Bernice Steinbaum — sporting giant, playfully baroque Prada eyeglasses and Chinese-inspired couture — is not her usual wisecracking self this afternoon. In a few days, she’ll shut down her two-story gallery, wedged between Wynwood and its chugging art scene and the increasingly tonyDesign District, now with Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Bulgari and Hermés on the way.

“I’m old, baby. I’m 70. I’ve been having lots of second thoughts about closing. But it’s time to recreate myself. And you only live once. And I suspect if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it,’’ she says about her decision to retire from full-time art dealing.

The still young gallery scene in Wynwood has had its casualties. For all of the buzz about the neighborhood’s rebirth as an art hub, there is no denying Miami still has a way to go before it catches up with deeper, more established art markets. The 10-year-old Art Basel Miami Beach, the most important contemporary art fair in the country, has done plenty to bolster the city’s cultural evolution. But sustaining year-round enthusiasm for art buying has been a struggle for both serious galleries and the upstarts. And recently, a few local artists, among them rising star Jen Stark, and the internationally-successful Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III of the collaborative FriendsWithYou, decided to bail for the more mature, lucrative art capital of Los Angeles.

But Steinbaum says her gallery has remained prosperous and that her decision to sell the property, which she bought in 1998 for $290,000 according to property records (assessed value in 2011 was nearly $1 million,) had nothing to do with the ups and downs of Miami’s art scene.

Two years ago, she lost her husband Harold, a retired physician. And for Steinbaum, that changed everything.

“Our marriage was 49 years in duration. I’m still reaching out to his pillow,” she says. “I had a wonderful life with him. In my naiveté, I thought this would go on forever. How silly. When someone so close to you dies, you are reminded of your own mortality. I want to spend more time with my grandchildren. I want to go to the mall. I want to watch Days of Our Lives – is that what that soap opera is called?”

In 2000, when Steinbaum opened her gallery on the corner of 36th Street and North Miami Avenue after a successful 23-year run in Manhattan, there wasn’t much but dust flying off a neighboring 56-acre rail yard that no one imagined would one day sprout into the happening Midtown Miami. The Design District was a desolate if historic collection of low-slung buildings, some housing furniture and fixture showrooms, others waiting out the tumbleweeds. Wynwood, now home to more than 60 galleries and private collection spaces plus an ever-expanding compilation of murals by some of the world’s most important graffiti artists, was nothing but a rough patch of the city known for its early 1990s race riots.

But the New York-born Steinbaum, who moved to Miami to live near her three children who had landed careers here, saw only possibility.

“When I bought the building it was crack-infested,’’ she says. “There were no other galleries here yet. And while I understood that a gallery has to be in an area where other galleries exist, you have to be able to do more than sell. You have to have exchanges with artists. And there were already artists who had studios nearby. I was guaranteed they would come. Artists have an insatiable curiosity. ‘’

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Stefan Altenburger, Rudolf Stingel/Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

“Untitled (Paula)” a photo-realist painting from 2012 by Rudolf Stingel. The 11-by-15-foot work is being shown at Art Basel.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: June 14, 2012

BASEL, Switzerland — The day before the invitation-only opening of Art Basel, scores of collectors and dealers gathered in the cavernous building that houses Art Unlimited, the annual show of super-size artworks. Word had spread quickly about an extraordinary photo-realist painting by the Italian-born artist Rudolf Stingel. Based on a 1980s photograph of the New York dealer Paula Cooper looking glamorous with sultry eyes and a cigarette in one hand, the large canvas (it measures 11 by 15 feet) was hung dramatically in a space by itself. Its price was around $3 million, and it was bought by François Pinault, the French luxury goods magnate and owner of Christie’s, before the fair even opened.“Stingel created the painting just for Art Unlimited,” said Steven P. Henry, director of the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea. “He’s been working on it for months.”

The economic crisis may have left the average American family with a shrinking bank account — and most Europeans in an even more precarious financial position — but in the tiny Never-Never Land that is the international art world, there is a conspicuous display of disposable income.

Art Basel, which opened on Wednesday and runs through Sunday, is as grand as ever, with 300 galleries from 36 countries exhibiting. And it still attracts the stars of contemporary art, including the collectors Eli Broad, the Los Angeles financier; Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire; Jerry I. Speyer, the real estate developer and chairman of the Museum of Modern Art; and Laurence Graff, the London jeweler. Museum directors are here too, including Nicholas Serota, from the Tate in London; Richard Armstrong, who runs the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum in New York; and Alain Seban, president of the Pompidou Center in Paris.

