her seamless blending of eloquent snark and critical observation, we’re sure the editorial director and founder of ArtFagCity.com will lead us in the direction of some pretty good art.

19. Oh you don’t follow the communications firm that has the one and only Art Basel Miami Beach as one of their clients? You might want to get on that. Oh, they also handle communications for the Gagosian galleries, Dallas Contemporary, the Parrish Art Museum and Madison Square Art, just to name a few.

20. Do you remember that insane barbeque that Art.sy hosted on the beach in conjunction with Louis Vuitton last year? You may want to follow them just so you don’t miss out on whatever’s up their sleeves this year, but their insightful feed is sure to break down which are the better fairs and installations as well.

21. The lensman behind World Red Eye Photos, Seth Browarnik is the veritable eye of Miami. Browarnick's Twitter feed is always chock full of Miami's who's who galavanting around town.

22. Often called the “alternative” art fair, Fountain is going to be kicking it with an abundance street art and wild performances this year, per usual. Rumor has it that they’re also planning to do a rendition of the famous, Brooklyn series Tiki Disco party on Saturday night as well.

23. What you’re looking for specifically with this one is this hashtag #MovingtheStill. This, people, is the first ever animated GIF Festival, held by our one and only favorite microblog Tumblr, in conjunction with Paddle8.

24. The Brooklyn-based editor and co-founder of the renowned art blogazine, Hyperallergic.com, has a giddy and contagious passion for art, particularly of the street, performance and internet variety. And if you don’t follow him we can guarantee that you’ll probably overlook some of the best art Miami Art Week has to offer this year.

25. Monsieur Director of MoMA PS1 announced shortly after that b*tch Sandy that he was cancelling the museum’s annual party during Art Basel to throw a fundraiser for victims of the hurricane instead. We think it’s still going to be a party.

26. As Société Perrier’s very own Miami Market Manager, Eunique Fowler is naturally always out and about unearthing Miami's hidden gems and attending the most talked about events in town.

27. Last, but certainly not least, follow us at @SPerrier_USA for up to the minute coverage on all things Miami Art Week.

Christie's

MASSIVE FLOWERS: Jeff Koons became one of the world's priciest living artists when his metal 'Tulips' sold for $33.6 million, over the $20 million estimate.

To gauge collectors' runaway confidence in the contemporary art market, consider this: A week ago, the world's major auction houses got $447 million from five Impressionist and modern art sales. On Wednesday, Christie's got nearly that much from a single sale of contemporary art.

Values for contemporary art—defined as any art created after 1945—are always in flux because art history hasn't had time to weigh its lasting merits. But the number of high prices attained during New York's fall sales proves newer art still attracts a broad group of competitive global collectors. In the past week alone, Sotheby's BID -1.04%got $75 million for a Mark Rothko abstract and $40.4 million for a Jackson Pollock drip painting. Rival Christie's sold a $43.7 million Andy Warhol silk-screen and a $40.4 million Franz Kline abstract.

As a result, Sotheby's scored its biggest-ever auction on Tuesday with a sale that topped $375 million; Christie's also made history the following night with a $412.2 million sale that represented its second-highest sale in company history after a $491 million blockbuster in 2006. This latest round—which includes a series by smaller auctioneer Phillips de Pury & Co.—concludes Friday. In February, the market will again be tested with a round of sales in London.

Why did collectors sniff at the older offerings but giddily embrace the new? Dealers say the homogenization of international art tastes may have played a role. Colorful abstracts are popular now in part because they don't require the nuanced cultural translations of Chinese scroll paintings or German Expressionist portraits. And at a time when other investment vehicles appear stagnant, collectors see a chance to profit by buying and selling newer artists whose price levels may still be rising.

A closer read of the week's results hints at something else: Collectors are finding ways within the contemporary-art arena to hedge their bets by buying older works created in the 1950s and 1960s by artists who are well-established yet still considered contemporary. Collectors are particularly bidding up the couple dozen artists who found fame right after World War II—including classic Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline. The Pennsylvania-born painter, known for splaying thick, feverish brush strokes atop white canvases, was overlooked during the market's last run-up. Now, Asian collectors are bidding him up. They competed heavily for Christie's untitled Kline, which on Wednesday went for $40.4 million, over the estimate. Minutes later, an Asian bidder snagged a smaller Kline from 1955 for $6.4 million, again besting the estimate.

