$4M piece found

By KATE KOWSH, LIZ SADLER and DAREH GREGORIAN

Last Updated: 8:53 AM, August 1, 2012

A multimillion-dollar Roy Lichtenstein painting that disappeared 42 years ago has popped up in a Manhattan warehouse — and its owner is trying to make sure it doesn’t pull another vanishing act.

“Electric Cord” was last seen in 1970 when owner Leo Castelli sent the piece by the pop-art prince out to be professionally cleaned. It was never returned, and the fate of the painting was a mystery — until last week.

That’s when Castelli’s widow, Barbara Castelli, got a call from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation saying the piece had turned up at a high-end art storage warehouse on the East Side, where someone was trying to sell it.

She asked for a restraining order barring the estimated $4 million painting from being moved from the Hayes Storage Warehouse until she can get her day in court, saying in court papers that she’s “deeply concerned” about the possibility of the artwork, “which is an American treasure by an artist native to Manhattan, again disappearing, perhaps to never be seen again.”

Justice O. Peter Sherwood signed off on Castelli’s temporary court order freezing the painting’s location pending a hearing with the warehouse people and “John Doe” on Monday.

Amye Austin, an operations supervisor at Hayes, declined to comment.

Leo Castelli, who put on Lichtenstein’s first solo exhibit at his gallery in 1962, bought “Electric Cord,” a painting of a tightly wrapped electric cord, in the 1960s for $750, the court papers say.

In January 1970, he sent the piece out to be cleaned by a well-regarded restorer named Daniel Goldreyer. But instead of returning the painting, Goldreyer told Castelli the work had been lost.

Lichtenstein, who’s known for his dotted comic book-like panel works, died in 1997, and Leo Castelli died in 1999. The work was officially listed as “lost/stolen” in the international Art Loss Registry in 2007.

Then last week, James Goodman Gallery owner James Goodman called the Lichtenstein foundation to say he’d been told by a “third party” that the painting was at Hayes Storage, and asked if they’d authenticate the work, the court filing says. A rep for the foundation then tipped off Barbara Castelli.

Goodman told The Post he had no idea that the painting might have been stolen, and that the current owners claimed to have an invoice showing the piece was purchased from Leo Castelli.

kate.kowsh@nypost.com

By ERIC FELTEN

Oh, the perils of found-object art. Over the course of some 20 years, art dealer and collector Ileana Sonnabend negotiated with federal regulators over a prized possession: "Canyon," a work by artist Robert Rauschenberg that combines a painting, a rope-trundled pillow and a stuffed bird. The problem was the bird—a young bald eagle of obscure origin. And now, five years after Ms. Sonnabend died, the problem continues to be the bird. Under federal statutes that prohibit any traffic in bald eagles or their remains, the artwork cannot legally be sold to anyone. And yet the Internal Revenue Service is demanding that Ms. Sonnabend's heirs pay $40 million in taxes on "Canyon." It's the sort of case where you wonder if the IRS agents are named Willem and Franz.

The mantle of art provides little mediation or mitigation when it comes to endangered species. When Lawrence M. Small was made secretary of the Smithsonian Institution a little more than a decade ago, he let some magazines photograph his collection of Amazonian tribal art, much of which was made of feathers of protected rain-forest birds. The articles and photos were perused with keen interest at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which soon began an investigation. That he considered the items art made no difference—Mr. Small eventually pleaded guilty to federal misdemeanor violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

Does it help if the artwork is famous? Perhaps, as art lawyer Ronald Spencer notes, it is "bad public relations to destroy works of art," and that can temper the urge to seize. Still, counting on enforcement agencies to be reasonable is a dicey strategy. What is deemed all right under one administration might be discovered to be not all right at all once different officials are in place. The stuffed bird adorning "Canyon" first caught the attention of Fish and Wildlife Service agents in 1981, when the artwork came back through U.S. Customs after a European tour. The Interior Department seems to have been rather accommodating at the time, giving Ms. Sonnabend a permit to hang on to the piece.

