George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Rearranging Warhol’s Legacy" @nytimes by BLAKE GOPNIK

The front entrance to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Credit Abby Warhola        

PITTSBURGH — Andy Warhol was, chronologically and by his own description, a nose picker, a pimp and a water guzzler. He was also (or therefore) one of the most various, complex and impressive talents the art world has produced. All those claims, however unlikely, can be confirmed by a visit to the Andy Warhol Museum here in his hometown. In honor of its 20th anniversary, the museum has been rethought from top to bottom, and the results are now being revealed to the public. There may not be another museum that digs as deep into a single artist, and gets as much out of the excavation.

“We want people to know that there’s much more to Andy Warhol than Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyns,” said Eric Shiner, who took over as director in 2011. He started his career as an intern at the museum in 1994, and sitting in his office one day in April — the same space where he once sorted books — he said of Warhol, “He changed just about everything.”

Curators set out to show how life and art were perhaps more closely entwined for Warhol than for any other artist.

Photo

Top, the new lobby is lined in silver foil to echo Warhol’s 1964 Factory. Below, the same space before it was remodeled. Credit Top, Abby Warhola; Bottom, The Andy Warhol Museum

The museum used to mix works from various periods in an attractive scattershot, but now all seven of its floors have been reconceived as an orderly survey of just about everything that Warhol got up to, from the 1950s as a leading commercial artist to his work as an impresario with the Velvet Underground in the later ’60s to his landmark films — and the first video art — right through to his place deep within MTV culture in the 1980s. Where other artists of his generation, such as Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, used pop culture to feed their high art, Warhol plunged right in and became part of that culture.

“It really is a new Warhol; it’s much more about him,” Mr. Shiner said, noting especially the trove of archival documents and early art, much of it on loan from local relatives.

Forget Elizabeth Taylor and Brillo boxes and even Edie Sedgwick. To understand the true greatness of Andy Warhol (1928-87), we may want to start with two early images by and of him. The rethought galleries now feature a little-known student painting from 1948 in which Warhol uses the latest in expressionist brushwork to portray himself, nude, with a finger stuck up his nose, pushing past the limits of good taste and fine art even while still in college. Near that artwork hangs a rare family snapshot that includes a baby-bonneted Andy, maybe 2 years old, also with his finger in his nose. Could there be any other artist whose art so closely tracks his life?

We can make do knowing little about Giotto or Vermeer; we can manage without the details of Monet’s life. But Warhol, by being who he was, as much as by making what he made, put himself “at the very heart of what we know as art in the 20th century,” Mr. Shiner said. That art had often tried to bridge the gap between art and life; when Warhol came along, he backfilled the chasm. Figures such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons have waltzed across after him.

Last year, a record 120,000 people visited the museum, helping boost its revenue. The budget for the anniversary rehang was $500,000 — less than some museums spend on one show. A new lobby is lined in silver foil to echo Warhol’s 1964 Factory on East 47th Street in Manhattan, and comes complete with a bar meant to get visitors hanging out and to make the important art-historical point that Warhol was as notable as a catalyst for new ways to hang out as he was a maker of precious objects.

The museum is asking a lot, however, if it wants us to imagine that what goes on in its lobby could have much of a link to Warhol’s wild times. The fun that went on in his studio was so serious, it could almost be fatal.

Later, in America’s disco days, Warhol’s mere presence at Studio 54, as much as the portraits he did of his pals there, were what made him matter to our culture, as revealed in a show about Warhol and his designer friend Halston now filling special-exhibition spaces on the new second floor. (Future exhibitions there will dwell on how contemporary artists were influenced by or even reacted against Warhol.)

Photo

Andy Warhol in Flushing, Queens, amid black-eyed Susans near the 1964 World’s Fair, with a freshly completed Flowers painting in the background. Credit William John Kennedy/KIWI Arts Group

The idea of a “post-object” Warhol — we might now think of him as the godfather of such “relational” artists as Rirkrit Tiravanija — was a big part of how he came across in his own day. The rehang includes a 1969 issue of “Esquire” in which Warhol explains that his next work will be to rent out his followers to all comers, turning himself into a kind of art-world pimp.