American and European collectors also chased after rare Abstract Expressionist examples by Jackson Pollock and Hans Hofmann. Both painters have long been revered by museums but neither has seen a price spike to rival the kind attained by later favorites like Francis Bacon or Gerhard Richter. Bidders competed heavily for Hofmann's "Swamp" series from the late 1950s, examples of which sold for around $4 million apiece—above their price tags but a bargain compared with similarly candy-colored Richters. Pollock's spattered "Number 4, 1951" finally got its due, selling for $40.4 million, over its $30 million estimate and setting a new auction record for the artist.

Richter snagged a couple big prices this round—Sotheby's got $17.4 million for his "Abstract Painting" from 1990 and Christie's got $15.3 million for another example from 1992—but his momentum appears to be slowing. Several Richters in these sales found no takers, including one offered by Christie's from hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen that stalled at $8.8 million.

Jeff Koons, on the other hand, got a boost when his rainbow-colored bouquet of enormous metal "Tulips" sold for $33.6 million, over the $20 million estimate. The sale gives Mr. Koons bragging rights as the second-priciest living artist after Richter.

But it was Warhol who proved once again why he's the warhorse of contemporary art: Between the houses' regular sales and an auxiliary sale of lower-priced pieces coming directly from his namesake foundation, around 400 Warhols came onto the market last week—and nearly all of them sold. From a $3,500 Polaroid snapshot of red poinsettias to a $16.3 million silk-screen of a man leaping to his death to a $23.7 million reproduction of a Marlon Brando movie still, collectors snapped up a variety pack of Warhols spanning his Pop oeuvre.

On Monday, Christie's inaugural sale of pieces from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts totaled $17 million; a majority of the offerings sold within or above their asking prices. Michael Straus, the foundation's chairman, said the result "proves our strategy was the right thing to do" to raise funds for the foundation's charitable causes.

After Christie's $412.2 million blockbuster two days later, specialist Koji Inoue summed up the contemporary-art market's mood more succinctly: "Talk about a flight to quality."

By Kelly Crow

NO GILT, NO GLORY The furniture collection designed by Brad Pitt with Frank Pollaro includes a glass-topped table with a 24-karat gold-plated base.

PRODUCT design can be a thankless job. Many designers don’t get to claim authorship of their work, and much of what they make, from sleds to spatulas, is assumed to be conceived on the factory floor without a jot of human intervention.

So it may encourage designers to know that Brad Pitt not only respects what they do but takes pains to be one of them.

Four Academy Award nominations? Bah! Twice named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive? Phooey! Mr. Pitt has spent a good deal of his off-screen time establishing his credibility in architecture and the applied arts. He designed the wedding bands for his marriage to Jennifer Aniston (and sued the jeweler for copying and distributing them). He was spotted at the 2008 Design Miami show buying artfully lumpy bronze chairs by the British designer Max Lamb. He apprenticed with the architect Frank Gehry. And, most impressively, his Make It Right foundation brought serious money and talent to the project of rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

If all the world’s a stage, Mr. Pitt appears to have a special feeling for its sets and props. Now he has escalated his involvement by designing furniture.

Collaborating with the luxury furniture maker Frank Pollaro in Union, N.J., Mr. Pitt has sketched and overseen the production of about a dozen limited-edition pieces. The group, Mr. Pollaro said, includes a bed, club chairs, dining tables, side tables, a bar stool and bathtub, and will be presented along with items created exclusively by Pollaro Custom Furniture at a gallery show in New York next week.

Mr. Pollaro met Mr. Pitt in 2008, when he was asked to build an Art Deco-style desk based on an Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann design as a birthday gift for Angelina Jolie. While installing the desk at the Pitt-Jolie residence in France, he saw a sketchbook filled with drawings the actor had made of furniture over a decade. Mr. Pollaro offered to produce some of the items.

“This is not a licensing situation,” Mr. Pollaro said about the partnership. “This is not Pollaro pays Pitt for his name. This is Brad Pitt controlling every single line. I gave him assistance with engineering and materials selection, but the reality is, the man is a great designer.” (Mr. Pitt was not available for comment.)

How great was a question we submitted to four experts: Murray Moss, founder of the design consultancy and gallery Moss Bureau and a former actor; Sheila Bridges, the New York-based interior designer who kitted out Bill Clinton’s Harlem office; Kurt Andersen, the novelist, public radio host and former architecture and design critic of Time magazine; and Giulio Cappellini, artistic director of the Italian furniture company Cappellini, and a noted booster of emerging design talent.