But it was a different story in 1998 when she tried to lend "Canyon" to an international retrospective of Mr. Rauschenberg's work. The Sonnabend Gallery "encountered resistance from a new administrator at the Department of the Interior," as ARTnews put it. Federal officials notified the gallery it would have to "relinquish the carcass to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service" or donate the artwork to a nonprofit museum—unless "the carcass was taken from the wild prior to 1940" (when the Bald Eagle Protection Act became law).

But how to prove that? This is when the gallery again enjoyed the benefit of regulatory discretion. Mr. Rauschenberg was allowed to simply swear before a notary-public that the eagle was old enough to be legal. He told a quirky story about how the bird had come into his possession. It seems that an artist friend living in an apartment above Carnegie Hall rescued the dingus from the trash in 1959. The eagle, the story went, had belonged to an aged tenant who in his youth "was a member of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders." According to Mr. Rauschenberg's notarized statement, "this Rough Rider acquired, from the wild, a bald eagle which he had taxidermed prior to 1940." When the old cowboy had died, his family tossed the unwanted bird in the garbage. Though the artist was recounting a third-hand tale of an unknown, unnamed cavalryman he had never met, Mr. Rauschenberg's account was accepted as appropriate documentation. Who said the feds can't be reasonable?

Not everyone gets such benefit of the doubt. Just imagine if Gibson Guitar Corp.—locked in a dispute with the Fish and Wildlife Service over the legality of foreign wood sourced for its instruments—had ever tried to offer proof of provenance as flimsy as the artist's notarized statement. But then again, in its dispute Gibson chose not to make nice. The company has been challenging Fish and Wildlife rulings in court. Which might help explain why, a year ago, heavily armed and body-armored agents descended on the company's Nashville factory to seize guitars and pallets of wood.

The Sonnabend heirs would ultimately find out how unreasonable enforcement agents can be. When the IRS first came looking for some payment on the unsalable "Canyon," the tax agency told an attorney working for the estate, Ralph E. Lerner, that the artwork was worth $15 million. But the lawyer refused to agree to that number, insisting that, because there is no legal market for the painting, it has no dollar value. Then, in what Mr. Lerner described to Forbes as the "most shocking part" of the whole fiasco, all of a sudden the IRS issued an official Notice of Deficiency declaring the Rauschenberg to be worth $65 million. Which would suggest that the market value of going along to get along is somewhere around $50 million.

The IRS valuation isn't necessarily crazy, even if its justification—the idea that an imagined black-market value should be binding on people not engaged in black-market transactions—is. But thanks to federal law, that value is entirely hypothetical.

How arbitrary is it to take a good off the market and then demand taxes be paid on an imaginary, indeed illegal, market price? The circumstances may be rare and peculiar, but the capriciousness of officials appears to be all too common.

A version of this article appeared July 26, 2012, on page D10 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Bald Eagle Is a White Elephant Thanks to Uncle Sam.

Erik Lasalle, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

El Anatsui’s “Broken Bridge,” shown installed in Paris, will be on display at the High Line later this year.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: July 26, 2012

Every museum has a few paintings or sculptures so popular that art lovers think of them as old friends. When one disappears, its absence is noticed.

“Our viewers let us know what they miss,” said Ann Temkin, the Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator of painting and sculpture. “If a certain Warhol or Picasso is not on view, people are very vocal.”

Last week “One: Number 31, 1950,” one of Jackson Pollock’s mystical drip paintings, was removed from the walls of the fourth-floor painting and sculptures galleries and taken to the Modern’s conservation lab for a few months for study and cleaning as part of a larger research project. So Ms. Temkin had a considerable hole to fill. “I did feel we had to put up another major Pollock in its place,” she said.

MoMA has a few drip Pollocks from which to choose. The issue, though, was size. “One: Number 31, 1950” is almost 18 feet long, a length Pollock worked with knowing the dimensions of the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, where it was first shown. None of MoMA’s other drip Pollocks are anywhere near as big.

“We do have an equally great, though not as gigantic, Pollock,” Ms. Temkin said, referring to “Number 1 A, 1948,” which has just been hung in place of “One.” “It’s the painting where Pollock’s hand prints are visible in the upper right-hand corner,” she said, “and it was made a year and a half earlier at that very moment when all of the Abstract Expressionist painters were at that breakthrough moment.”