There are several noticeable changes at this year’s fair. Rather than one opening day for art world V.I.P.’s, there were two. The reason, the organizers said, was to make the fair less crowded and more pleasant for serious buyers. But many dealers, who declined to be named for fear of being thrown out of the fair next year, said that with more time to buy, the exciting, now-or-never rush of having to make a quick decision had evaporated. Some dealers were also unhappy about having to give their client lists to the fair organizers to issue the V.I.P. invitations, rather than having the galleries themselves do it.

The art on view at Art Unlimited is also different. Rather than a hodgepodge of oversize objects, it is a more carefully conceived exhibition, put together for the first time by Gianni Jetzer, director of the Swiss Institute/Contemporary Art in New York. In addition to Ms. Cooper’s portrait, another crowd pleaser was “Untitled (Scatter Piece),” from 1968-69, by the American artist Robert Morris. The installation consists of 200 pieces of industrial materials seemingly randomly placed in a space, first shown when it was made, at the Castelli Gallery in New York. (This version comes from Barbara Castelli, the widow of the dealer Leo Castelli, who is showing it in collaboration with Sprüth Magers, a gallery with spaces in Berlin and London.) Like most everything here, it is for sale; the price is $1.45 million.

“Untitled (Scatter Piece)” was among many works of older art. Conservative, classic modern paintings and sculptures were everywhere.

“Dealers are aware that collectors want to put their money in things that will endure,” said Tobias Meyer, chairman of contemporary art at Sotheby’s worldwide. “And the prices of these traditional works are now at levels that were once reserved only for masters like Picasso, Matisse and Brancusi.”

At the main fair, in a chapel-like installation, watched over by a security guard, at Marlborough Fine Art, was Rothko’s “Untitled, 1954,” a yellow-and-pink abstract canvas. The painting was auctioned at Christie’s in New York in 2007. A Swiss collector bought it for $26.9 million and is now hoping to get $78 million. The markup — and its presence here — was inspired by the nearly $87 million record that someone (some say it was the businessman Leonard Blavatnik) paid at Christie’s last month for “Orange, Red, Yellow,” a dreamy 1961 Rothko.

“That auction was the incentive,” said Andrew Renton, director of Marlborough Contemporary in London. “Rothko is finally being recognized as one of the great masters of the 20th century, and this is the moment.”

Throughout the fair there are many works by artists who brought top prices at last month’s big New York auctions. Gerhard Richter is one. At the Pace Gallery, Mr. Richter’s “A. B. Courbet,” an abstract canvas from 1986, sold to an unidentified American collector on Wednesday, gallery officials reported. The asking price was $25 million.

The fair is also filled with works by artists who have recently had a big retrospective — John Chamberlain and Cindy Sherman — or are about to, like Wade Guyton, whose show at the Whitney Museum of American Art opens in October.

There have been a few less predictable touches. Almine Rech, a Paris dealer, asked Nicolas Trembley, a curator and art critic, to organize her booth as though it were a small museum or gallery exhibition, around the notion of the artist’s process and appropriation. Called “Telephone Paintings,” the installation was inspired by László Moholy-Nagy’s “Konstruction in Emaille,” in which he challenged the notion of man-made art by asking an enamel plaque factory to commission three pieces composed of abstract lines in primary colors.

“The space feels like a salon for selling art,” Ms. Rech said. White wallpaper decorated with small gold Aladdin’s lamps designed by the Swiss artist John M. Armleder covers her booth, and the selection of art on view is unusual and varied. There is a “Joke” painting by Richard Prince, 1963 race riot prints by Andy Warhol and a collage by Kurt Schwitters, along with examples by younger artists like Mr. Guyton, Erik Lindman, Tom Burr, Alex Israel and Jonathan Binet. By the end of Tuesday, Ms. Rech said, she had sold a number of the smaller works by artists like Mr. Israel and Mr. Lindman.

Some seasoned collectors and art advisers were grumbling that many works had gone before they even walked through the fair doors. “With dealers sending clients JPEGs ahead of time the game has changed,” said Philippe Ségalot, a New York dealer whose antics in years past, like hiring of a Hollywood makeup artist to disguise him so he could sneak into the fair before everyone and snap up the best works, have become Art Basel legend.

So why do so many important collectors still bother to come all the way to Basel? “They’re afraid of missing something,” Mr. Ségalot replied.