The group reviewed the designs and returned their comments by e-mail. On the whole, they avoided the lure of snark and made thoughtful and surprisingly supportive observations. This was all the more impressive considering that Mr. Pollaro released only a few computerized renderings of the collection, all of which left something to the imagination: It was not clear, for instance, that the bathtub was produced in a high-quality white Italian marble, or what the price would be. “At this point, we haven’t even set the prices,” Mr. Pollaro said.

FIRST WORD THAT COMES TO MIND?

Murray Moss: “Stifled.” Designing, like acting, requires that one take an action. One enters on stage with a clear purpose. Brad Pitt is a great actor; he knows that he needs to speak through his work in his own voice, and he can do that fiercely better than anyone. These pieces are too nice; I do not hear Mr. Pitt’s voice unleashed with full authority.

Sheila Bridges: “Modern.” The furniture looks as though it is very well made and seems consistent with the exceptional quality and workmanship Frank Pollaro has built his reputation on.

Kurt Andersen: “Swanky.” Which is the word I’ve used for many years to describe expensive, curvy, shiny modern things meant to look stylish.

Giulio Cappellini: “Timeless.” It’s hard to give a timing for these products that may have been designed several decades ago or today. The articles, however, are elegant.

DO YOU FIND ANY ASPECT OF THIS COLLECTION SURPRISING?

Ms. Bridges: I’m always a bit wary when supermodels and bona fide Hollywood celebrities become furniture designers. I’m not sure what I expected, but I must admit I was pleasantly surprised. Because of Frank Pollaro’s expertise with rare woods, I guess I expected to see a collection that felt heavier. It is refreshing to see him veer from the materials he’s most accustomed to working with.

Mr. Andersen: The shiny metal surprised me specifically; the mod Trumpian swankiness, in general. Heretofore, Mr. Pitt’s design sensibility — as embodied by Frank Gehry and other designers of the Make It Right houses in New Orleans — has seemed very different than that. Also, I was surprised to discover that the bathtub was a bathtub; I thought it was an ashtray.

Mr. Cappellini: The work looks very strongly influenced by the Bauhaus and Art Deco, which may seem contradictory. In one case, the style is sinuous and rounded; in the other, the forms are rigid and square. This, however, is part of freedom of the designer, which does not surprise me in a negative way.

Mr. Moss: These pieces address “line”: they are formal studies of movement and growth; they are projectiles generated by nature and/or mathematics. They surprise me, coming from a person whose work I know to be so famously “reactive” and seemingly less conscious about formal aesthetics.

WOULD YOU RECOMMEND ANY OF THIS WORK TO A CLIENT?

Ms. Bridges: My favorite piece, by far, is the dining table. This piece in particular seems a bit reminiscent of the Eameses’ iconic laminate tables with wire-rod bases. Pitt’s bases are less rectilinear, more fluid and luxurious, so there seems to be a nod to both Art Nouveau and Art Deco in his collection. It would be great if the dining table base came in a variety of finishes to choose from (which I assume it does). I don’t specify a lot of glass and metal tables (most of my clients prefer wood), but I would specify this dining table (depending on the price) and pair it with antique wood side chairs or ones that are more classic, like a set of upholstered Brno chairs by Mies van der Rohe.

WOULD YOU WANT ANY OF THESE PIECES IN YOUR HOME?

Mr. Andersen: Possibly the oval table — in the guest room of a second home, if I owned a second home.

IF BRAD PITT ASKED YOU TO CONSULT ON HIS NEXT COLLECTION, WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU OFFER?

Mr. Moss: I would say, “Mr. Pitt, you are a great actor. Stay that person, with all of his confidence and drive and risk-taking, when designing. These first pieces are audition monologues; you already have the part. If you’re going to draw a line in space, do it as Brad Pitt.”

SHOULD THE DESIGN INDUSTRIES BE ENCOURAGED BY MR. PITT’S INTEREST? MORE TO THE POINT, SHOULD HE BE ENCOURAGED?

Mr. Cappellini: Surely, it is very positive that Mr. Pitt supports and promotes design. I recently saw one of his houses published in a magazine and I found it very nice, with the presence of some iconic products that have made the history of design. I think his passion for design should absolutely be encouraged, not so much because of his famous name but because of his attitude.