Recent scholarship has also latched onto this idea of Warhol as performer. “There’s this conception of Andy Warhol’s most important artwork as his construction of the self, as it changed over the years,” said Nicholas Chambers, curator of art at the museum. Many of the new galleries where he’s hanging Warhol’s well-known canvases also include photos that show Warhol constructing a forever-new “self” that ranged from tie-wearing upstart to leather-clad undergrounder to preppy social climber and disco king.

The one Warhol persona that is slighted in the new installation is his presence as one of the first notably gay artists to reach mass attention. The museum is open about Warhol’s homosexuality, displaying his “Studies for a Boy Book,” a series of pre-Pop drawings from the 1950s, and mentioning boyfriends in wall text. But it never digs into how important he was for the history of gay culture, and how vital his gayness was for his art.

Yet there’s a risk that too much attention paid to who Warhol was could distract from the art he made, according to Christopher Bedford, the director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, who recently presented a show on Warhol’s use of photography. Warhol’s ideas about art may have expanded to include aspects of his life, but they are still ideas about art; Mr. Bedford said he felt that the museum has to be careful not to present Warhol as just another “fascinating social figure.”

You can sense the museum trying to strike this delicate balance in its rehang. If anything, however, recent stratospheric auction prices have focused public attention away from Warhol the man and onto his handmade, salable “masterpieces”: The catalog for Christie’s latest contemporary art auction in New York featured a “White Marilyn” from 1962 on its cover, as oligarch bait.

Mr. Shiner, the museum’s director, doesn’t deny the instant appeal of the paintings. Touring through the collection, he stopped to admire an immense 1963 silk-screened canvas of Elvis Presley called “Elvis 11 Times,” now given its own wall. Warhol wrote that he liked the silk-screen technique for its “assembly-line” effect, “the way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple — quick and chancey.”

Mr. Shiner emphasized that it’s easier to recognize the radical flair of Warhol’s classic pieces when they are seen near his more challenging work in moving pictures, as they are in the new installation. “Film is equal in his oeuvre to the paintings,” Mr. Shiner said.

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This vintage glass vase, etched in red in the 1920s or ’30s, is one of many objects from Andy Warhol’s personal collection on view for the first time. Credit The Andy Warhol Museum                    

Next year will mark five decades since Warhol became the first artist to make video art. (His landmark piece, “Outer and Inner Space,” featured Edie Sedgwick on film, keeping company with a second image of herself on video, and it beat Nam June Paik’s first video work by several weeks.) One of the rehang’s highlights is a fourth-floor media gallery where, for the first time, the public is offered on-demand, uncut access to about 130 of Warhol’s films, videos and TV programs, mostly unfindable until now. “Movies, movies and more movies,” Warhol later recalled. “We were shooting so many, we never even bothered to give titles to a lot of them".

Greg Pierce, a curator of film and video at the museum, is presenting one piece barely known even to experts: Warhol’s 1971 video called “Water.” It was made for an exhibition organized by Yoko Ono, and offers a 33-minute close-up on the tank of the water cooler in Warhol’s Union Square studio, as he and his irregulars stand around nattering and drinking from it. (The audio is punctuated with the “glug-glug” of the cooler being used). The video takes off from Warhol’s earlier “durational” films — works that had him pointing a static movie camera at such things as the Empire State Building — and blends them with his budding 1970s “performance” as the world’s cattiest gossip and partygoer.

John W. Smith, now the director of the art museum at the Rhode Island School of Design, was at the Warhol museum from 1994 to 2006 as an archivist and then assistant director. He said one of the most provocative moves for any one-artist museum would be to acknowledge the weak works as a vital part of the story. He added, “I know the storerooms at the Warhol Museum, and there’s a lot of work that the market has tried to tell us is important but frankly, I doubt it.” He cited Warhol’s “Toy” paintings, from the 1980s, as pieces that might be displayed as examples of second-rate work.

The new installation does not show much sign of trumpeting any works as also-rans.

But Mr. Smith also notes the opposite happening, with works once considered minor now being universally recognized as great. He mentions the Warhol archives as such a case. Down on the museum’s third floor, those archives are going on display behind glass walls. Warhol had the habit of filling cardboard boxes with all the mail, mementos and leftovers from his daily life, including such things as wedding cake, a banana-shaped harmonica and naughty pictures. He called the results “Time Capsules,” and all 610 of them are now visible; at any given time, the contents of one will be spread out in vitrines.

