The William S. Paley Collection, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New YorkPicasso’s 1905-6 painting “Boy Leading a Horse

By CAROL VOGEL
August 2, 2012, 2:57 PM

The staggering art collection put together by William S. Paley, the television impresario who founded the Columbia Broadcasting System, first went on view at the Museum of Modern Art in 1992. Paley, a longtime trustee at MoMA, had left his paintings, drawings and sculptures to the museum upon his death in 1990. After MoMA showed the collection it then traveled to museums in Indianapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego and Baltimore.

One city that did not get the show was San Francisco. But on Sept. 15, “The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism,’’ will open the de Young Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco before going to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, the Fine Arts Museum of Quebec and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.

On view will be highlights of the Paley holdings, including Picasso’s famous 1905-6 painting “Boy Leading a Horse,’’ Gauguin’s “Seed of the Areoi’’ (1892), from the artist’s first trip to Tahiti, and Degas’s 1905 large-scale pastel and charcoal “Two Dancers.’’ The exhibition will remain on view in San Francisco through Dec. 30.

Walter Maibaum/The Degas Sculpture Project
Some of the 74 plasters attributed to Edgar Degas: fearing lawsuits, scholars are afraid to declare them genuine or not.

John Elderfield, former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, remembers the days when scholars spoke freely about whether a particular work was genuine.

They were connoisseurs, this was their field of expertise, and a curator like Kirk Varnedoe, Mr. Elderfield’s predecessor at the Modern, would think nothing of offering his view of a drawing attributed to Rodin, his specialty.

“He was qualified to do it and felt he had a moral obligation to do it,” Mr. Elderfield said.

But when the owner of a painting attributed to Henri Matisse recently asked Mr. Elderfield for his opinion, he demurred. He worried he could be sued if he said the painting was not a real Matisse.

Librado Romero/The New York Times
John Elderfield, a former curator at the Modern.

Mr. Elderfield is hardly alone in feeling that art’s celebrated freedom of expression no longer extends to expert opinions on authenticity. As spectacular sums flow through the art market and an expert verdict can make or destroy a fortune, several high-profile legal cases have pushed scholars to censor themselves for fear of becoming entangled in lawsuits.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and the Noguchi Museum have all stopped authenticating works to avoid litigation. In January the Courtauld Institute of Art in London cited “the possibility of legal action” when it canceled a forum discussing a controversial set of some 600 drawings attributed to Francis Bacon. And the leading experts on Degas have avoided publicly saying whether 74 plasters attributed to him are a stupendous new find or an elaborate hoax.

The anxiety has even touched the supreme arbiter of the genuine and fake: the catalogue raisonné, the definitive, scholarly compendium of an artist’s work. Inclusion has been called the difference between “great wealth and the gutter,” and auction houses sometimes refuse to handle unlisted works. As a result catalogue raisonné authors have been the targets of lawsuits, not to mention bribes and even death threats.

“Legal cage rattling was always part of the process,” said Nancy Mowll Mathews, president of the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association. But the staggering rise in art prices has transformed the cost-benefit analysis of suing at the same time that fraud has become more profitable, she said.

While some argue the fear is overblown, others warn the growing reluctance to speak publicly about authenticity could keep forgeries and misattributed works in circulation while permitting newly discovered works to go unrecognized.

The perceived crisis has prompted a pointed ethical debate: Do you speak out if you spot a suspicious work or keep quiet as lawyers recommend?

Art experts have been getting sued over their opinions since at least the days of Joseph Duveen, the flamboyant dealer who found himself in court in the 1920s after declaring “La Belle Ferronnière,” a supposed Leonardo painting for sale, to be a fake. Duveen’s judgment caused the Kansas City Art Institute to withdraw its offer of $250,000, and in the end Duveen settled by agreeing to pay the owner $60,000. (The painting is now considered to be by a follower of Leonardo.)