A canvas of delicate layered webs, globs and pools of paint, “Number 1 A, 1948” is just shy of nine feet long. But when she hung it on the wall, Ms. Temkin was surprised. “It has the amazing capacity for its presence to expand far behind the boundaries of the canvas itself,” she said.

TIN DRAPERY FOR HIGH LINE

The High Line attracts nearly four million visitors a year, and it had 500,000 last month alone. It has become a phenomenon, not simply as a place to walk above the dense city streets and enjoy views of the Hudson River, but also as a serious art destination. Year by year its arts programming grows. Now it includes films and performances as well as projects by fine artists.

A star in the fall lineup will be a site-specific installation by El Anatsui. This artist, who was born in Ghana and lives in Nigeria, is known for his shimmering, almost painterly tapestries fashioned from discarded bottle caps that are woven together with copper wire. On an outdoor wall adjacent to the park, between 21st and 22nd Streets, he will be creating “Broken Bridge,” a monumental drapery made from pressed tin and mirrors.

“He hasn’t shown here much except in galleries,” said Cecilia Alemani, the curator and director of High Line Art. “We’re particularly excited because this piece is slightly different than others he has made in the past, since it includes mirrors that will reflect the surrounding landscape.”

“Broken Bridge,” his first outdoor installation in the United States, is to be installed in early October and be on view through the spring of 2013.

NEW MUSEUM EXPANSION

In 2009 the New Museum bought 231 Bowery, the building next door to its current home on the Lower East Side. While it has yet to undergo extensive renovations, the building is being used for artist residencies and additional ground-floor exhibition space, which the museum calls “Studio 231.” At the same time it has been working on an expansion that does not have the construction headaches of bricks and mortar.

The museum has recently raised about $1 million to expand virtually, redesigning its five-year-old Web site. The new site, four years in the making, is to go live on Friday. “We hope it will be a destination location,” Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum, said in a telephone interview. “We have a fast-growing online audience that is already three times the size of our on-site audience, which is about 350,000 visitors a year.”

These are among the Web site’s new features:

¶The Art Spaces Directory, an international guide with an interactive map to more than 400 independent art spaces in 96 nations.

¶A digital archive of the museum’s 35 years, including images, videos and publications.

¶“First Look,” a series organized by the curator Lauren Cornell, featuring a new digital artwork every month. “It will be a combination of either works that are not familiar to a wide audience or commissions,” Ms. Phillips said. She explained that the museum plans to tap artists who already work in the digital realm. It also intends to ask artists who have not created digital works before to contribute. For the Web site’s start Taryn Simon, an artist, and Aaron Swartz, a Web programmer and political activist, have teamed up to create “Image Atlas,” which invites viewers to enter a key word: what pops up will be top results from search engines around the world.

¶A blog called Six Degrees will have weekly interviews, photographic essays, short videos, reviews and curators’ recommendations. Running alongside it will be social-media platforms inviting public participation.

THE STAMPS OF DANCERS

While the financially troubled United States Postal Service may be streamlining operations, it continues to commission artists for new stamps. On Saturday it introduces “Innovative Choreographers,” four first-class stamps depicting the dance giants Isadora Duncan, José Limón, Katherine Dunham and Bob Fosse.

James McMullan, best known for the posters he has created for the Lincoln Center Theater, illustrated the stamps. Working primarily from archival photographs, Mr. McMullan said he wanted his stamps to be different from the rest. “I love dance, and I love gesture,” he said in a telephone interview from his home and studio in Sag Harbor, on Long Island. “This was the opportunity to make something unusual, something with movement rather than a static portrait.” Each choreographer is depicted in a move identifiable with his or her work.

In addition to the stamp project Mr. McMullan has also been looking through his archives in preparation for a retrospective of his work that opens on Nov. 21 at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where he teaches. “There will be materials besides the theater posters,” he said, explaining that the show will include life drawings — both pencil and gouache — that he has been making for more than 30 years.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 27, 2012, on page C22 of the New York edition with the headline: At MoMA a Substitute for Pollock’s ‘One’.

Erik Lasalle, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

El Anatsui’s “Broken Bridge,” shown installed in Paris, will be on display at the High Line later this year.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: July 26, 2012

Every museum has a few paintings or sculptures so popular that art lovers think of them as old friends. When one disappears, its absence is noticed.

