Librado Romero/The New York Times
Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000, at the Museum of Modern Art, includes props from “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

By KEN JOHNSON
Published: July 26, 2012

Childhood, it is often said, is a recent invention. Children used to be treated as small adults to be put to work as soon as possible. Education meant discipline and punishment. Then came the 20th century and the idea that children are fundamentally different from adults and should be treated accordingly. The ideal child, a creature of terrific potential, became an inspiring symbol of futurity, and the care and education of actual children exercised the minds of great thinkers, including many from the fields of art and design.

“Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000,” a big, wonderful show at the Museum of Modern Art, examines the intersection of Modernist design and modern thinking about children. A rich and thought-provoking study of a great subject, it is loaded with intriguing things to look at — some 500 items, including furniture, toys, games, posters, books and much more.

Juliet Kinchin, a curator in MoMA’s architecture and design department who organized the show along with Aidan O’Connor, a curatorial assistant, observes in her catalog introduction that no period in human history was as invested in concern for children as the 20th century. Yet contradictions abound: “Elastic and powerful,” Ms. Kinchin writes, “the symbolic figure of the child has masked paradoxical aspects of the human predicament in the modern world.” How much freedom to allow and how much control to impose are questions not only about children but also about people everywhere in a time of declining traditional values and expanding possibilities for new ways of being and doing.

What do children need to flourish and become proper members of society? How you answer such questions depends on what you think the essential nature of the child is. Implicitly if not overtly, a different image of the child presides over each of the exhibition’s seven chronologically laid-out sections.

At the start we meet what you might call the rational-creative child, who, given the right materials to play with and a few logical guidelines, will turn into a little architect. Here are kits for creating two- and three-dimensional designs developed by Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten movement in the early 19th century. A teaching tool kit full of variously shaped nonrepresentational objects created by Maria Montessori is more colorful and inviting, but it too is based on the understanding that huge, complicated things are usually made from little things following simple rules.

Moving on to the post-World War I era, another vision of childhood comes into view under the heading “Avant-Garde Playtime.” Here one of the most telling objects is a painting called “The Bad Child” (around 1924), a decorative panel for a child’s bedroom by the illustrator and designer Antonio Rubino. In retro-Victorian style it pictures a boy in a comical rage surrounded by a menacing cast of fairy tale characters. The moral may be that the child bedeviled by hobgoblins of small minds becomes a monster himself. Being irrepressibly energetic and playful, children need room to express their impulses and imaginations, which do not always align with adult, bourgeois strictures of behavior.

This version of the child can be seen as a reflection of the avant-garde artist’s own desire to shed burdensome moral and aesthetic conventions. (And to celebrate his own powers; this was a time when the idea of the child as a pure creative genius captivated artists like Klee, Miró and Picasso.)

So it may be not so surprising to learn that the Futurist painter Giacomo Balla designed pieces of children’s furniture like a simple, painted wood wardrobe on view here, held off the floor by a pair of flat, abstracted cutouts of children. Here too are child-size chairs and desks by De Stijl artists, including a delightful diminutive wheelbarrow by Gerrit Rietveld; it is remarkable how little needed to change in scaling down the basic language of simple rectilinear forms and primary colors. It is almost as if these artists had been designing for their idea of the child all along.

An opposite approach to childhood enters the picture in the 1930s as fascist social engineers in Germany and Japan turned to children as raw material to be molded into cogs for industrial and military machinery. A baleful section on these developments, as reflected in photographs, posters and children’s books, is highlighted by startling kimonos for Japanese children patterned with images of warplanes, bombs and cannons.

Consciousness of the needs of children and how best to serve them expanded in all directions after World War II. Health and hygiene became concerns, and designers were called upon to create not only more constructive toys and functional furniture but entire school buildings that would provide the light, air and space that youngsters need to grow sound minds and bodies. The rational-creative child, the playful, unruly child — these were eclipsed by the healthy child, who would be more amenable to a new era of conformity in the 1950s.

Then came consumerism and the advent of the needy child, driven by wants and desires he did not know he had until they were triggered by popular media. From astronaut costumes and ray guns in the ’60s to Nintendo’s Game Boy of 1989, designers and manufacturers catered to juvenile fantasies with predatory resourcefulness.

The contradictions of contemporary childhood come together most resonantly in a display of props designed by the artist Gary Panter for the television program “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” (1986-91) arranged around a video projection of an episode of the show. Surrounded by friendly characters like Globey, an animated world globe, and Chairy, a soft, big-eyed chair, the antic man-child Pee-wee, played by Paul Reubens, resembles a happier version of Rubino’s bad boy. He lives in an artificial world without adult supervision where almost all his fantasies come true. Yet he is constantly buffeted by his own desires and frustrations. He is the infantilized consumer par excellence, and in his archly knowing performance as a children’s show host, he is too a kind of postmodern Pop artist, toying subversively with the semiotics of mass entertainment.

The exhibition ends on a rueful note with a brief section about playgrounds that includes a model for a pastoral playground by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi from 1961. Playground designers in recent years have been stymied by increasingly stringent demands for safety. But how do you give children freedom to explore and test their abilities while minimizing risk and lawsuits? The image of the vulnerable, endangered child haunts today’s consciousness more urgently than ever, as children increasingly do their playing online, in often seamy virtual realities where real-life strangers with bad intentions are easily encountered. And what about the child who is dangerous to others? The issues are only going to get more complicated and the challenges for designers of the 21st century more daunting.

“Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000,” continues through Nov. 5 at the Museum of Modern Art, (212) 708-9400, moma.org.

 

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
“The Ego and the Id,” installed at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park in 2004.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: July 26, 2012

Franz West, an influential Austrian sculptor with a penchant for art objects that were willfully unserious, nonideological and accessible and were displayed in Central Park and on the plaza at Lincoln Center, as well as in international exhibitions and blue-chip galleries around the world, died on Wednesday in Vienna. He was 65.His death was announced by the Franz West Foundation. He had been ill for some time.

Mr. West’s work ranged from collages to furniture to large, colorful public sculptures. It consistently embodied a kind of friendly iconoclasm in which form and function were pitted against each other, and the notion of artwork as an autonomous object was frequently undermined. His homely, rough-surfaced materials, like plaster or papier-mâché, sometimes doused with color, challenged accepted taste.

His efforts contributed equally to two of contemporary art’s most persistent trends: the interactive, collaboration-prone art of relational aesthetics and the cobbled-together assemblage-like objects called bricolage. He was also known for large, irreverent sculptures, like those shown in Manhattan in 2004 whose cartoonish, sausagelike shapes and patchwork surfaces, made of lacquered aluminum, parodied the usual decorum of abstract public art.

Mr. West, who represented Austria at the 1990 Venice Biennale, was less a strikingly original artist who changed the course of art than an astute synthesizer and incisive adjuster. He operated on a parallel course to contemporary art, commenting and satirizing, creating a vast multimedia universe that fomented an active mingling of painting, sculpture, collage, furniture and even works (most of which he owned) by the artists he admired.

But his work was also steeped in various figurative and avant-garde traditions of postwar European art. Its DNA included the elongated, encrusted figures of Giacometti, the plaster-coated paintings of Jean Fautrier, the reliclike sculptures of Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth’s objects made of chocolate and other decaying foodstuffs, and the polymorphous formal wit of the painter Sigmar Polke.

Mr. West was born on Feb. 16, 1947, in Vienna. His father was a coal dealer, his mother a dentist who took her son with her on art-viewing trips to Italy. Mr. West was unclear about his aims in life and sometimes said he started making art “mostly to calm my mother, who was fed up that I did nothing.”

He started making crude drawings around 1970 before moving on to painted collages incorporating magazine images that showed the influence of Pop Art. He was also attracted to newsprint as a material both to paint on and to moisten and form into tentative objects.

By then he was familiar with the work of the Vienna Actionists, whose provocative performances involving masturbation, self-mutilation and dead animals dominated the Viennese art scene of the 1960s. He once said that he had his first taste of the movement when he heard the screams of his mother’s dental patients from her office next door to the family’s apartment.

He deliberately sidestepped Actionism’s physical ordeals and existential intensity. Instead he emphasized a benign, relaxed lightness.

Among his first known efforts were pieces that he called Passtücke, or Adaptives: eccentric white objects formed of plaster or papier-mâché and sometimes rebar that he began making in 1974, three years before he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he studied until 1982. There he executed the first of his “wall arrangements,” installations in which he combined his work with that of his fellow students.

The Adaptives, Mr. West’s primary work into the early 1980s, executed a neat, low-key truce between performance and art object. Sometimes incorporating parts of chairs and other found objects, they reflected his early admiration for the all-white paintings and reliefs of Robert Ryman and Piero Manzoni. The difference was that Mr. West’s works were intended to be held, carried or worn by the viewer, and they were often part of larger events.  

Writing about the Adaptives in 1989 in The New York Times on the occasion of Mr. West’s first exhibition in the United States, at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Michael Brenson noted that they were “meant to be placed over the face, worn around the waist or held in the crook of the neck,” adding that “they leave the wearer looking both protected and trapped.”

Much of Mr. West’s later work developed from ideas implicit in the Adaptives. He sometimes invited other artists to apply paint or collage to their white surfaces. Soon he was adding color himself to pieces that were too large to handle, and which he therefore called “legitimate sculptures.”

These evolved into considerably larger painted papier-mâché and cardboard works whose fragmentary shapes and distressed surfaces had an ancient mien, as if they had survived the vicissitudes of time. They were succeeded by larger, hilariously bulbous, vibrantly colored papier-mâché pieces.

In the early 1980s he started expanding on the possibilities of the found furniture incorporated into some of the Adaptives, making spindly chairs and divans out of rebar that parodied elegant furniture while being quite elegant and surprisingly comfortable themselves. This development led in turn to increasingly ambitious installations that combined furniture, sculpture, paintings and, frequently, works by other artists.

A large presentation consisting of row upon row of divans, covered with Oriental rugs, suggestive of a theater without a stage and titled “Auditorium,” was one of the biggest hits of the 1992 Documenta in Kassel, Germany. A variation called “Test and Rest” was later installed on the roof of the Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea.

In the late 1990s, Mr. West turned to the immense lacquered aluminum pieces, the first (and several after) inspired by the forms of Viennese sausages, as well as the shapes of the Adaptives. With their hot monochrome colors and irregular patchwork surfaces, these works were immensely appealing and also meant for sitting and lying. They both confirmed and belied Mr. West’s contention that “it doesn’t matter what the art looks like but how it’s used.”