As prices have risen, so have risks. In 2005, after watching other organizations fend off lawsuits, the Lichtenstein foundation bought $5 million worth of liability insurance and made its authentication process more rigorous and transparent, its executive director, Jack Cowart, said. Then in 2011 the Warhol foundation revealed it had spent $7 million defending itself against a lawsuit involving a silk-screen it had rejected for the catalogue raisonné. Mr. Cowart called his insurance company to find out if the Lichtenstein foundation would be protected if faced with a similar suit. The agent said it was impossible to predict. “That was a very sobering moment,” Mr. Cowart said.

The board had always felt an obligation to guard Lichtenstein’s legacy in this way, he explained. But now, figuring it was only a matter of time before the law of averages would throw a lawsuit their way, board members decided the benefits of authenticating did not outweigh the risks.

“Why should we go stand in front of a speeding car?” Mr. Cowart said. “We decided it’s not the role of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation to deal with the art market’s authenticity issues.”

That view disturbs Jack Flam, president of the Dedalus Foundation, which is publishing Robert Motherwell’s catalogue raisonné and was sued last year for changing its opinion about a painting’s authenticity. “If experts stop speaking up, you’re going to get more fakes surfacing,” he said.

Mr. Cowart counters that the authentication committee’s pronouncements were not driving fakes out of the market. The majority of works inspected during the panel’s six years, he said, were third-rate fakes that would reappear as soon as the owners sold them to other unsuspecting dupes.

So what would the Lichtenstein foundation do if it became aware that a major forgery was being auctioned for millions of dollars?

“We don’t know what we would say if we were asked formally or informally,” Mr. Cowart said. “We don’t deal in hypotheticals.”

Sharon Flescher, president of the International Foundation for Art Research, said she doubts the number of lawsuits challenging expert opinions has gone up. Nonetheless she conceded that the perception is having “a chilling effect.” Even though few plaintiffs win, experts are deterred by the time and legal expense. That’s why the College Art Association recently began offering affordable liability insurance to its members who authenticate art, she noted.

Peter R. Stern, an art lawyer in New York, tells clients never to volunteer an opinion unless formally asked by the owners, and even then to make sure the owners sign a waiver promising not to sue. If they don’t ask, don’t tell. “Art scholarship is fighting a losing battle against commerce,” he said.

Fears of being sued may even lead to changes in the nature of catalogues raisonnés, Ms. Flescher added. She pointed to recent decisions by the Calder and Lichtenstein foundations and the Noguchi Museum to move their cataloging efforts online and label them as “works in progress.”

“What we are presenting is a combination of completed research and research pending,” said Shaina D. Larrivee, project manager of the Isamu Noguchi catalogue raisonné. “We are very clear that ‘research pending’ does not guarantee inclusion in the final catalogue raisonné, and that we have the ability to remove artworks if new information comes to light.”

Alexander Rower, Alexander Calder’s grandson and the chairman of the Calder Foundation, said he decided to forgo a catalogue raisonné in favor of an online guide to Calder’s development and history. “You determine if your work is fake or not with the data we present,” he said.

The Web site, scheduled to begin operation this summer, will feature 4,000 to 6,000 works, roughly one-quarter of Calder’s total output. Although the foundation does not authenticate, Mr. Rower said, it will register and examine a supposed Calder at an owner’s request and release any information it has about the piece. The foundation does, however, keep a watchful eye on the market. Mr. Rower traveled to the Basel art fair in Switzerland last week to photograph every Calder for further research, he said.

And if he were to find a forgery? “You can’t just go out there in the world and say, ‘That’s fake,’ “ Mr. Rower said. “But it is a fair thing for me to say to an art dealer, ‘Have your presented this work to the Calder Foundation?’ And if he says no, I say, ‘You really should.’ “

As for scholars who are dragged into court, they do occasionally come out ahead. The art expert Steve Seltzer was sued after declaring that a watercolor of cowboys was not painted by the revered Western artist Charles M. Russell but by his own grandfather the artist O. C. Seltzer. After the suit was thrown out, Mr. Seltzer turned around and countersued the painting’s owner, Steve Morton, and his lawyers. In 2007 the Montana Supreme Court awarded Mr. Seltzer $11 million in damages. As the judges put it, using a lawsuit to coerce an expert to give a particular opinion is “legal thuggery.”