“Our viewers let us know what they miss,” said Ann Temkin, the Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator of painting and sculpture. “If a certain Warhol or Picasso is not on view, people are very vocal.”

Last week “One: Number 31, 1950,” one of Jackson Pollock’s mystical drip paintings, was removed from the walls of the fourth-floor painting and sculptures galleries and taken to the Modern’s conservation lab for a few months for study and cleaning as part of a larger research project. So Ms. Temkin had a considerable hole to fill. “I did feel we had to put up another major Pollock in its place,” she said.

MoMA has a few drip Pollocks from which to choose. The issue, though, was size. “One: Number 31, 1950” is almost 18 feet long, a length Pollock worked with knowing the dimensions of the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, where it was first shown. None of MoMA’s other drip Pollocks are anywhere near as big.

“We do have an equally great, though not as gigantic, Pollock,” Ms. Temkin said, referring to “Number 1 A, 1948,” which has just been hung in place of “One.” “It’s the painting where Pollock’s hand prints are visible in the upper right-hand corner,” she said, “and it was made a year and a half earlier at that very moment when all of the Abstract Expressionist painters were at that breakthrough moment.”

A canvas of delicate layered webs, globs and pools of paint, “Number 1 A, 1948” is just shy of nine feet long. But when she hung it on the wall, Ms. Temkin was surprised. “It has the amazing capacity for its presence to expand far behind the boundaries of the canvas itself,” she said.

TIN DRAPERY FOR HIGH LINE

The High Line attracts nearly four million visitors a year, and it had 500,000 last month alone. It has become a phenomenon, not simply as a place to walk above the dense city streets and enjoy views of the Hudson River, but also as a serious art destination. Year by year its arts programming grows. Now it includes films and performances as well as projects by fine artists.

A star in the fall lineup will be a site-specific installation by El Anatsui. This artist, who was born in Ghana and lives in Nigeria, is known for his shimmering, almost painterly tapestries fashioned from discarded bottle caps that are woven together with copper wire. On an outdoor wall adjacent to the park, between 21st and 22nd Streets, he will be creating “Broken Bridge,” a monumental drapery made from pressed tin and mirrors.

“He hasn’t shown here much except in galleries,” said Cecilia Alemani, the curator and director of High Line Art. “We’re particularly excited because this piece is slightly different than others he has made in the past, since it includes mirrors that will reflect the surrounding landscape.”

“Broken Bridge,” his first outdoor installation in the United States, is to be installed in early October and be on view through the spring of 2013.

NEW MUSEUM EXPANSION

In 2009 the New Museum bought 231 Bowery, the building next door to its current home on the Lower East Side. While it has yet to undergo extensive renovations, the building is being used for artist residencies and additional ground-floor exhibition space, which the museum calls “Studio 231.” At the same time it has been working on an expansion that does not have the construction headaches of bricks and mortar.

The museum has recently raised about $1 million to expand virtually, redesigning its five-year-old Web site. The new site, four years in the making, is to go live on Friday. “We hope it will be a destination location,” Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum, said in a telephone interview. “We have a fast-growing online audience that is already three times the size of our on-site audience, which is about 350,000 visitors a year.”

These are among the Web site’s new features:

¶The Art Spaces Directory, an international guide with an interactive map to more than 400 independent art spaces in 96 nations.

¶A digital archive of the museum’s 35 years, including images, videos and publications.

¶“First Look,” a series organized by the curator Lauren Cornell, featuring a new digital artwork every month. “It will be a combination of either works that are not familiar to a wide audience or commissions,” Ms. Phillips said. She explained that the museum plans to tap artists who already work in the digital realm. It also intends to ask artists who have not created digital works before to contribute. For the Web site’s start Taryn Simon, an artist, and Aaron Swartz, a Web programmer and political activist, have teamed up to create “Image Atlas,” which invites viewers to enter a key word: what pops up will be top results from search engines around the world.

¶A blog called Six Degrees will have weekly interviews, photographic essays, short videos, reviews and curators’ recommendations. Running alongside it will be social-media platforms inviting public participation.