 

 

By KELLY CROW

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Daniel Buren, 'Photo-souvenir: From Three Windows, 5 Colours for 252 Places, Work in Situ'

Hong Kong

"Expansion" is a six-foot-long, multicolored abstract created by Chinese painter Chu Teh-Chun in 2006. The painting's title could also sum up the ambition of Art HK: The Hong Kong International Art Fair, where the work sold Wednesday to a Chinese buyer for around $900,000.

   

 

Kelly Crow on Lunch Break reports from Hong Kong on that city's major contemporary art fair, Art HK, which Art Basel has bought a controlling stake in.

Since its kickoff five years ago, Art HK has grown into Asia's pre-eminent art fair, drawing over 60,000 people a year into a warren of booths that spread across a pair of vast halls in the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

European Pressphoto Agency

'I Didn't Notice What I Am Doing,' pictured here, by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu., on view at the fair.

This year, at least 700 galleries applied for the fair's 266 slots, said fair director Magnus Renfrew. Several dealers, like Shanghai's Pearl Lam and Paris's Emmanuel Perrotin, waited until fair week to debut their new gallery outposts in Hong Kong. Luxury brands Veuve Clicquot and Shanghai Tang threw late-night parties to coincide with the event.

All of it dovetails with Hong Kong's long-term plans to become a year-round, art-selling hub to rival London or New York—an aspiration wedded to Asia's wealth boom.

There's still an unpredictable energy to Art HK, as Western galleries—who make up about half the fair's dealers—anxiously try to nail down the shifting tastes and spending habits of newer Asian collectors, who are the real power players here.

The mood has been mostly upbeat. Few booths are sold out entirely, but major galleries like Pace are reporting steady sales for works priced under $1 million, thanks mainly to buyers from Asia and Europe. Dealers said at least 300 Australian collectors signed up to attend, happy to have a fair comparatively close to home.

On the other hand, American collectors, who typically flock to major art fairs world-wide, have proven surprisingly scarce. Dealers reasoned that Americans might have gotten their fix at Frieze, a London fair that debuted its own New York edition two weeks ago. Others are also likely saving up for next month's Art Basel, the Swiss contemporary art fair whose owner MCH Group recently bought a majority ownership stake in Art HK. (Next spring, Art HK will be renamed Art Basel Hong Kong.) The fair closes Sunday.

On Wednesday, a reliable group of well-known collectors turned out for the fair's VIP preview, including François Pinault, Christie's owner; Uli Sigg, a former Swiss ambassador to China; Rudy Tseng, a former Walt Disney executive from Taiwan and Richard Chang, the Beijing director of investment firm Tira Holdings.

The galleries also worked to make first-timers feel comfortable. London's Annely Juda Gallery taped up a sign in Mandarin offering to divulge prices for its offerings—something dealers usually just whisper to prospective buyers on a case-by-case basis. Dealer David Juda also placed a small sticker shaped like a red dot beside David Hockney's $950,000 painting of a log, "Felled Totem, September 8th, 2009," to indicate that the work in that booth had already found a buyer. Mr. Juda doesn't apply stickers at other fairs, but he said, "I heard it was a good idea here to reassure people when works are sold."

Plenty of galleries dangled new works by Asian artists in their rosters. In one of the most elaborate displays, the Gagosian Gallery added a carpeted side room to its booth to showcase a pair of new pencil drawings of trees by Zeng Fanzhi, a Chinese painter who is better known for his colorful portraits of men wearing white masks. The gallery used the other walls of this antechamber to offer up paintings by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Claude Monet. The lofty comparison may have helped: Mr. Zeng's drawings sold on the first day for an undisclosed sum.

London dealer Stephane Custot, who sold the Chu Teh-Chun abstract, also brought a $2.2 million Picasso musketeer painting, 1969's "Bust of a Man." But so far, he said passersby had gravitated to their hometown favorite: "It's easier here to sell a Chu Teh-Chun than a Picasso."

Mr. Tseng, the Taiwanese collector, said he thinks the ongoing strength of this fair will lie in artistic mix of East and West. This time, he said he liked German painter Gerhard Richter's wall-size print "Stripe" at Marian Goodman's booth. He also raved about Beijing art duo Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's life-size sculptures of dinosaurs and rhinoceroses, which stood, like a scattered herd, in several fair booths. "See? Everything about this fair is getting bigger," he added.

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 18, 2012, on page D4 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Next Global Art Powerhouse.