 

Cindy Sherman/Metro Pictures, via Sotheby's

 

ARTIST Cindy Sherman

TITLE 'Untitled #91'

AUCTION HOUSE Sotheby's

ESTIMATE $800,000 to $1.2 million

Although Ms. Sherman already has a considerable fan base, her blockbuster retrospective on view at the Museum of Modern Art through June 11 has enhanced her popularity.

This season works by Ms. Sherman from various years and series are for sale at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury. This 1981 image is from her famous “Centerfold Series,” a group of portraits inspired by photographs in Playboy but with the women in clothes and conveying a complicated mix of emotions.

The estimate may seem steep considering that the Museum of Modern Art purchased her entire “Untitled Film Series” — a group of 69 prints — for a reported $1 million in 1995. But another image from the “Centerfold Series,” “Untitled #96,” brought nearly $4 million a year ago, a record for her work at auction.

By LEE ROSENBAUMUniversity of Iowa Museum of Art, Gift of Peggy Guggenheim

"Mural" (1943) by Jackson Pollock

Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock
Hood Museum of Art
Through Jun 17
Then travels to the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.

Hanover, N.H.

The late Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art, was a tough act to follow. Probably because no one can top his definitive 1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective, we have no major show in the U.S. this year to commemorate the centenary of that towering Abstract Expressionist's birth.

But there are aspects of Pollock's work from the years preceding the famous "drip" paintings that remain underexplored. Dartmouth College's Hood Museum of Art, under its new director, Michael Taylor (former curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art), has seized the moment by hastily assembling an absorbing dossier exhibition focusing on a crucial period in Pollock's trajectory from representational landscapes, heavily influenced by his teacher Thomas Hart Benton, to his signature abstract masterpieces that, according to popular and Hollywood legend, seemed to spring out of nowhere.

The Hood's "Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock," organized by Sarah Powers of the Hood with Pollock expert Helen Harrison, reveals that many of the pictorial strategies employed by Pollock in his celebrated monumental canvases of the late 1940s to early 1950s can be traced to his intensely charged easel-size paintings from the brief period, 1938-41, when this quintessentially American artist was haunted by Orozco's macabre visions of skeletons and ritual sacrifice. Pollock had seen the Mexican's murals in 1930 at Pomona College in California and, six years later, at Dartmouth. While there are plenty of pyrotechnics in the works of both artists, "Men of Fire" might have been more aptly (if less appealingly) titled "Men of Skulls and Bones."

Pollock owed his enthusiasm for the visceral impact of monumentality to Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and, above all, Orozco. In his first oversize horizontal canvas, a 20-foot-wide 1943 composition, "Mural," commissioned by his patron Peggy Guggenheim (on view at the Des Moines Art Center through July 15), Pollock was influenced not only by Orozco's larger-than-life scale but also by the swirling energy of his brushstrokes and dramatic use of black to define curving contours. Orozco's archetypal images of snakes, skulls and flames, which must have resonated with the American's Jungian sensibility, are abundantly present in Pollock's works at the Hood.

Gallery: 'Men of Fire'

View Slideshow

2012 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. .

'Untitled (Bald Woman and Skeleton)' by Jackson Pollock

To appreciate "Men of Fire," you need to start not in Dartmouth's art museum but in its Baker Library. That's where the 24-year-old Pollock made pilgrimage in 1936 to see Orozco's 24-panel mural "The Epic of American Civilization" (1932-34), a sweeping history of the Mexican people. Its darkly symbolic and ritualistic content made a strong impression on the younger artist. Dartmouth also owns Orozco's studies for the mural, included in the Hood's show.

Nowhere is the connection between Dartmouth's mural and Pollock's work clearer than in his "Untitled (Bald Woman with Skeleton)" (c. 1938-41), acquired by the Hood six years ago. With a lumpish, crouched female at its center, it quotes the image of a skeletal ribcage and extended limb from Orozco's fiercely satiric panel "Gods of the Modern World." That work had stirred an uproar at Dartmouth over its depiction of a ghoulish cadre of skeletal professors in caps and gowns, overseeing a female skeleton as she gives birth to a skeletal baby with a mortarboard on its head (representing "stillborn knowledge").