Mr. Andersen: I think his design enthusiasms are wonderful, and I’m a big believer in the amateur spirit. Enthusiasm, however, is necessary but not sufficient for making great design. I think he should be emphatically encouraged to continue his activities as a design activist, collector, impresario and client.

Mr. Moss: Konstantin Stanislavsky, the great innovator in the teaching of acting, understood and conceded that “every person who is really an artist desires to create inside of himself another, deeper, more interesting life than the one that actually surrounds him.” How can we not encourage this?

Ms. Bridges: I’m not convinced after seeing three table designs (and a bathtub that reminds me of an ashtray) that Brad Pitt should quit his day job to be in the furniture or product design game. Unless that means I can be an actor for a day and get paid $7 million to star in a Chanel No. 5 perfume ad.

Responding to the comments, Mr. Pollaro reiterated his admiration for Mr. Pitt. “Having worked side by side with Brad for hundreds of hours on the Pitt-Pollaro collection,” he wrote in an e-mail, “I am impressed by his commitment to express his own artistic vision.” He also clarified that “the metal pieces will be available in gold, silver, nickel, titanium and patinated bronze, all in both polished and satin finishes.” The one-off pieces can be seen Nov. 13 to 15 at a show in Chelsea. Information: (908) 206-1888 or pollaro.com.

Introducing bass art pass 2012! Join today and get everything you need for December Art Fair Week including a $250 or $1,000 level membership to the Bass Museum of Art, VIP passes to satellite fairs December 3-9, 2012, a customized Art Fair Week guide, a limited edition Bass Museum of Art tote bag and more. Quantities are limited on a first come, first served basis.

$250 level benefits
* Complimentary admission for two to Bass Museum of Art VIP opening reception of The Endless Renaissance – Six Solo Artist Projects: Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Barry X Ball, Walead Beshty, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Ged Quinn and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook – Wednesday December 5, 2012 | 9pm-12am

* Unlimited Free Admission all year long to the museum

* Free admission to special programs and activities, including 11 free Beats After Sunset (value $110)

* 4 single admission guest passes to the museum (value $32)

* Invitations to upper-level special receptions

* Reciprocal membership benefits at 625 museums in the North American Reciprocal Program

* 15% discount at elemental@thebass (museum shop)

* Complimentary admission for two to Bass Museum of Art fundraiser – A Night at the Museum – Thursday, March 14, 2013

* One Standard Spa Pass (value $75 – limited to the first 75 memberships)

* Limited Edition (200) Bass Museum of Art 2012 purple tote bag (value $50 – shown below)

* VIP Passes to the following fairs during the week of December 3-9, 2012:

Aqua 12 at the Aqua Hotel
Art Miami
Art Asia Miami
INK Miami Art Fair
PULSE Miami
Red Dot Miami
Scope Miami
Select Fair Miami Beach
Verge Art Miami Beach
Pool Art Fair Miami Beach
Untitled

$1,000 level Benefits
All of the benefits of the $250 level plus:
* Private tour of an exhibition by the Director or Curator

* Listing on recognition panel at entrance to the Museum

* Recognition in Bass Museum of Art members’ magazine

* Ten single admission guest passes to the Museum

* 1 complimentary individual or family/dual gift membership per year to give to a friend

* 10% discount on rental of Bass Museum facility for a private event

* Invitation for two to Breakfast with a Curator

* Invitation to Art Basel Miami Beach Vernissage | Wednesday, December 5, 2012

* Invitation to Design Miami Collectors Breakfast | Thursday, December 6, 2012

* Invitation for two to Design Miami Vernissage | Tuesday, December 4, 2012

* Invitation to the Sagamore Brunch | Saturday, December 6, 2012

* Limited Edition (200) Bass Museum of Art 2012 poppy tote bag (value $50 – shown below)

To upgrade, renew or confirm your bass art pass 2012 membership today:
Gabrielle Peters | gpeters@bassmuseum.org
305.673.7530 x1001

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Ai Weiwei will probably be regarded as the most important artist of the past decade. He is certainly its most newsworthy and arguably its most inspiring. Over the repressions of Chinese authorities, he has used a wide range of resources to broadcast a message of freedom.

Through his art, he has spoken with a voice that also includes those who have been silenced. A dissident under a capricious regime, he has endured trials that have captivated world attention while galvanizing an underground culture at home.