THE STAMPS OF DANCERS

While the financially troubled United States Postal Service may be streamlining operations, it continues to commission artists for new stamps. On Saturday it introduces “Innovative Choreographers,” four first-class stamps depicting the dance giants Isadora Duncan, José Limón, Katherine Dunham and Bob Fosse.

James McMullan, best known for the posters he has created for the Lincoln Center Theater, illustrated the stamps. Working primarily from archival photographs, Mr. McMullan said he wanted his stamps to be different from the rest. “I love dance, and I love gesture,” he said in a telephone interview from his home and studio in Sag Harbor, on Long Island. “This was the opportunity to make something unusual, something with movement rather than a static portrait.” Each choreographer is depicted in a move identifiable with his or her work.

In addition to the stamp project Mr. McMullan has also been looking through his archives in preparation for a retrospective of his work that opens on Nov. 21 at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where he teaches. “There will be materials besides the theater posters,” he said, explaining that the show will include life drawings — both pencil and gouache — that he has been making for more than 30 years.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 27, 2012, on page C22 of the New York edition with the headline: At MoMA a Substitute for Pollock’s ‘One’.

 

William Wegman's Wilderness: A visit with the artist William Wegman and his dogs at their home in Maine.

Published: July 27, 2012

By CAROL KINO

ONE sunny morning last month the artist William Wegman led me into the woods surrounding his lakeside retreat here, along with his Weimaraners, Bobbin, Candy and Flo. “This is one of my favorite paths,” he said, as he passed an old garage. “It’s filled with haunted little things.”

His route led to a junked 1950s Buick and an even older pickup truck and sedan, which looked as if they’d been gathering leaves and rust since the Hoover administration. After noting that the Buick was his “favorite relic,” Mr. Wegman reminisced about the time he had walked miles into the wilderness, only to discover an abandoned couch.

This disjuncture between nature and the man-made is something Mr. Wegman, 68, prizes about the area, and his own wry humor is the hallmark of his work, which is so diverse that it should be hard to characterize. But to the wider world, he is known as the guy who makes large, colorful photographs of dogs dressed as things like fashion models and fairy tale characters. Though he has produced many different sorts of dog-free artworks in many different styles throughout his long and successful career, including paintings, drawings and collages (as seen in his 2006 Brooklyn Museum retrospective), the art world knows him as a dog photographer too. Even his much-admired conceptual videos and photographs of the 1970s often feature his first Weimaraner, Man Ray.

But now the show “William Wegman: Hello Nature,” through Oct. 21 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Me., aims to shine light on a less obvious aspect of Mr. Wegman’s oeuvre. Its ostensible focus is his attachment to the western mountains of Maine, where he has summered for over 30 years. Yet the true thread running through it is Mr. Wegman’s lifelong fascination with nature itself, and his affection for the many ways it has been revered, romanticized and interfered with by human beings.

“Growing up in rural Massachusetts before anyone I knew had a television set, I spent most of my time in the woods,” Mr. Wegman writes in the show catalog. “The earliest painting I remember making was of a duck and a rock with a question mark.”

The oldest work on display is a deadpan photographic diptych from 1971, in which Mr. Wegman and a woman mimic fishing and ice-skating in his studio. The latest is one of his so-called postcard paintings from this year, in which one or more tourist postcards blossom into a fantastical oil-painted scene. (In this case a picturesque lake becomes a flooded house.)

In between come photographs of dogs, costumed or blending into the landscape; totemic alphabets made from photographs of plants and leaves; and all manner of paintings, drawings and collages. The museum is also screening Mr. Wegman’s short film, “The Hardly Boys in Hardly Gold” (1995), a detective saga based on the Hardy Boys and shot in and around Loon Lake, in which dogs play all the roles.

The show has been in the works since 2009, when Kevin Salatino, until recently the museum’s director, moved here from Los Angeles. (He now directs the art collections at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif.) Mr. Wegman’s Los Angeles dealer, Marc Selwyn, mentioned that the artist spent summers here and suggested the two collaborate on a show.

Mr. Salatino’s plan was to exhibit the early conceptual work. But when he and Diana K. Tuite, a curator at the museum, began visiting Mr. Wegman at his studio in Chelsea, the idea of a “nature-centric” show emerged, Mr. Salatino said. “I realized that this was an aspect of the work that had never really been thought through thematically before,” he added. “But it weaves its way through everything, even the early conceptual work.”