The museum has unpacked Capsule No. 109, whose hundreds of artifacts include a poster printed from a bootleg photo of a naked Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (in good humor, she inscribed it “For Andy — with enduring affection — Jackie, Montauk”) and an autographed (but never opened) copy of Lou Reed’s “Coney Island Baby.” (In an obscure interview conducted in the studio in 1985, apparently with Warhol looking on, one assistant talked about the capsules: “He wants to sell them as a unit. I tried to make them really good. Each one has a T-shirt, a good art book, Godiva chocolates — things like that.”)

Matt Wrbican, chief archivist and a walking hard-drive of Warholian facts, said there are over 500,000 items in his care, with many only now being put on display. Even the couple of hours I spent in the archives last year instantly delivered fresh information — the fact, for instance, that after being shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968, Warhol, either down at the heels or simply cheap, had hoped to trade paintings for his doctors’ services. At today’s auction prices, that would have made it the most profitable medicine ever practiced.

“He always kept everything,” recalled the illustrator James Warhola, a nephew who stayed with Warhol for several weeks in the 1970s and witnessed his manic collecting. “His whole life’s work was made to order for a museum.”

George Lindemann Wins Inaugural Better Beach Award

March 26, 2013

Congratulations, George Lindemann!

By ELLEN GAMERMAN and MARY M. LANE

A lady in a bonnet is shaking up the art world.

When "After Lunch," Berthe Morisot's portrait of a doe-eyed woman, sold for $10.9 million in February, it set a record as the most expensive work ever sold by a female artist at auction. It also helped power a wave of interest among collectors and dealers looking to identify undervalued female artists.

Yayoi Kusama/David Zwirner, Victoria Miro Gallery, Ota Fine Arts, Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc.

YAYOI KUSAMA: The 84-year-old is the top-selling living female artist of all time, fetching $118 million total at auction.

A woman's signature in the bottom corner of a painting has long spelled a bargain—men in the same artistic school or period can fetch more than 10 times the price of a woman's best sale. While an age-old debate rages over whether talent, sexism or lack of promotion has held many women out of the art world's boys club, everyone agrees that prices for female artists have always lagged behind those of their male counterparts.

Today's flourishing art market—marked by last year's record-setting sale at auction of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" for nearly $120 million—has lifted prices for male and female artists alike. As the supply of great pictures diminishes, more collectors are priced out of blue-chip works and are combing the market for previously overlooked names. A number of highly regarded women artists are seeing their prices rise as a result.

"Remember 'plastics' from 'The Graduate'? It should be 'women,' " says Tony Podesta, the Washington lobbyist who is one of a handful of collectors aggressively buying work by women artists.

  

This winter, a painting by Berthe Morisot sold for $11 million--the most ever paid for a woman's artwork at auction. Along with other big art-market moments for women in recent years, the record has auction houses and dealers re-examining this historically undervalued niche. Ellen Gamerman reports.

The records are toppling. Nine of the top 10 auction sales of work by women occurred within the last five years. The last two years marked record-high prices at auction for artists including Joan Mitchell, Tamara de Lempicka, Louise Bourgeois, Irma Stern, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Helen Frankenthaler, Rosemarie Trockel and Louise Lawler.

Auction experts and collectors are anxious to see how three Morisot paintings will sell next month during Impressionist and modern sales in New York, two at Sotheby's BID +2.20%and one at Christie's.

"Whereas before we looked at female artists as the land of opportunity, with prices like these, collectors say the window is closing for gender-specificity bargain buying," says Gabriela Palmieri, a senior vice president and contemporary-art specialist at Sotheby's.

Cindy Sherman/Metro Pictures

CINDY SHERMAN: In 2011, the artist was the auction world's highest-priced photographer, male or female, with a $3.9 million sale. Here, the artist models in an untitled portrait.

Spanning centuries and a wide variety of styles, work by women is hardly a cohesive market category. Still, some collectors eagerly seek out female artwork.