Like many of the Pollocks in the show, "Bald Woman" is densely composed and difficult to read. Only close scrutiny can unpack the contorted anatomy of the drooping woman and the many images derived from Orozco's mural—winding serpents, orange flames and the jumble of tiny, sickly green skulls surrounding the central figure. Pollock had transmuted Orozco's politically charged imagery into psychological totems. The morbid scene is redolent with death and despair.

Pollock's use of semiabstraction and his partial concealment of representational images point ahead to the layered complexities of the drip paintings, where representation seems to disappear. The Museum of Modern Art's "Flame" (c. 1934-38), for example, is a precursor to all-over abstraction, with its jagged orange, black and white slashes that represent a raging fire. Without help from the label text, you might miss the ribcage—parallel light and dark lines. Lying near the bottom of the canvas, amid the conflagration, the bones suggest that this is a sacrificial pyre.

Pollock's use of disguised and obscured representation, although later difficult to detect, persisted into his abstract masterpieces of the late '40s and early '50s. As noted in the catalog for MoMA's show, close analysis of Pollock's signature "drip" paintings (informed by Hans Namuth's famous images of Pollock at work) reveals their structural underpinnings of veiled and hidden figures.

The link between the proto-Pollocks seen at Dartmouth and the mature abstract masterpieces is the groundbreaking, ex-Peggy Guggenheim "Mural" of 1943. Designed for her apartment's entrance hall, that dazzling achievement, said to have been largely executed in one day, is not only the first but also the biggest of the mural-size Pollocks.

A frenzy of black verticals and whorls, enlivened with touches of pink, yellow and turquoise, "Mural," under sustained scrutiny, comes into focus as a cross-canvas parade of upright, abstracted figures, with outlines strongly reminiscent of the black-defined curves of the marching Aztecs' muscled flesh in the "Migration" panel that begins Dartmouth's Orozco mural. Tightly focused on the brief period when Pollock was most strongly influenced by Orozco, the show doesn't include (or illustrate) works like "Mural" that marked the next step toward Pollocks signature style. But the black swirls that animate Orozco's and Pollock's murals also figure prominently in a painting displayed at the entrance to the Hood's show, the Tate Gallery's powerful "Naked Man with Knife" (c. 1938-1940), a chaotic jumble of three fiercely grappling nudes.

Comparing the little-known Pollocks at the Hood with the paintings that later became touchstones of international veneration reveals that we might not have had the latter without the foundation laid by the former. Contradicting the myth of the sudden epiphany, Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, once noted that there were "no sharp breaks" from the works of the pre-"drip" period to the mature masterpieces, "but rather a continuing development of the same themes and obsessions."

You can see the truth of that in Hanover.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Kraftwerk fans at MoMA on Tuesday night. The band's performances include 3-D imagery. More Photos »

By MELENA RYZIK

Published: April 11, 2012

Sell-out rock shows usually mean a lot of shouting, some sweating, maybe a few drunken pass-outs. Kraftwerk inspired none of that on Tuesday night. The first of its eight consecutive sold-out performances at the Museum of Modern Art had reverence and stylistic weight; even for a New York museum crowd there was a lot of black. Artfully swept hair, uncomfortable-looking shoes, architectural glasses: check, check and check. The high-design audience was rewarded with an equally aesthetically tuned concert, with the band, a foursome in graphic black-and-white unitards, playing neon-lighted synths. Behind them a video screen offered a parade of simple 3-D images, like stick figure robots and spinning numbers, a retro future in an MS-DOS font.

 

Multimedia

Slide Show

Kraftwerk at MoMA

The show, part of a retrospective for this pioneering German electronica group, was a coveted event, with fewer than 450 tickets available to the public for each night of the run. All eight sold out within an hour when they went on sale in February. (With a face value of $25, they were going for hundreds online afterward.)