Mr. West’s first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Tamuna Sirbiladze, a painter; their children, Emily Anouk West and Lazaré Otto West; and his sister, Anne Gutjahr.  

Birthe Piontek for The New York Times

By JOHN WRAY

Published: July 26, 2012 Comment

“Brace yourself,” Janet Cardiff said to me politely. “Here comes the big boom.”

It was an overcast Tuesday evening in Kassel, Germany, and I was sitting in a cramped, cluttered trailer at the edge of a forest with Cardiff and George Bures Miller, her husband and collaborator of nearly 30 years, trying to make myself heard over the sound of artillery fire. The idyll of the twilight woods around us was being severely compromised, just then, by what might reasonably have passed for the soundtrack of the end of the world: the droning of airplanes and the shouting of soldiers and the thunder of bombshells detonating on every side. Miller and Cardiff were sipping Earl Grey tea and observing me with quiet amusement. “Kind of like being a war correspondent, isn’t it?” Miller said with a grin.

“What comes before and after, though, is just as important,” Cardiff added. “The other sounds, I mean, and the quiet between. It’s important that you get that sense of peace.”

Cardiff and Miller are artists who have become known for their work with sound, and the woods of Kassel’s normally sedate Karlsaue Park are home to their latest installation, “Forest (for a thousand years),” one of two pieces featured in Documenta, the twice-a-decade survey of contemporary art that is arguably the most lavish group show on the planet. In visual terms, “Forest” barely registers as an artwork: 18 shoebox-size speakers and 4 subwoofers arranged discreetly in the underbrush, with tree stumps to sit on. The piece depends on Cardiff and Miller’s use of a technology known as Ambisonics, developed in the 1970s by an Oxford mathematician, which creates a three-dimensional sound field out of whatever noises, vibrations or explosions they have recorded.

“Having this trailer makes us feel a bit like filmmakers,” Cardiff said. “But we aren’t filmmakers, even when we’re working with video. Sound feels more directly tied to memory, and to dreams, which are important to our — ”

Before she could finish, the big boom arrived. It was loud enough to make the trailer shudder, but what made me clutch at the corners of the table wasn’t simply its volume. Like the hundreds of other noises out of which “Forest” has been fashioned — the cawing of ravens, the hiss of wind, radio static, laughter, gunfire — the explosion felt as real to me as my own heartbeat.

Cardiff and Miller made two distinct artworks for Documenta 13, and earlier that day, getting off the train in Kassel’s Hauptbahnhof, I encountered the other, titled simply, “Alter Bahnhof Video Walk.” I write “encountered” — not “seen” or “heard” or even “touched” — because all the above senses were engaged by the piece, not to mention my perception of timing, decorum and balance. Cardiff originally rose to art-world prominence on the strength of her “audio walks,” as she calls them, and I came to Kassel, in large part, to understand why. It took me exactly five minutes.

In the station’s main atrium, I exchanged my passport for an iPhone and a set of stereo earphones, then took a seat on a nearby bench, tucked the headphones into my ears and pressed play. In comparison to “Forest,” nothing especially spectacular or startling happened over the course of the next 28 minutes: no explosions, no gunfire, no Götterdämmerung. I simply walked from place to place in the moderately busy station, holding the iPhone’s screen in front of my face like some terminal video-game addict, trying to bring my perspective and the perspective shown on-screen into alignment.

The station in the video appeared, at first, to be the same station I was moving through. But it was home to a soundscape that seemed more immediate to me than the noises that reached my ears from the present, one that was populated by ghostly commuters from some unspecified time in the past. Cardiff’s cool, breathy voice was my nearly constant companion, pointing out features of the building’s history, or sharing a dream, or issuing simple instructions. It was a game of sorts to try to follow her, and I was pleased with myself for adjusting so smoothly. It wasn’t until I found myself ducking to avoid someone approaching on-screen that I realized how unmoored I had become.

The problem of the walk — the impossibility of being in two times and places at once — was also the point of the walk, and it touched a deep ontological nerve. My mind demanded synthesis, but no synthesis was possible. “It’s hard for me to be in the present,” Cardiff’s voice sighs at one point in the piece, and by the time I took my earphones out, I seemed to know exactly what she meant. It took me the better part of the evening to reassure my stunned brain that the walk was over.

I shared my experience with Cardiff and Miller in the trailer that evening, between hoofbeats and the crash of falling trees. “You could say our work is about time travel, in a way,” Cardiff said. “The walks especially. A step away from reality — consensus reality — in the interests of seeing it better.” She turned to Miller, who nodded. “We’ve been trying to escape reality for, like, 35 years,” he added. “It’s been going O.K. so far.”

“My first date with Janet was already a collaboration,” Miller told me over breakfast in Kassel the following day. “We were both in art school at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton — I was studying painting, she was studying printmaking, of all things — and she invited me over to help her make a film.”

“I had a six-pack of beers,” Cardiff cut in, a bit wistful. “I’d recorded an all-percussion band called Nexus a few nights earlier on a little tape recorder, and we went to my place and watched TV with the sound off and the music playing.”

“It was ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour,’ ” Miller added, “and you were taking photos of the screen while we watched it. You ended up making a print out of one of those photos.” Cardiff was quiet for a moment, remembering. “So you see,” she said finally, “as first dates go, that one was pretty good.”