Prominent women like Wal-Mart WMT +1.47%heiress Alice Walton, pop queen Madonna and songstress Barbra Streisand have long collected work by women. Barbara Lee, a national activist for women in politics, has filled her collection almost entirely with work by women partly to support artists she believes are underrepresented by museums and galleries. She recalled visiting Louise Bourgeois's studio in the early 1990s. "It was filled with sculpture from every period of her life—no one had purchased it," says Ms. Lee.

Others have less-altruistic motives. "A lot of collectors look for undervalued groups of art, and women could easily be considered the last big group," says Michel Witmer, a New York collector and board member of the European Fine Art Fair.

Dealers and auction experts are using several tactics as they scour the market. One is to find female artists whose works, backgrounds or artistic movements mirror those of prohibitively expensive male artists. These artists include: Joan Mitchell, who worked in the shadows of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock; Natalia Goncharova, one of the turn-of-the-century Russian artists led by Wassily Kandinsky; and Agnes Martin, who forged a path in a male-dominated period led by minimalists like Donald Judd.

Others track female artists whose works have hovered just under $1 million at auction, expecting them to pop into seven figures. Among those attracting attention: conceptual artist Sherrie Levine, known for appropriating photographs by artists like Edward Weston and Walker Evans; and Barbara Kruger, who plasters black-and-white photographs with loud slogans. Both their prices have been dwarfed by the multimillion-dollar sums fetched by fellow contemporary artists like Richard Prince or Christopher Wool.

Another contender: Helen Frankenthaler. There's some debate over the merits of the late abstract expressionist's work compared with those of the men who came before her—like Pollock, whose biggest auction sale topped $40 million—but collectors have shown they're ready to bet on her. Frankenthaler's auction record is just under $1 million, but her early work was recently featured in a show at New York's Gagosian Gallery, where a canvas sold privately for $3 million, according to a gallery official.

The evolution in the market for Joan Mitchell's work illustrates how collectors have recently "discovered" an artist long in the shadows of her male counterparts.

Mitchell, the late Chicago-born painter known for splattering strokes and bold colors, operated just outside circles of older abstract-expressionist peers like de Kooning and Pollock. In 1951, she exhibited alongside them in New York, but by the 1960s she had exiled herself to France.

In 2006, as the art market boomed, a 1970s de Kooning sold for $27 million at Christie's. A Mitchell work fetched $2 million, a big sum for the artist at the time, but one that suddenly had the whiff of a good deal in the Christie's salesroom. New York art adviser Abigail Asher remembers the scene: "A client turned to me and said, 'Wow, doesn't that seem inexpensive?' " she recalled of the collector, who had just bought a Mitchell privately earlier that week.

By 2011, Mitchell's market had climbed as hedge-fund managers and other trophy hunters pegged her work as a good investment. Ms. Asher recalled chasing a Mitchell canvas past its $6 million high estimate against another bidder at Sotheby's. The piece, a large-scale canvas in a riot of colors, sold for $9.3 million—her highest sum ever at auction. Ms. Asher, who lost out, slumped in her seat after the hammer fell: "It was the feeling of: 'The cat's out of the bag.' "

Last year, Mitchell's canvases were the two most expensive works by any woman artist sold at auction, according to auction database Artnet. Her work now hangs in museums around the world, including Ms. Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. A 1958 Mitchell painting will be on the block next month at Christie's.

A number of theories exist for why women have languished in the art world's bargain basement. Experts point to the smaller supply of work by women from certain periods—after all they're called Old Masters, not Old Mistresses—which limits the frequency of sales and holds down prices. Women also are underrepresented by major museums, where purchases and exhibits boost prices. Famous artists like Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo do appear in museum shows, but the permanent modern art collections of most major institutions are comprised largely of work by male artists.

Others say women haven't marketed themselves as well as men. "Male artists are much more pushy and power-related," says Eva Presenhuber, a Zurich-based dealer who noted she recently threw a toned-down party for the artist Karen Kilimnik because the artist doesn't like to promote herself with splashy events.

Indeed, the upper echelons of the art world still belong to men: All of the top 100 works ever sold at auction were created by male artists, and fewer than 3% of auctioned works over $1 million last year were by female artists, according to Artnet. No living woman has cleared $10 million at auction to date, compared with scores of men.