On Tuesday several diehard Kraftwerk fans waited outside the museum in the vain hope of scoring an extra ticket. “I grew up listening to this in high school,” said Andy Horowitz, 49, a banker turned teacher from Long Island. “It’s got a real good sound. It’s melodic, pulsating, makes you want to move. It’s timeless.” Mr. Horowitz, who had also turned up at the museum a few days earlier to inquire about more spots, said he might return nightly but was holding out for Friday, when the band is scheduled to perform its seminal 1978 album, “The Man-Machine.” “The personal computer, space, technology — they hit it right on the head,” Mr. Horowitz said. Kraftwerk was expected to play a full album a night, with some bonus and new material mixed in.

 

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Kraftwerk, the German group whose members were early adapters to the world of the computer, at the Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday. More Photos »

By JON PARELES

Published: April 11, 2012

The Robots” — the first song Kraftwerk played on Tuesday to start its eight-night series of retrospective concerts at the Museum of Modern Art — is adroitly misleading. “We’re programmed to do/anything you want us to,” Ralf Hutter sang.

 

Multimedia

The album in focus on the opening night of the Kraftwerk retrospective at the Modern was “Autobahn,” from 1974, performed live with prominent graphics and along with additional material. More Photos »

In fact Kraftwerk has been far more predictive than obedient. It can rightfully claim to have done some cultural reprogramming of its own. Back in the 1970s Kraftwerk conceptualized itself as the Man-Machine and started writing songs about what technology might do to — and with — the modern mind. It can now claim a direct influence on all sorts of electronic and computer-driven music, while its lyrics clearly envisioned our computer-mediated daily lives.

Tuesday’s concert was the beginning of Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, with Kraftwerk performing eight consecutive albums on eight nights for just 450 people per show. Only Mr. Hutter remains from Kraftwerk’s original lineup; the other current members are Henning Schmitz, Fritz Hilpert and Stefan Pfaffe. Onstage the quartet stood at keyboards — playing some of the music’s components live — in front of a very active video screen with images that sometimes sandwiched the musicians between the planes of eye-popping three-dimensional geometry and typography. (Concertgoers were handed 3D glasses on the way to the museum’s atrium.)...

 

22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens

Through April 30

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

620 Greenwich Street, at Leroy Street, West Village

Through April 21

Do you dream of anonymous sex with random strangers but fear actual physical contact? You are in luck. Sign on to any number of Web sites and you can fulfill your fantasies remotely with real, live others via the miracle of Skype.

Frances Stark, an assistant professor at the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has been indulging in this activity over the past few years and has distilled her experiences into visually chaste and verbally promiscuous videos. Her magnum opus, at PS1, is “My Best Thing,” a 99-minute film that she made for, and presented at, the 2011 Venice Biennale. What you mainly see are two digitally animated, childlike figures resembling dolls made from Lego blocks — a female who speaks in computer-generated standard English, and one or the other of two males, who each speak in heavily Italian-accented, grammatically uncertain English — isolated on green-screen backgrounds. (To create these animations, Ms. Stark used free software available from Xtranormal.com.)

Intermittent episodes of simultaneous masturbation are represented by expressions like “mmmm” and “omg!” Mostly, the characters talk about art, film, literature, language and philosophy, and about Ms. Stark’s plan to make an artwork out of these interactions for the Venice Biennale. Improbably, there unfolds a genuinely affecting story about the vagaries of emotional connection and the difficulties of making art and being an artist.

At Gavin Brown, more of this dialogue is video-projected in two rooms as lines of text accompanied by music. These shorter pieces feel like outtakes from “My Best Thing,” which is, against all odds, some kind of masterpiece.

“Good lord,” said Pat, a New York friend, eyeing the eager faces, the stilettos, the sheer force field of energy. “Is anybody here over the age of 18?”

“I got a very good price on it,” I said.

We walked to a nearby bar in another hotel. There, the median age doubled, the lights didn’t throb, and screaming to be heard was optional, not mandatory. All of a sudden, I didn’t feel like my own mother.