Miller and Cardiff knew each other already — they worked in the same group of studios — but they didn’t realize until they started dating how much they had in common. Each was born in a small town in rural Canada, far from the centers of culture — Cardiff on a working farm in Brussels, Ontario, Miller as the son of a country veterinarian in Vegreville, Alberta, “Home of the World’s Largest Ukrainian Easter Egg.”

More significant, perhaps, they were each impatient with the limitations of their chosen modes of art-making. “Whenever we got together, we’d do these films and sound pieces, all sorts of things,” Cardiff told me. “Right from the beginning, working with each other, we realized we could do things that were different than what we could do alone. Our artwork and our lives have always been connected.”

Miller and Cardiff were married two and a half years later, in 1983, in a country ceremony (there were ponies involved) in Cardiff’s hometown. She was 26; he was 23. Their lives over the next dozen years, first in Edmonton, then in Toronto, then in a small city near the Alberta-Montana border called Lethbridge, had their share of privation and uncertainty, but both artists seem to look back on that period with unalloyed fondness. “At one point in Toronto — I must have been 23 or so — we were so poor that we tried panhandling,” Miller said, managing to seem both embarrassed and almost imperceptibly proud. “We were terrible at it. We tried for one hour and realized we had to come up with a better solution.” They wound up designing T-shirts, which they sold on the corner of Queen and John Streets downtown. He laughed at the memory. “They did fairly well, actually.”

Miller and Cardiff’s pieces in the course of their first decade together ran the gamut from silk-screens to kinetic sculpture to a computer-illustrated comic book, even a video for Miller’s one-man rock band (“Mum Has Gone Away,” by Jordie Jones and the League of Misfits); but their first official collaboration was a multimedia installation titled, “The Dark Pool.”

“That was the beginning,” Cardiff said to me that evening in the trailer. “I think both of us felt it at the time.” She glanced at Miller, who nodded. “We’d done a lot of pieces by then,” he said, “but ‘Dark Pool’ was the first work of ours that felt mature to me. We’ve had offers to buy it — we get them pretty regularly — but I can’t bear the thought of parting with it. It’s not the kind of piece you can make twice.”

First shown in Vancouver in 1995, “Dark Pool” is, on the surface, an installation in the classic style: a 20-by-30-foot room, dimly lighted, with corrugated cardboard and thrift-store Persian carpets on the floor, littered with paraphernalia and artifacts — stacks of hardcover books, Kodachrome slides, dusty, paint-splattered furniture, an apparatus labeled, “wish machine.” Just when you might feel tempted to dismiss the work as hermetic, however — or even willfully obscure — “Dark Pool” begins to speak. Moving through the room, the viewer triggers the acoustic elements of the piece — scraps of music, half-told stories, fragments of conversation between a woman and a man — and with each snippet, a piece of the mystery seems to become clear. You begin to suspect that the vanished inhabitants of this space were a couple, perhaps even the artists themselves. It’s not hard to imagine, therefore, why they might resist selling it: in terms of form and content, “Dark Pool” may be as close to a self-portrait as Miller and Cardiff have come.

Even more personal, perhaps — and an indirect descendant of “The Dark Pool” — is “The Murder of Crows,” a 98-speaker installation that Cardiff and Miller are bringing to Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory on Aug. 3 for a monthlong run. The piece, their largest, was developed during one of the strangest and most fraught periods of their lives: the six months they spent in Katmandu, Nepal, trying to adopt their infant daughter, Aradhana, now a precocious 5-year-old. “That was a hard time for us,” Miller told me, “and I think the art shows it.” While they waited, Cardiff recalled, they roamed the city, crossing to the government district every so often to meet with officials, who told them something different every time. “ ‘Murder of Crows’ is a dark piece,” Cardiff added, “but it also comes out of the soundscape of that strange, smoggy city — totally different sounds from those we were used to.” She was quiet for a moment. “Neither of us will ever forget that place.”

Parallel to the development of the couple’s installations, which grew progressively more elaborate and ambitious, Cardiff, with her husband’s aid, was exploring a markedly more intimate interaction with the art-going public. In 1991, she spent two months at the Banff arts center in Alberta, as a guest of its residency program. “I was out recording things — wearing a pair of headphones, making sure I was getting good sound — and at one point I was reading the names of grave sites out loud,” she told me. “I pressed rewind, then pressed play — losing track of where I was — and I heard my voice describing what I was seeing in front of me. It was such a strange and particular feeling — one of those serendipitous moments, I guess. Over the next few weeks, I made my first walk, but only about a dozen people tried it. I wasn’t even sure what it was at the time — is this thing even art?” She shook her head.

One of the 12 people who took Cardiff’s walk was a young Canadian curator named Kitty Scott. In 1996, upon being invited to assist in a show at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum titled, “Walking and Thinking and Walking,” Scott remembered Cardiff’s odd, unclassifiable experiment and described it to the curator, Bruce Ferguson, who asked Cardiff to develop a site-specific walk for the museum grounds. The piece attracted the notice of a soft-spoken German named Kasper König, director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and a founder of the Münster Sculpture Project, who was also one of the contemporary art world’s most influential curators.