One reason Morisot took off, experts say, is because she and artists like Mary Cassatt have styles similar to those of famous male painters of the period, in this case Manet and Renoir. They also have recognizable brand looks that are easy to live with. "It's no coincidence that the art you see reproduced in doctors' waiting rooms is [their] type of Impressionist work," says Philip Hook, a senior specialist in Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art department.

Morisot and Cassatt were prolific artists, but most of their work is ferreted away in museums, making those paintings that do crop up on the market highly sought-after.

In a packed Christie's salesroom in London last February, the Morisot canvas, "After Lunch," sold for roughly three times its high estimate after a protracted back-and-forth between two telephone bidders from Russia and the U.S. The piece is believed to have gone to an American.

The market prizes other female artists because of artistic styles and cultural sensibilities that translate well over time. Tamara de Lempicka, a Polish-born artist with a booze-and-party-fueled lifestyle, moved to Hollywood in 1939 and became a wild fixture on the movie-industry scene. Her Art Deco paintings, brimming with men in tuxes, busty blondes and lesbian trysts, draw famous admirers today—and have reached record auction prices in recent years. Sotheby's will feature a moody Manhattan skyline by the artist during next month's sales.

Madonna, who owns at least two de Lempickas, has collected her for decades and considers her work a source of inspiration, a spokeswoman confirmed. When the singer's "Vogue" video came out in 1990, featuring Madonna's de Lempickas in the background, it sent a frisson through auction houses and art galleries. For years later, whenever anyone had a de Lempicka to sell, the reaction was always the same: "Everyone said, 'Oh, offer it to Madonna,' " says David Norman, Sotheby's co-chairman of Impressionist and modern art world-wide.

Other avid collectors include Barbra Streisand, who was first drawn to the artist's paintings in the 1970s when she was building a house in Art Deco style. "I found Lempicka's work to be so original," Ms. Streisand said in an email, praising the artist's style and technique. "The fact that she was a woman artist made her even more intriguing."

The gender gap narrows within smaller niche markets like photography. Cindy Sherman, a 59-year-old chameleon who spends years planning portraits of herself in various personae, briefly held the title as the auction world's highest-priced photographer, female or male, in 2011. An image of herself splayed across a brown linoleum floor sold for $3.9 million. Ms. Sherman's works, which sold for $1,000 at her long-standing gallery Metro Pictures in 1981, now typically fetch $450,000 at the gallery and are collected by art-market heavyweights such as Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad and Christie's owner François Pinault.

An older generation of women artists sees a much different art market today than the one they grew up with. Pat Steir, a 74-year-old New York artist who pours paint down her monumental canvases, recalled one summer in 1964 visiting a friend whose father was an abstract painter. One of his guests was Mark Rothko. Ms. Steir approached him, explaining that she had just gotten out of art school. "I said, 'Mr. Rothko, you're such a great artist, I admire your work so much,' and he said, 'You're a pretty girl. Why aren't you married?' "

Ms. Steir's art now hangs in most major museums across the U.S., including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Partner Without the Prize

By ROBIN POGREBIN

Twenty-two years after being passed by, the architect Denise Scott Brown, 81, said at an awards ceremony for women in architecture last month that it was time she share in the 1991 Pritzker Prize that was given to her design partner and husband, Robert Venturi, with whom she had worked side by side.

 

 

 

Arielle Assouline-Lichten, foreground, and Caroline James started the Pritzker petition.

By Erika Bolstad

McClatchy Newspapers

Jean Nouvel, ante el proyecto del Louvre Abu Dhabi. / thomas coex (afp)


The Louvre Abu Dhabi is ready, two and a half years after its inauguration, to show the world the backbone of its permanent collection. In total, 130 objects from different places over the last four millennia in the exhibition Birth of a museum, which opens to the public on day 22 in the Saadiyat Island cultural district in Abu Dhabi. It is the first large-scale museum ambitious funds, the first with universal vocation of the Arab world and whose construction is based on a project by architect Jean Nouvel.