The arrival this week of Mr. Ai's first North American retrospective, "Ai Weiwei: According to What?"—which begins at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and travels to three other cities, concluding at the Brooklyn Museum in 2014—is itself newsworthy. That this exhibition largely fails to inspire not only speaks to Mr. Ai's own limitations but also to the challenges and missteps in exhibiting this increasingly multifaceted artist.

It bears remembering that following his youth in a Chinese labor camp and his punk bohemian immersion in 1980s New York, for several years Mr. Ai, now 55, was a member of Beijing's cultural elite. A sly thinker and adept designer, he emerged in the late 1990s along with the booming market for contemporary Chinese art to become a sanctioned and profitable ambassador of the modernized socialist state. In 2008, he even served as the artistic consultant on National Stadium, the "Bird's Nest" centerpiece of the Beijing summer Olympics.

It was the Sichuan earthquake in May of that year that turned Mr. Ai from cultural purveyor to iconoclast. He rightly believed that the tragedy of this event, a thousand miles from Beijing in the heart of rural China, was magnified by the state's refusal to investigate its particularly tragic circumstances: the death of more than 5,000 children due to shoddy school construction.

In the years that followed, Mr. Ai put this belief into action. He visited the devastation, documenting the sites in photos and videos, and organized what he called a "citizens' investigation" to identify and memorialize each child killed in this disaster.

As he pursued this project, Mr. Ai increasingly faced off with the Communist state. He came under surveillance and sustained a beating at the hands of local police, a life-threatening brain injury, the destruction of his studio in Shanghai, 81 days of imprisonment and psychological torture, a state-driven campaign of intimidation, multimillion-dollar charges and fines, and the stripping of his freedom to leave the country—including his plans to attend this North American retrospective.

The Hirshhorn show is an update of the one at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum in 2009, which was organized largely before Mr. Ai's dissident chapter. While the current exhibition brings in some important new pieces, it still feels weighted toward the state-sanctioned years. Even the recent selection largely follows the earlier formula.

Much of this work falls under what I call the Salon style of contemporary Chinese art: Oriental idioms, passed through Pop-art sensibilities, processed into large works with a factorylike finish. Mr. Ai can be particularly taken with Western art's historical references. Several examples here are minimalist-inspired sculptures with flourishes of Chinoiserie. "Cube in Ebony" (2009), carved with a traditional rusticated surface, recalls Tony Smith's "Die." "Moon Chest" (2008), created through traditional cabinet-making techniques, riffs off Donald Judd's "specific objects." "Cube Light" (2008), which is a recent acquisition by the Hirshhorn and also the most oversized, underwhelming piece in the show, is minimalism transformed into a kitschy chandelier.

Too much real estate gets taken up by these large works. The Mori's Mami Kataoka, who also curated this show, calls the art a "warm" minimalism for existing "between formalist and contextual methodologies"—in other words, Western work with an Eastern twist.

It is true that Mr. Ai includes personal, social and political references in his sculptures. At times they can seem like the coded messages of a prisoner tapping on his cell wall. "Surveillance Camera" (2010), a marble sculpture that turns an object of oppression into a work of art, is ominous and poignant. But often the sculpture, outsourced to inexpensive Chinese artisans, is a lot of effort for not much return. Sculptures that require lengthy explanations—that one was inspired by a small wooden box left by the artist's dissident poet father, Ai Qing, or that one was inspired by the shaking of the chandelier in Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 film "October"—are not so much "warm" as warmed over. One exception is "Straight" (2008-2012), a new floor installation made up of 38 tons of rebar recovered from Sichuan after the earthquake that is a rough and powerful work regardless of what else we know about it.

Mr. Ai has always been a conceptual artist. The challenge of a conventional museum exhibition is that his output has become more and more immaterial. It could be that Mr. Ai is now best reflected in other ways—for example in Alison Klayman's inspiring documentary "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry." Blogging, Twitter and the Internet itself, to which Mr. Ai devotes eight hours a day, have become his genuine new media and his most consequential work. Unfortunately, this traditionally mounted show tells us little about that. Walls of photographs—with both wonderful snapshots from his New York years and thousands of digital images from his Internet feed—could offer extra context, but they are so poorly labeled and hung so high that they serve as little more than decoration.

For a retrospective, there is also regrettably little about his involvement in the Beijing avant-garde of the late 1970s—he was part of the "Stars" group during a brief thaw known as the "Beijing Spring." Nor are there examples of his underground books published in the mid-1990s.