“I was sitting outside, on a lawn chair,” Cardiff told me, “and this guy sat down next to me and said, ‘I make this, you know, this kind of sculpture show in Münster. . . .’ ”

“We had no idea who he was at the time,” Miller added, laughing. “Luckily for us, he didn’t seem offended. Someone must have told him we were from Alberta.”

As evening fell on my first day in Kassel, I returned to the park to meet Miller, who wanted to get a live recording of “Forest” before returning to Berlin. He explained to me that he would be using binaural recording equipment — the same equipment that he and Cardiff used in recording the sound for their walk pieces — and said I would have a chance to meet Fritz, who I assumed, in my innocence, to be a technical assistant. I was more than a little startled, therefore, to make out Miller’s husky silhouette between the trunks of two trees, holding what appeared to be a human head.

“Meet Fritz,” Miller said cheerfully. “He’s made by Neumann, here in Germany, and he not only looks like a human head, he has the full weight of one — eight pounds. The microphones are in the ear holes.” The spatial component in human hearing, Miller went on to explain, has been so finely developed over hundreds of thousands of years that our minds factor in the distance traveled by any given sound, in order to determine its direction as precisely as possible. Fritz’s anthropomorphic weight and shape, in addition to his stereo microphones, make the sound effects in the walks seem more real to us, and more compelling, than the noises of our actual surroundings.

Despite the lateness of the hour and the bleakness of the sky, a cluster of parka-swaddled Documenta-goers remained, and Miller attracted the occasional stare as he clomped around the woods in Fritz’s company. Few watched him for long, however, because the piece itself demanded their attention. Though I’d experienced “Forest” a number of times by that point, I found it nearly impossible to tell which of the ominous rumblings and hissings around me were part of the piece, and which were due to the worsening weather. I said as much to Miller just as it began to rain.

“I’ve always loved the anecdote,” Miller said between takes, “that when the Lumière brothers first showed their films in Paris — the one of a train pulling into the station — people in the audience tried to jump out of the way. And that was a silent film, don’t forget. Imagine what they could have done with sound!”

It wasn’t until I returned to New York that I was able to see the installation many regard as Cardiff’s masterpiece, “The Forty-Part Motet.” The installation, on long-term display at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, is so deceptively simple, so matter-of-fact in its presentation — and so sublime in its effect — that it may be impossible to do it justice. It’s easy enough to describe: 40 cinderblock-size speakers, mounted on stands at the approximate height of a human head, arranged in a precise, expansive oval, facing inward. The speakers play “Spem in Alium,” a 16th-century choral work by the composer Thomas Tallis, which takes roughly 14 minutes. During a three-minute break, you hear the members of the choir clearing their throats, or yawning, or whispering jokes to one another about the choirmaster, before the music plays again. What exactly you’ll hear depends on which speaker is closest, because each member of that 40-person choir was recorded into a separate microphone, whose signal is then run, in the piece, through one — and only one — of the 40 speakers in that otherwise empty, unremarkable room in Queens.

It’s this single factor — one speaker, one voice — that transforms “The Forty-Part Motet” from a kind of glorified CD-listening party into something approaching a religious event. In the 30 minutes I spent in that bare, loftlike room on PS1’s second floor, not a single visitor passed through without being transfixed by the bright ellipse of human sound. One middle-aged man in a tweed jacket burst into tears. I consulted with the guard, a businesslike woman in her 50s, and was informed that such outbursts happen on a daily basis. When I asked how she felt about “The Forty-Part Motet,” given that she had to hear it in its entirety more than 30 times a day, she considered my question with care.

“A few of my co-workers, you know, they can’t take it,” she whispered, as if letting me in on a trade secret. “They say it’s too much.” She paused a moment, and we both watched a girl in her teens standing in the middle of the room with her eyes closed, swaying lightly to the voices­. “But you’ve got to understand — some people have no sense of peace.”

 

John Wray is the author, most recently, of the novel "Lowboy.” His last feature for the magazine was about the comedian Zach Galifianakis.

Editor: Sheila Glaser

 

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: July 23, 2012

New York City teems with questionable urban legends. But the fable about the postal clerk and his wife, a Brooklyn librarian, scrimping to amass an astounding collection of modern art, cramming all 5,000 pieces in a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment, then donating the whole kit and caboodle to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and galleries in all 50 states, is true.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Dorothy and Herbert Vogel at a Manhattan art gallery in 1992.

Herbert Vogel, who retired as a postal clerk in 1980 but kept collecting art, died on Sunday at 89 at a nursing home in Manhattan, the National Gallery announced. When he and his wife, Dorothy, gave thousands of artworks to the museum in 1992, J. Carter Brown, then the museum’s director, called their collection “a work of art in itself.”

So too were the lives of the couple colloquially called Dorothy and Herbert (the order on which Mr. Vogel insisted). Shortly after their wedding in 1962, they bought their first piece of art, a small crushed-metal sculpture by John Chamberlain. Realizing that their own efforts at making art were not up to the standards of Mr. Chamberlain and other artists they admired, they began buying others’ works. Starting slowly, they bought what they liked — within the strictures of two civil-service incomes — with the only criterion that they be able to carry it home.

Fitting it in their small apartment on the Upper East Side was no problem, as long as they didn’t mind devoting their closets to art, getting rid of their sofa and other furniture, and perpetually tripping over paintings. Mrs. Vogel told journalists that she did not — repeat, did not — keep art in her oven. “We didn’t set out to live bizarrely,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1992.