Inevitably the show also became autobiographical, and the catalog is essentially an artist’s book. Part field guide, part memoir, it’s filled with Mr. Wegman’s youthful artwork and family photographs, as well as an essay about his early aesthetic tastes, back when he was making watercolors of his dog in the woods, painting American Indian alphabets using pigment extracted from berries, and admiring the sensuous brushwork in the Breck Girl ads.

“So many people would be inclined to suppress the naïveté of their worldview,” Ms. Tuite said. “But in Bill’s case he wears it so proudly, almost so much so that it is kind of a conceptual move in and of itself.”

In person Mr. Wegman, who seems kindly and dryly humorous at once, also affects a certain degree of naïveté. For one so famous he’s surprisingly self-effacing, quick to compliment others and to claim he doesn’t know much about anything. He also loves reminiscing about his childhood. In an interview in his studio, as the dogs snored on a couch, he talked about his first trip to Maine in 1958. Then 14, he had driven up from East Longmeadow, the small Massachusetts quarry town where he grew up, with slightly older boys to fish in the Rangeley Lakes. “It took really a long time to get up here,” he recalled. “Then we hit a rock.” They were rescued by the proprietor of a lake club, who put them up in one of his log cabins for a week while the car was being fixed. “It was a very memorable trip,” Mr. Wegman said.

Years later, in 1979, halfway through his second marriage, and just as his large color Polaroids of Man Ray were starting to bring him fortune and fame, he returned to Rangeley with a new fishing buddy, and rented a cabin at another camp, York’s. Before long he had bought the cabin, the tennis court and, by 1989, the main lodge itself. Today, this is where he lives part-time, with Christine Burgin, his wife of 17 years; their children, Atlas, 17, and Lola, 14; and the dogs of course. The lodge’s main room still looks much as it did in the ’70s, he said, with a looming fireplace, light fixtures made from birch branches, and taxidermied bison, moose, elk and caribou heads on the walls. Every surface seems to be packed with sporting equipment, memorabilia, artwork and books. His studio occupies a third of the building.

York’s is where he found his way back to representational painting, in the mid-1980s, after Man Ray’s death. “I loved painting,” he said. “That’s why I went to art school. But soon after I got to art school I stopped, because painting was dead in the ’60s.” At first he was so self-conscious that he painted on the back of the canvas. But soon he was working fluently, in a variety of styles, including cartoonish caricature and brushily expressionistic figuration.

York’s was also the place where, in 1987, Mr. Wegman made his first photograph of his second Weimaraner, the slinky, almond-eyed Fay Ray, by a brook in a Wonder Woman mask. A few years on it also played a pivotal role in his romance with Ms. Burgin, then an art dealer in SoHo.

Soon after they began dating, the couple traveled to Maine so that Mr. Wegman could work on his “Field Guide to North America and Other Places,” an edition of 20 unique artists’ books, several of which are included in the current show. Packaged in a plywood box and wrapped in a piece of Buffalo plaid blanket, sort of like an L. L. Bean take on the Duchampian valise, each contains about 20 loose double-sided pages of photographs, collages and multimedia works on materials like paper, bark and felt, creating a gentle parody of centuries of nature writing. Mr. Wegman made his first postcard painting for these books, and almost every one includes a photograph of a half-naked Ms. Burgin, brandishing a toy tomahawk as she runs into the woods.

Mr. Wegman said her help was crucial: “I was making lots of pictures. I had things all over the place. She would help make it neat, neat, so I wouldn’t get too flummoxed.” (She now oversees his projects, alongside her own business.)

Ms. Burgin saw the project as a field guide to Mr. Wegman, who “has a million ideas a minute” and “things going in every direction,” she said. The guide, she added, “was a key to Bill in some way, like a key in a map, and I think this show is too.”

During the ’90s, as they were having children, Mr. Wegman focused much of his energy on children’s books, featuring Fay and her descendants. The woods and the town of Rangeley often served as his set. Now, four generations of Weimaraners and one generation of Wegmans later, he continues to find inspiration in the locale — and so do his dogs. In Maine, he said, they behave quite differently from the way they do in the city. “In New York you can call them or have someone drop something, and you can get a surprised look,” he said. “But here you get a waft of some scent that makes them really open up in a different way. They kind of lead with their noses.”