A deep humanity runs through Mr. Ai's best work. "I've experienced dramatic changes in my living and working conditions over the past few years," he says in an interview with Hirshhorn curator Kerry Brougher reproduced in the exhibition catalog. But he resists being taken in by his own politics. "Maybe I'm just an undercover artist in the disguise of a dissident," he says. Believing in "freedom of speech, free expression, the value of life, and individual rights," he tempers his politics with empathy.

That's why his work on the "citizens' investigation" is so affecting and stands apart from the more ornamental aspects of this show. Alongside a wall-size spreadsheet listing all the child victims of the Sichuan quake, including their birthdays and schools, he presents a recording that reads off their names. In this stripped-down piece, we sense the full extent of the loss, a tragedy that is magnified for the victims' parents by China's one-child policy: "These people have cried a lifetime's worth of tears," says Mr. Ai. "In their hearts, they know that the precious lives they gave everything to protect are no longer." Beyond politics, the work strikes at the heart of death and remembrance. It also shows us how present this artist can be even in his absence—and just what is missing in so much else of this exhibition.

-By James Panero

The National YoungArts Foundation has purchased the famous Bacardi complex in Miami, with plans to create — with Frank Gehry’s help — a new center of arts activity.

A pair of historic, glittering buildings sat empty beside a busy Miami thoroughfare. An arts foundation with a nomadic background was looking for a place to plant permanent roots and expand.

That is how the National YoungArts Foundation, founded 31 years ago by Ted and Lin Arison, came to find its new home: the iconic Bacardi Tower and Museum complex along Biscayne Boulevard. The campus will get a Frank Gehry-designed master plan and year-round programming to link downtown’s burgeoning arts scene with the hip Wynwood and Design District neighborhoods.

Officials with the organization and company will announce the news Wednesday.

“This was really, I believe, a match made in heaven,” said Paul T. Lehr, executive director of YoungArts. “There was no better place for us to go and there was no better purchaser for this campus than us and what we were going to do.”

Lehr said Bacardi U.S.A. sold the 3.3-acre site at 2100 Biscayne Blvd. to the foundation for $10 million, though the market value was over $20 million. The blue and white tiled tower, by architect Enrique Gutiérrez, was completed in 1963. The mosaic square known as the “jewel box,” designed by Ignacio Carrera-Justiz, was added in 1975.

They were designated as historic in 2009 by Miami’s historic preservation board.

Facundo L. Bacardi, chairman of the board of spirits producer Bacardi Limited, said the sale wasn’t about making money. The privately held company moved its Americas headquarters to Coral Gables in 2009 and has maintained the Biscayne Boulevard site but used it only rarely.

When Lehr approached him with the idea about nine months ago and discussions started within the company, “it was kind of like a light bulb went off,” Bacardi said.

“We were looking for somebody to extend the legacy of the property and how much it means to us,” he said. “I don’t think we could’ve come up with a better partner.”

While closely guarded, the news had been shared with some YoungArts supporters in recent days. Reactions were enthusiastic.

“It’s not only a milestone in Miami’s evolution as a cultural community, I think it’ll be a powerful magnet for talent for decades to come,” said Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which has supported the organization. “The whole thing just strikes me as perfect for a cultural center for this town.”

Despite working with more than 16,000 students over the last 31 years — including alumni like Vanessa Williams and Nicki Minaj, who have become household names — YoungArts has kept a relatively low profile. The organization finds and nurtures artists 15 and older, bringing in 150 a year for a week of intensive classes with masters in their field.

Even with its new home, the foundation is also planning a huge expansion of activities beyond Miami, including year-round events in New York, a Los Angeles version of Miami’s YoungArts Week and continued presence in Washington as the only nominating agency for the Presidential Scholars in the Arts.

“It’s all coming together at once,” Lin Arison said. “That’s because it’s meant to be. We’ve been doing our quiet work for 31 years, and now it is going to become visible.”

As the foundation expands nationally, it has added Gehry, singer Plácido Domingo and dancer, choreographer and director Bill T. Jones as artistic advisors. And it has added a 10th discipline, architecture and design, to a lineup that includes cinematic arts, dance, jazz, music, photography, theater, visual arts, voice and writing.

And its YoungArts MasterClass television program, which has appeared on HBO, is being used in public schools in Miami, New York and Los Angeles with a teachers guide so educators can use lessons from mentors in their classes.