Wandering around the mountains of art were eight cats with names like Manet, Renoir and Corot. Twenty exotic turtles completed the scene.

But the art was what came to matter most, and the Vogel collection grew into a guidepost for an often austere school of art that followed Abstract Expressionism’s long reign: Minimal Art, which often examined monochromatic surfaces and essential forms. It was nowhere near as popular as Pop Art, which drew its colorful imagery from consumer products and arose around the same time.

There was also a buyers’ market for conceptual art, in which the image is an idea. An example in the Vogel collection was a few inches of frayed rope with a nail through it; another was a black cardboard square with the definition of the word “nothing” printed on it in white.

Their style was to make friends with the young, often little-known artists who were making the new art. Thus they bypassed galleries, a practice some in the art world later criticized as cheating the system. They bought on credit and were slow to pay. They had no car, took no vacations and ate TV dinners; a night out was a trip to the nearby Chinese restaurant. They sometimes did cat-sitting in exchange for art.

Artists liked to be taken seriously by patrons eager to understand novel directions in art, and they particularly appreciated the Vogels’ pattern of buying artists’ works over a period of years to capture evolving careers. “You knew when you were selling them something it was becoming part of an important collection,” Chuck Close, who helped develop the painting style called photorealism, said in an interview with Newsday in 1992.

Christo, whom the Vogels collected before he became famous for monumental works of environmental art, told The Miami Herald in 1989, “They passionately collect some artists, and they collect them from the beginning, before gallery or critical interest.”

Among the artists the Vogels collected were Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Richard Tuttle and Donald Judd. In more recent years they collected works by Andy Goldsworthy, James Siena and Pat Steir, among others.

Earl A. Powell III, the current director of the National Gallery, said in a statement: “The radical expansion of intellectual and stylistic expressions in many media by European and American artists since the 1960s is reflected in the diversity of the works that Herb and Dorothy collected over five decades.”

Herbert Vogel was born in Manhattan on Aug. 16, 1922, dropped out of school and worked in garment-industry sweatshops. But he told Smithsonian magazine in 1992, “I knew there was another world out there, and somehow I’d find it for myself.”

After a stint in the Army, he encountered paintings by the old masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That led him to contemporary art, and contemporary art led him to the Cedar Bar, the fabled artists’ hangout in Greenwich Village. There he listened in awe to Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and David Smith.

“I was nothing — a postal clerk,” he told The Times. “But I respected the artists, and they sort of respected me. They would talk until 3, 4 in the morning, and I would be one of the people who just listened. I just remember it very vividly. I never even asked a question.”

In 1960 he met Dorothy Faye Hoffman at a resort in the Poconos. On their first date, art did not come up. On subsequent dates, as they went to the movies and watched the presidential election returns together (Senator John F. Kennedy won), they fell in love. After their honeymoon in Washington, where they visited the National Gallery, they both took classes in painting. They soon realized they would rather hang other artists’ work on their walls.

“I wasn’t bad,” Mrs. Vogel told Newsday. “I didn’t like Herbie’s paintings, actually.”

In 1992 five full-size moving vans were needed to move their art to the National Gallery, where they were soon feted by William H. Rehnquist, the chief justice of the United States, and David Rockefeller. In 2008 the gallery announced that it would help them carry out their plan to give 50 artworks to a museum in each of the 50 states. The couple liked to work with the gallery because it has never sold a painting, and admission is free.

In 2008 Megumi Sasaki directed a documentary about the Vogels, “Herb & Dorothy.” Ms. Sasaki had her camera operators focus on how Mr. Vogel’s eyes intensified and lit up when he liked something. In addition to his wife, Mr. Vogel is survived by his sister, Paula Antebi. In 1992 Mr. Vogel, whose highest salary at the post office was $23,000 before taxes, told The Associated Press that he and his wife could easily have become millionaires. “But we weren’t concerned about that aspect,” he said.

 

 

By  SUSANNAH CAHALAN

Last Updated: 2:04 AM, July 22, 2012

Caveat Emptor - The Secret Life of an American Art Forger

by Ken Perenyi

Pegasus Books

In 1993, a New York real estate developer bought a small painting of two hummingbirds for $3 at a British flea market. He had a gut feeling it might be more valuable, so he took it to Christie’s, who attributed the work to 19th century painter Martin Johnson Heade. It sold at auction for $96,000.

The Post covered the story, a perfect example of the art collector’s dream find, under the headline “Art of the Steal.”

Little did we know then how accurate that headline really was.

The painting did not come from a flea market, and painter Heade had never touched the canvas. And that unnamed real estate developer? He happened to be one of the most prolific art forgers in history.

Between 1968 and 1998, Ken Perenyi passed 1,000 of his own paintings off as long-lost Old Masters — in Flemish, American and British styles — amassing millions and flooding the art world with very convincing fakes, some of which are still being sold as the real thing.

Just a few years ago, Perenyi, who has since gone legit, saw one of his J.F. Herring equestrian paintings in a Sotheby’s catalog. The painting, which he sold for $3,000 more than 20 years ago, was now asking for $32,000, and was billed as a genuine Herring.

The self-taught painter has fooled renowned experts in auction houses, private collectors and antique dealers from New York to London.