Well, maybe you get a little self-conscious and defensive about aging when you’re in a hotel lobby crowd younger than your own children (who are grown, but still). Or maybe I was just in a chronological-spiral frame of mind after seeing the new play “Marrying George Clooney: Confessions From a Midlife Crisis,” at Cap 21 Theater Company in Chelsea.

Based on the memoir of the same title by Amy Ferris, the play features three menopausal women with insomnia. They’re scouring the Internet for news of old boyfriends, researching dire diseases they’re sure they’re dying of, sweating out their latest hormonal surges, cleaning their closets. You know, what you usually do at 3 a.m. when you’re middle-aged, haggard and homebound in your torn bathrobe — and not young, fresh-faced, dressed to dazzle and in search of a New York party. The play’s three unnamed women speak of their demons and fears. They swap stories of recent weight gains and parents’ deaths, the disappearance of a waistline and the lingering of a mother who’s losing her mind to dementia. They drink wine, they loudly regret quitting cigarettes, and they dance and they sing.

All the above happened to her during her plunge into menopause, Ms. Ferris, a first-time playwright (who adapted the memoir with her husband, Ken Ferris, and Krista Lyons), said when we met at the nearby Tipsy Parson restaurant. (She is, I should add, happily married and does not personally know George Clooney, at least not yet.)

Ms. Ferris’s memoir, which is freewheeling, poignant, funny and cranky, ends in an epilogue recounting her last hours with her dying mother. As she tries to comfort her mother, her own mind is overwhelmed with images and memories from both their lives. In many ways, these final scenes in the book are more powerful than the staged versions. Or maybe, when you’re a reader, your mind is freed to imagine, and the dying mother — with her lifetime of rage and unhappiness — becomes your own.

“When I do book readings,” Ms. Ferris said, “it almost always ends up like a therapy group, with all the women in the audience talking about their mothers.”

Well, of course they do. Sure, middle-aged women talk about aging and wrinkles and menopause and how we’re not young any longer. But sometimes I think that’s only a passing phase, as we plummet into a new time in our lives and learn to adjust.

But our mothers! Do we ever outgrow talking about our mothers — apologizing to them, confronting them, reproaching them, grieving for their lives — no matter how long they have been dead?

Ms. Ferris’s mother wanted to be an artist. Instead she had children she loved but deeply resented. Ms. Ferris, with her own career as a screenwriter, author and now playwright, often feels she is leading the life her mother wanted for herself.

I was still thinking about mothers and their middle-aged daughters when I met my friend Nancy at the Museum of Modern Art exhibition of Cindy Sherman’s photographs. We wandered through the rooms marveling at the artist’s diversity, her intensity, the detail in her work, both subtle and lavish.

“Do you think,” I asked Nancy, “when Cindy was just beginning in the ’70s and ’80s, that her mother started saying, ‘Enough with photographing yourself, Cindy! What’s wrong with a nice landscape now and then?’ ”

Before I left town, I went shopping at Vince in Chelsea. Like the women at the Downtown Dream, every other woman I’d seen in New York, it seemed, had been wedged into skinny jeans and boots. The boots I could skip, but the jeans were a definite possibility.

I squeezed myself into a pair and went to peer into a store mirror. Both the young man and the young woman who worked there told me the jeans looked great. I said that, unfortunately, I couldn’t breathe or sit down. In fact, I felt I lacked the commitment to wear skinny jeans and, presumably, expire while looking great.

The experience made me sympathetic to all the young women I saw wearing skinny jeans after that. It isn’t only middle-aged women who suffer in this life, I told myself.

Maybe you had to get to middle age to realize your mother was right: you should never buy clothes you aren’t comfortable in.

Ruth Pennebaker’s latest novel is “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough.” She blogs at geezersisters.com.

 

“Since 1977, when Cindy Sherman first exhibited her “untitled film Stills” of fictional B-movie starlets, she has surrendered herself to photographic portraits of nearly every female archetype imaginable. So completely does the artist disappear into her subjects—disheveled fashion victims, art-historical icons, tragic dowagers, manic clowns, Beverly Hills housewives—that it’s hard to believe they are all the same woman.” by Linda Yablonsky for the Wall Street Journal (2/26.2012)