One might say that Mr. Wegman does too. He’s now working on a series of postcard paintings on wood, which he started here last year. Although he’s not quite sure what to make of them yet, “Maine is a place where I’m willing to try anything,” he said. “Things emerge in a very unique way up here.”

 

 

Wolfgang Schmidt, Chemnitz

 Ingrid Mössinger, who oversees  three museums, including the  Museum Gunzenhauser, in Chemnitz, Germany.

By ELIZABETH ZACH

Published: July 27, 2012

The 40-ton bronze bust of Karl Marx, built in 1971, still looks on to a major thoroughfare in this east German city, which was once called Karl-Marx-City. In the 19th century, Chemnitz bore another moniker, the Manchester of Saxony, reflecting the factory smokestacks across the horizon. Today, bleak concrete apartment houses border treeless boulevards, remnants of socialist urban planning.

None of this deterred Ingrid Mössinger when she arrived in 1996. A former curator in Wiesbaden and Frankfurt and at the Biennale of Sydney, Ms. Mössinger was hired to direct the Museum am Theaterplatz, which has an eclectic collection of 70,000 paintings, graphics, textiles and sculptures, as well a large collection of work from the Chemnitz native and Expressionist painter Karl-Schmidt Rottluff. Built in 1909 in the stately Wilhelminian style, the museum faces the city’s equally distinguished opera house.

The 40-ton bronze bust of Karl Marx, built in 1971, still looks on to a major thoroughfare in this east German city, which was once called Karl-Marx-City. In the 19th century, Chemnitz bore another moniker, the Manchester of Saxony, reflecting the factory smokestacks across the horizon. Today, bleak concrete apartment houses border treeless boulevards, remnants of socialist urban planning.

“What I saw in Chemnitz demonstrated to me that people must have wanted to live here,” said Ms. Mössinger, “and for them, art and music were important.”

Since her arrival, Ms. Mössinger has been appointed to direct three more museums in Chemnitz, including the Museum Gunzenhauser, which contains a vast trove of Otto Dix paintings and other works of so-called “degenerate art” once outlawed by the National Socialists leading up to World War II.

The museums are an astonishing achievement for this city of 240,000, particularly when one considers that more than 20 percent of the city’s residents have moved elsewhere since 1990.

Dr. Stephan Scholz, president of the Society of Friends of the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, the city’s collection of four museums, can remember interviewing Ms. Mössinger for the museum directorship. “She saw potential,” he recalled, “where few others did.”

Ms. Mössinger has a penchant for vibrant dress suits and fire-engine-red lipstick, both in apparent contrast to the city’s mostly drab façades. She exudes an immediate affection for her adopted home.

“It is the purest architecture museum, with the largest, most cohesive Art Nouveau district in Germany,” she said.

Elegant Art Nouveau villas, spared during Allied bombing in 1945, still grace Chemnitz’s hilly Kassberg district. Before the world wars, Chemnitz had an admirable symbiosis between art-loving textile industry titans and painters. There were salons and cafes, and artists and designers such as Henry Van de Velde, Otto Dix and, at one point, Edvard Munch all gravitated to the city, in part to take advantage of benefactor largesse.

At a time of constrained municipal budgets across the Continent and much of the world, Ms. Mössinger’s artistic coups over the past 15 years have prompted admiration, if not bewilderment.

In 2007, she engineered the world’s first-ever exhibition of Bob Dylan’s sketches and paintings. The international press lauded the show at the Museum am Theaterplatz, and it has since opened in Copenhagen, London and New York. Observers marveled at Ms. Mössinger’s chutzpah at tracking down Mr. Dylan and persuading him to exhibit his work in Chemnitz.

“I believe he was just waiting to be asked,” she said. “I had no idea how famous he is. I listen to opera.”

It wasn’t until she came across a coffee table book of Mr. Dylan’s sketches while browsing a bookstore in New York City that she bought 50 of his CDs.