Yet Perenyi was never arrested. And his story has never been told — until now.

With the statute of limitations on his crimes expired, Perenyi happily confesses all in “Caveat Emptor,” telling how he successfully pulled the wool over the eyes of the stuffy art world, who more often than not was thrilled to capitalize on his forged long-lost great works of art.

Perenyi, though undoubtedly gifted, did not become aware of his artistic hidden talent until his late teens. Born to a working class family in Palisades Park, NJ, in 1949, Perenyi describes himself as a lackluster student without ambitions.

But he found his way — through a haze of drugs and alcohol — in New York’s underground art scene.

At 17, he met older artist Tom Daly, who took him under his wing, and introduced him to Titian, Rembrandt and Michelangelo. Perenyi practiced painting by copying the Masters.

Perenyi had an uncanny knack for mimicking, Daly noted. That same year, the two men discovered a book written by a famous Dutch art forger. The germ of an idea was planted.

Perenyi spent every waking hour devouring books about artists, going to museums and picking up antique furniture whose wood panels could be used as the canvas for his artwork.

He first attempted 16th century Flemish portraiture — because of how simple it seemed to recreate. Using original paintings as models, and taking characteristics like medieval hairstyles, thin lips and long straight noses, he made three portraits. After painting each one on the wooden panels, he burned the edges, baked them in the sun for several weeks and painstakingly applied a grid pattern of cracks, darkening them to mimic the debris that collects over time. He finished by rubbing it in dust.

His first portrait sold in 1968 at a New York antique store for $800. With cash in hand, he bought a pair of leather boots from Bloomingdale’s, the first of many shopping sprees to come.

THE portraits were so easy to make that he found it hard to sell them all — until he hooked up with a dealer from Nyack who “placed them.”

“I wasn’t asking any questions,” he writes. “I gave him a painting, and a week later he was back with cash. I gave him another, and it looked like I had steady money coming in.”

But the demand for Flemish paintings just wasn’t high enough. The Nyack dealer had an idea: “If you could start painting me some portraits of American Indians, we could sell them like crazy.”

Perenyi found another mentor in Jimmy Ricau, one of the most prominent 19th century American collectors in the world. To Perenyi’s surprise, Ricau had plans for the young painter: He wanted to make him the best American Old Masters forger in the world.

To do so, he gave him history lessons and walked him through his immense catalog of original pieces from big names like John F. Peto, James E. Buttersworth and Heade. Perenyi took stock of measurements, signatures and brush strokes.

It was a perfect time to exploit the American arts market, Ricau explained, because the American Masters were still not popular enough for people to think they warranted forgeries.

“Jimmy said it best, ‘It was like shooting fish a barrel,’ ” Perenyi says. “That was when I started seeing the real money — the market was so vulnerable for exploitation if you had the skill to do it.”

The key was that none of these were exact replicas. Each piece of art was original but plausibly authentic. For example, Buttersworth often used the same yachts with different backdrops, and the same backdrops with different yachts, so Perenyi would play around with these elements until he had something new.

There was also a bit of a Robin Hood-type mission about the plan.

“They’re a bunch of prostitutes,” Ricau would say of auctioneers. “And their primary appreciation of a picture is its price tag.”

Perenyi was producing about two forgeries a week. But the moment of no return happened in November 1978 when Parke-Bernet (later Sotheby’s) released their catalog called “The American Heritage Sale.” In it, were two full pages dedicated to recently discovered Buttersworths.

“Isn’t the one on the right yours?” Ricau asked.

“Actually, they’re both mine,” he said.

By 1980, the sheer number of fakes had flooded the market. People began whispering about Buttersworth forgeries that were everywhere.

Then, two of Perenyi’s associates were interviewed by the FBI, but no formal charges were lodged against them.

After these close calls, Perenyi laid low for several years until he was goaded out of hiding by a new Christie’s “Conditions of Business” caveat in their contracts. Now, they no longer guaranteed anything about the pieces they sold.

From his headquarters in Florida (where he had moved in 1978), Perenyi began transporting forgeries of British sporting scenes (equestrian, boating, hunting, etc.) that he claimed to have picked up at local flea markets. It was the perfect time for these pictures, too. Ralph Lauren was hugely popular — and there seemed to be a fetish for English-style paintings.

Some even seemed to be in on the con — but were so thrilled by their profit margins that they actively turned a blind eye.

“I would say that on a couple of occasions, I knew they knew,” Perenyi says. “My paintings were lifting up the prices of everything else, so they couldn’t say no.”

During one trip alone, Perenyi brought a suitcase filled with paintings — a few for Christie’s, one for Sotheby’s, one for Bonhams. In 1997, Bonhams even used one of his paintings (an American Buttersworth) for their promotional postcards.

He’d often wear disguises so as not to tip off anyone. Sometimes he’d play the part of a British playboy in a Hermes scarf; other times he’d arrive with a deep Florida tan and be the typical American tourist.

No matter what he wore, often sales of his work would double or even triple house estimates.

The British sporting scene eventually flooded the market, too, and he had to draw back.

But his appetite had already been sufficiently whetted — and now he wanted to make the big score. And an artist named Martin Johnson Heade would help him do just that.