"The goal is to demonstrate the concept of universality making art objects dialogue of civilizations and eras," said Celine Hullo-Pouyat yesterday, director of the Louvre Abu Dhabi project during a previous visit to the exhibition. It is also, as stated during the presentation Emirati co-director, Hissa to Dhaheri, to "emphasize human values ​​that unite us."

Hence, the sample is divided by civilizations and historical periods, but according to anthropological concepts. This statement of intent is apparent from the first room, which is dedicated to the representation of the human figure, a taboo for some radical interpretations of Islam. In it, the Conservatives opposed the sculpture of a Bactrian princess from the late third millennium BC (one of the jewels of the collection) and a Cypriot prehistoric idol with an abstract painting by Yves Klein. The effect is amazing and encourages reflection of the visitor. To help her, also have been placed screens on which video can be put into context mute that works and pieces linked to other museums.

"The mediation effort is part of the museum's educational objective," says Hullo-Pouyat. Like the rest of the exhibitions organized in Saadiyat, Birth of a museum will be accompanied by lectures, discussions and workshops. In addition, the Louvre Abu Dhabi seeks to establish permanent links with schools in the country and become an instrument of educational support.

The exhibition is divided into six trans-chronological rooms although not a literal illustration of the future museum itself evoke their aesthetic and narrative. In the dedicated to the Ancient World, The speaker, a Roman toga first century marble, is presented alongside a pedestrian statue of a Buddha, a piece dated between the second and third centuries. It is interesting to compare the similarities and differences in the folds of their cloaks or expression. A map explaining what was happening in the rest of the world at that time. Entitled The Sacred In a Jewish Pentateuch shares from Yemen cabinet with a diptych Christian and a Koran.

Later, the eastern Image contrasts with the western look, showing a score of paintings by some of the great European artists ranging from Murillo or Jordaens to Gauguin and Picasso. The presence in these works of Venus and nymphs in the bathroom, Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, whose protagonists are scantily clad, forced ago asking if conservatives found with red lines or warnings to local cultural sensitivity.

"No," he replies without hesitation Hullo-Pouyat. "We worked on a universal concept in the context of cultural and scientific program of the museum". Neither she nor the other makers reveal the total number of pieces in the collection or its value. And also refer to this program as a reference framework for the purchase of works by the Government of Abu Dhabi, the owner of both the museum and its contents. Having decided on the target must be aware of the parts that go on sale.

"This is the challenge facing all new museums because they can only access what is available in the market against centuries collections" admits Olivier Gabet, deputy conservation French Museums Agency, whose collaboration is the result of a bilateral agreement between Paris and Abu Dhabi. Gabet highlights the "exclusivity" not only of the works presented but how to present them.

For now, when it opens in late 2015, the museum also displays the permanent collection, funds borrowed from French museums. "As you increase the collection, loans will be reduced," explains the director. The organizers will be very attentive to how local audiences reacted to this exhibition, since the ultimate goal is that the museum will attract local and regional audiences, and that they get to call their own.

The announcement that the Emirate of Abu Dhabi signed an agreement with the Louvre to help him to develop his own art gallery and planned to build the largest Guggenheim in the world was met with skepticism when it was announced in early 2007. Three years after the financial crisis forced the makers to curb its ambitions. Only recently, work has resumed. Under the new timetable announced this year, the Louvre will open in two years, the National Museum signing Foster & Partners will be ready in 2016 and the Guggenheim, designed as one would expect by Frank Gehry opened in 2017. It also plans to build an auditorium designed by architect Zaha Hadid and a maritime museum by Tadao Ando draft.

Neil MacGregor (Glasgow, 1946), director of the British Museum, popularizer radio and one of the most admired intellectual authorities in the UK, came to Madrid to celebrate more than the loan exhibition of drawings The Spanish stroke in the British Museum. Renaissance Drawings Goya. "This year marks half a century of the first time I visited the Prado. I remember it well, went with my parents, and I refused to go out to eat ... Wanted to continue seeing more rooms ". Then, MacGregor was a Scottish guy just a curious idea of ​​artistic taste: "I grew up in Glasgow, next to the home of refined Stirling Maxwell, who was one of the largest collections of Spanish art. And when he was eight, the city bought Christ of Saint John of the Cross, Dali. So at such a tender age thought that Spanish art collectors and collected them when cities bought, also were favored by their country. "

That boy became museum director, first in the National Gallery and from 2002 of the British institution that aspires to contain the world from antiquity to the present day. She also made radio history a BBC program (which became a book, published by Debate) in which two million years of humanity were explained in 100 objects. On the challenges that lie ahead for museums chatted with the country in the modern, sunny and peaceful cloister extending the Prado, a metaphor for how much they have changed in this half century galleries. "They've changed, yes, but the tables, not".