“I recognized this strong connection between his lyrics and his drawing and it was obvious to me that this was something unique. That’s when I decided to approach him,” she said, adding: “I have very good intuition.”

There was the Pablo Picasso exhibition, also at the Museum am Theaterplatz, in 2002 and 2003, in which a collection of 215 portraits of women drew an estimated 100,000 visitors. Other high-caliber exhibitions at the Theaterplatz have featured Renoir, Munch, Chagall and Cranach.

These shows came on the heels of another milestone when, in 2001, Ms. Mössinger worked with city leaders to have the Esche Villa, designed by Henry van de Velde and built in 1903, restored as a museum of Art Nouveau design and furnishings.

The Schlossberg Museum, in a 12th-century Benedictine monastery exhibiting Gothic art and sculpture, fell under her direction in 2005.

Off of a busy tram juncture sits the fourth and most recent addition to her museums: the Gunzenhauser. It is a cuboid-style building, unremarkable but for the fact that inside is an impressive private collection of masterpieces, many of them once banned and almost burned.

In 2007, the inauguration of the museum, and the collection’s sheer volume and scope, had art lovers, collectors and dealers again asking, “Why here?” The nearly 2,500 paintings, all dating from Germany’s Expressionist and New Objectivity period between the world wars, includes works by Conrad Felixmüller, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Gustav Wunderwald, among others. Many had never been exhibited.

It also includes a number of paintings by Otto Dix, born in nearby Gera in 1891. Dix’s bold renderings of war and urban melancholy won him recognition within and beyond the New Objectivity movement, which called for a practical and realistic aesthetic.

But the genre rankled National Socialist leaders, who branded his work “degenerate art.” In 1933, under pressure from the regime, he quit his position as an art instructor in Dresden, fled to Randegg, near Lake Constance in southern Germany, and began painting innocuous yet poignant landscapes, an “inner emigration,” as art historians call it. He died in 1969 in Singen.

In 1998, Ms. Mössinger viewed some of the paintings at a Leipzig gallery and learned that the owner was planning to donate the collection.

She thought Chemnitz might attract the collector. The painters, she reasoned, had all either come from Chemnitz or its environs, or had once worked there. She had heard, too, that the collector was keen to keep his works together, and hoped for a building to house only them.

Ms. Mössinger made some calls, eventually verifying the collector’s name: Dr. Alfred Gunzenhauser. She invited him to Chemnitz.

Dr. Gunzenhauser was, like Ms. Mössinger, beguiled by the city’s past splendor. A prominent gallery owner and art dealer in Munich, he had met Dix in the 1960s at an exhibition in West Berlin.

The Bauhaus-inspired building that was chosen for the museum was designed in 1930 by the Berlin architect Fred Otto, rose in the same era as the painters and is under landmark protection.

“I wanted to do something for what I felt was a rather neglected city in one of the new eastern German states,” said Dr. Gunzenhauser, who is 85.

In that respect, he and Ms. Mössinger think alike.

“Florence, for example,” she said, was put on the map through art.
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A version of this article appeared in print on July 28, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.

Yoga was probably far from Josef Albers’s mind when he was working on the series of color-saturated pictures he called “Homage to the Square” beginning in 1950. Yet deep meditation was built into the project, which went on for a quarter of a century, sustained by the almost reflexive focus that comes with long practice of a craft.

In Albers’s case practice really did make perfect. The hundreds of same-size paintings in the “Homage” group are about as faultless as art gets. Each is composed of three or four precisely nested squares. The color in each square is calculated to interact with and transform the colors around it. The paint surfaces look machine tooled but aren’t. They’re sensuously if minimally textured, like skin.

Albers’s overall aim was to create an impression of effortless, inevitable harmony, which, of course, demands hard work. And labor is the subject of “Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper” at the Morgan Library & Museum, a show not about finished products but about the constant hands-on research and experimentation, the hitting, missing and learning-as-you-go correcting that went into them.

Hands-on came naturally to Albers, born in Germany in 1888. One grandfather was a carpenter, another a blacksmith. His father was a joiner and wall painter who worked with stained glass. Although Albers studied painting, it was as a maker of stained glass that he joined the faculty of the He meant his own and ours.

“Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper” remains on view through Oct. 14 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org.