Arison, who said she sold paintings by Claude Monet and Amedeo Modigliani to support the move, envisions the new campus as a place where visual arts by alumni will be displayed year-round, popular art walks in the nearby Wynwood district will spill over and outside projections like the well-known wallcasts at the New World Center will take place. Gehry designed the new Miami Beach home for the New World Symphony, which the Arisons co-founded.

“Once people get in here, they’re going to own it,” Arison said. “The kids are going to own it, the mentors are going to own it and hopefully the community is going to own it.”

While YoungArts will move its administrative headquarters into the new building by mid-October, the timeline for the rest of the project was not yet known. Mentors in the program will be asked for input on how the space should be used, and Gehry will involve students in the overall design of the campus.

“Whatever she wants me to do, I’ll do,” Gehry said of Arison.

An office area next to the tower building will be transformed into a performance space, and a parking lot will become a park that will attach to the existing plaza and green space, Lehr said.

“It’s nice that they’re taking over a building that’s a symbol in Miami but has been underused in the last years,” said Meaghan Lloyd, a partner in Gehry’s firm. “We’re very happy to be part of that story, which is a big part of the history of Miami.”

Yara Travieso, 26, remembers the complex from her days growing up in Miami-Dade with an architect father; they would drive around admiring buildings in the area, and the Bacardi structures were a favorite.

Now a New York-based director and choreographer who attended The Juilliard School on a full scholarship thanks to her involvement in YoungArts as a student, Travieso said she is overjoyed about the organization’s new permanent home.

“I think it’s perfect timing, it’s the perfect location,” she said. “This new generation needs that.”

Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and a consultant who has worked with YoungArts for more than a year, said young people are involved in much of Miami’s artistic momentum.

“This is about vibrancy and youth, which seems so fitting for this city to make this the calling card,” he said. “Arts organizations all over America are trying to find ways to engage younger people, and Miami’s going to be truly the center of activity for younger people and serious engagement for young people with the arts.”

-By Hannah Sampson

In June 2010, Apsara DiQuinzio, then a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (now at the Berkeley Art Museum), received a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation to travel around the world and find six relatively off-the-chart cities where significant new art institutions, movements and activity had taken root and flourished in the past 10 or 20 years. The cities she ended up with were Beirut, Lebanon; Cali, Colombia; Cluj, Romania (the Communist government added “Napoca” to its name in 1974, but no one ever uses it); Saigon, Vietnam (the Communist powers have renamed it Ho Chi Minh City, but no one except bureaucrats ever uses that name, either); Tangier, Morocco; and San Francisco.

The result is the eye-opening “Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geography in Contemporary Art,” which fills the top floor of SFMOMA. It contains 60 works in many media by 19 artists or art collectives from these cities, separated geographically by gallery.

San Francisco doesn’t belong on the list. As an art city, it’s not “marginal,” or “peripheral,” as the catalog authors define the other locales, and its significance as a creative center has long been acknowledged. Ms. DiQuinzio’s justification was that “this exhibition was about the importance of the local, and I had to include my own locality.” But what if she lived in New York?

Moreover, the San Francisco contribution, by an environmentalist, anticorporate group called Futurefarmers, is the weakest of the six: 10 audio recordings about the future, by experts (on ecology, planning, astronomy, physics, biology, etc.) from Berkeley, Harvard and other universities, that could have been PBS broadcasts.

The only other disappointing contribution from Ms. DiQuinzio’s six chosen cities is the sole one from Tangier. There is no question that Morocco’s colonialist past, and the two decades of repressive national government that came after independence, provide plenty of material. But in her photographs, posters and videos, Yto Barrada (director of the Cinémathèque de Tanger) focuses on the uglification of her native city since masses of impoverished new immigrants and wealthy tourists have led to the destruction of old quarters and the erection of banal hotels and apartment blocks. A good story, yielding grim, banal photographs.

Unlike the U.S. and Morocco, the other four countries have been through hell in the past 20 to 50 years. This goes a long way to explain why their suddenly released artistic energies—as they try to remember, rediscover and rewrite their tragic pasts—are so much more moving.