It is important not to be dependent on the private or the public

Show the past in the future. "They are still the places to understand the world in retrospect. In the Prado you realize that the history of Europe is a single, culturally and politically. We struggle lately for building a single European history when a story we've been building for centuries. The museums will allow us to understand the world. Obviously, the British is different, because it brings together objects of all civilizations. But it throws the same message: the world has always been connected. "

Free tickets for all?? "The tradition in Britain is that the museums are free, because that was the mandate of Parliament that created in the eighteenth century. They settled at no cost to British and foreign citizens. If you want people to understand the world you must make accessible and free entry. A museum is a public space of the mind and spirit that all citizens have the right to live ".

Surviving the cuts. "As in Spain, the institutions of Britain suffer cuts in public allocation. We fought using private money, making use of the store sales and sponsors, whether businesses or individual citizens. And then share our collection with the rest of the world, as I think you are doing with much discretion the Prado. On every continent right now you can see pictures of the gallery in Madrid. That, plus reaffirm that these treasures belong to the world, it also means that recipients of these collections support the museum's finances. "

"To achieve the perfect balance no formula. The British tradition has always been a mix between public and private. Half and half. I think that's a good percentage. The State guarantees the continuity and security of the collection and businesses, individuals and foreign museums help in other ways. The formula is difficult, but clear: lots of hard work. It can be a complex issue, but remember to museums who your audience is and how they should be addressed to him. It is important not to be totally dependent on the private or the public, you need to have independence when telling a story academically true ".

The pieces that were legally acquired there is no need to return them

Who does cultural diplomacy? "Depends what you mean by that concept. I do not believe in museums as a weapon of the state. Because the pieces do not belong. Now, when you travel to the works create a dialogue, a debate with people. Lately we are paying much more to China and India. They have never had the opportunity to see the pieces of ancient Egypt, for example. With them, we allow these countries to enter and interact with the story of our time, which is a global history. It is a form of communication, but should not be a subterfuge to employ Velázquez in the interest of a country or of another. "

Spoliation or property? Legitimate? "Do not believe in the return of the parts if they were properly acquired. And we know it was not always that way: there was a lot of looting in World War II. Things have not improved much in the last 30 or 40 years. But if the objects were obtained legally, as with the Parthenon, do not understand why would they return them. The same is true Flemish Paintings of the Prado, why should they be returned? Here are accessible to everyone. The great challenge is to fight against illegal excavations and be able to share these treasures with the world. These jewels do not belong to Paris, Berlin or Madrid, but that these cities should share. Religions divide, museums are world citizens ".

Challenges. "The danger for the future of museums is nationalism. The very existence of art collections is a denial of nationalism, because they provide a vision of humanity as a whole. Perhaps more important today than ever, when we see the dangers of division worldwide. These collections teach us to share. "

Is there a limit to the number of visitors? "It's a great dilemma. We have six million. There is a limit, undoubtedly. We must be able to accommodate that demand our buildings. And then we return to the idea of ​​the museum traveler, if visitors can not come here, we can send them the pieces. We must also work to make the collections accessible to all, on the web and on smartphones. And what the mobile is to make the collection accessible to all uses. "

Daniel Reich, 39, Resourceful Art Dealer, Dies

Nancy Siesel/The New York Times

Daniel Reich in his gallery on 23rd Street in Chelsea. He previously held exhibitions in his tiny studio apartment.

By RANDY KENNEDY

Daniel Reich, a scrappy and innovative New York art dealer who held exhibitions for two years in his tiny studio apartment and, even after renting a traditional gallery, continued to show art nomadically in places like the Chelsea Hotel and a former delicatessen in Midtown, died on Dec. 25 at his parents’ home in Larchmont, N.Y., his sister confirmed this week. He was 39.