Lebanon has a 3,000-year-old history, perpetually cloven by religious and cultural divisions and invasions. Akram Zaatari tries to reconstruct this messy history through the archives of hundreds of thousands of photographs he discovered, all taken by a popular Beirut portrait photographer Hashem el Maadani since the 1940s; the exhibit includes a reconstruction of this photographer’s studio. Joana Hadjithomas has taken dozens of colorful “Welcome to Beirut” postcards of the good old days—the beaches, grand hotels, quasi-Parisian night life—and burned or smudged each one. (Museum visitors are invited to take copies home.) Lamia Joreige has composed a wall-filling “time line” of the history of Beirut, from 1200 B.C. to A.D. 2100—made up of 29 photos, drawings, reproduced paintings, maps, texts and video monitors—that would take a day or more to absorb.

Cluj, in Romania, is a city that not one museum visitor in a thousand is likely to have heard of. Yet it is that country’s second city, arguably its most active in terms of new art and intellectual activity, looked down on (like Saigon by Hanoi, Cali by Bogotá) by the more powerful capital city, Bucharest.

After serving as dictator of the country since 1967 (and after 1971, as the most repressive, neo-Stalinist dictator in Eastern Europe), Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, were seized by the army (which had joined forces with the revolutionaries, after four days of national mass demonstrations), given a brief show-trial, and almost instantly shot by a firing squad on Christmas Day 1989. The assassination was shown on national television and the Communist Party dissolved.

Cluj painter Adrian Ghenie’s large 2010 oil called “The Trial” depicts a blurred, freely painted image of the Ceaușescus sitting before an L-shaped judgment table—an image shown on TV—shortly before they were killed. Another, “Dada is Dead” (2009), shows a spot-lit, frightened and frightening gray wolf in a dark cellar. A third (“The Collector,” 2008) is a large, blood-red painting of Hermann Göring at his desk, surrounded by paintings he had looted from all over Europe. All three are museum worthy; “The Trial” belongs to SFMOMA.

Also from Cluj is Ciprian Muresan’s video of a gang of animated dog-puppets shouting out the oppressive evils of the world, tormenting a female member of the Eternal Republic of Dogmania with every kind of insulting accusation, and then torturing to death one of their members for being insufficiently dedicated to the ruling regime.

Particularly impressive are the contributions of new Cali artists, after 21 years of rule by a brutal drug cartel often in collusion with a corrupt government. Wilson Diaz’s video of a Colombian pop group (in military fatigues and bearing rifles) singing and playing jauntily about the recent atrocities of life in Cali is no joke. Oscar Muñoz’s gradually fading images of his own face and of significant moments in recent Colombian history remind us of how quickly the present disappears into the past. Most powerful of all is Luis Ospina’s 28-minute mockumentary (“The Vampires of Poverty”) about the poor people of Cali, with paid actors, written lines and a borrowed set. Just before the end, the gaunt, dreadlocked, gap-toothed owner of the shack breaks in, curses the film crew as exploiters (what Latin Americans call purveyors of “pornomiseria” for the middle class), chases them out, and ruins their film.

We know something of Vietnam’s historical horror story, because we had something to do with it, during what the Vietnamese now call “the American War” of 1965-75. It is against this background that the art on display from Saigon—the former capital of the U.S.-allied South, still regarded with suspicion and disdain by Hanoi—must be seen.

The Propellor group—two returned Vietnamese and one American—made a slow-motion video of an underground North Vietnamese tunnel near Hanoi (one of the thousands that were a major weapon in the Communist victory) that has been excavated and converted into a shooting gallery for tourists, mainly Americans, who pay to aim at a target with AK-47s. The ironies involved are almost stifling. Dinh Q. Lê’s video contrasts a stiff, perfunctory daily assembly of Vietnamese soldiers in front of the huge white mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi with exuberant scenes of hundreds of gleaming motorcycles racing at night (sometimes upside-down) through the jovial chaos of still-Westernized Saigon.

Tiffany Chung’s exquisitely drawn, colored and embroidered maps of each of the six cities (commissioned by SFMOMA) turn cartography into art overlaid with social commentary. Her precise, beautiful maps depict cities expanding through increased population growth (Cali, Cluj); past earthquakes and predicted floods (San Francisco, Saigon); major political events (Tangier); and total social chaos (Beirut).

I can’t say that “Six Lines of Flight” totally won me over to its premise: that the relatively new, “peripheral” art cities of the world may now have as much to offer the “center” (New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles) as they once drew from these art-world capitals. But, thanks to Ms. DiQuinzio and SFMOMA, I feel a slightly better-informed citizen of the world.

-By David Littlejohn