In 1992, after reading a throwaway line from a book saying that many of Heade’s best work — called the “Gems of Brazil,” a series of pictures of hummingbirds in South America — was later found in England, he came up with a plan.

Armed with a fake “Gems of Brazil” painting, he arrived at Christie’s with a tale that he had bought the masterpiece at a Bristol flea market for $3. Christie’s was so tickled after the painting went for $96,000 that they leaked the back story to the The Times of London.

“It was easy money,” he said. So he tried it again at Sotheby’s in New York. “This is the finest passionflower I’ve ever seen painted by Heade,” one of the Sotheby’s experts exclaimed.

But there was trouble in paradise. One of the experts was not entirely convinced and insisted that the painting be cleaned with acetone before it was placed on the auction block.

Perenyi balked, knowing that a cleaning would tarnish the new paint and reveal it to be a fake. In a standoff, Perenyi won out, and the piece sold for $717, 500.

A year later, he heard a rumor that the painting “disintegrated during restoration” — but he never heard from Sotheby’s about it, he says, possibly because they wanted to avoid the humiliating fact that they had been duped.

That would be one of his last big frauds. He now had a million in cash — enough to travel and go on endless Versace couture shopping sprees.

But the life he loved almost ended in 1998 when two FBI agents arrived on his front steps, asking about his connection to two Buttersworth pieces.

Though the FBI spent five years investigating Perenyi and his business associates, they never indicted him. Now it’s too late to bring charges — he got away with the perfect con.

From his home in Madeira Beach, Fla., Perenyi’s launched a legal career, openly selling his works of art as fakes. Though not as lucrative, he still makes a living.

But this is not the end of Perenyi’s story, he says. RKO pictures has optioned the story of his life (when asked who should play him, he hesitantly offered up “a young Johnny Depp”) and he hopes that this newfound notoriety might reinvigorate his career.

“The art world has such a fascination with the subject of fakes,” he says. “Who knows? Maybe a great faker could have his own show in New York.”

A Los Angeles Museum on Life-Support

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Art in the Streets” show.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Maybe two out of three isn’t bad. Los Angeles has gotten two quite effective museum directors from New York. Ann Philbin went from the Drawing Center to head the Hammer Museum. Michael Govan went from the Dia Art Foundation to become director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Both seem to be doing swimmingly.

Published: July 22, 2012 

Stephanie Diani for The New York Times
Jeffrey Deitch, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles since 2010.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

“Art in the Streets,” mounted at the museum in 2011, focused on graffiti art and skateboard culture, including special coverage of the Los Angeles scene.

But a much rougher time is being had by the third, Jeffrey Deitch, who closed his SoHo gallery in the spring of 2010 to become director of theMuseum of Contemporary Art, an institution with an enviable curatorial record but historically plagued by financial problems. Criticism about his tenure has been constant, but has intensified over the last three and a half weeks in the wake of the departure under pressure of Paul Schimmel, the museum’s brilliant, headstrong chief curator, after a vote by the trustees. The chemistry between the two men was known to be troubled.

Even more disturbing than Mr. Schimmel’s leaving after 22 years was news that his position would not be filled and that the museum would rely more on freelance curators. Around the same time there was increasing talk in both the press and the art world of Mr. Deitch’s problems in fund-raising.

And then came word that an exhibition about art and disco was in development. Complaints escalated that Mr. Deitch was emphasizing populist entertainment and glitz at the expense of the scholarly rigor associated with Mr. Schimmel. The next week or so brought the resignations of all four artist-trustees: John Baldessari, Catherine Opie, Barbara Kruger and Ed Ruscha.

The museum, which counted artists among its most active founders, has always had them on its board. In a sense their loss was as shocking as anything that came before, because it signaled in the extreme a loss of faith on the part of artists. Mr. Deitch’s tenure as director has so far been a disappointment even to the people who thought it was a feasible idea in the first place, of whom I was one.

I considered it “a brilliant stroke,” I wrote at the time, calling it an example of a museum thinking outside the box, and also an appropriately desperate measure for desperate times. The museum had come close to collapse in 2008 after drawing its endowment down to $5 million (it was once around $40 million), and there was talk of selling the collection or merging with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. That threat was averted by the real estate developer and cultural philanthropist Eli Broad, a founding trustee of the museum, who returned to the museum’s board after a 15-year hiatus and donated a $30 million bailout, and then had a big hand in Mr. Deitch’s appointment.

I didn’t buy the idea that someone from the gallery world cannot cross over into the museum sphere or that advanced degrees in art history are essential, and I still don’t. It was certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that given Mr. Deitch’s wide art world experience he could have met the challenge of a big museum. But instead of redefining himself in a bid to do that, he seems to have redefined the job.

Rather than encourage and cultivate curators much the way an art dealer encourages and cultivates artists, he has frequently chosen to assume the role of curator himself, when he wasn’t commissioning celebrities to do it. He started with an exhibition devoted to photographs and other artworks by the actor Dennis Hopper organized by Julian Schnabel, then staged an off-site show about James Dean organized by James Franco. His 2011 “Art in the Streets” exhibition, although better received by critics and very well-attended, didn’t help establish a serious tone. And it included several artists whom Mr. Deitch had represented as an art dealer — at-best a sloppy-looking overlap between his former role as a dealer and his current one as a custodian of a public institution.

For all his missteps, though, it is much too simplistic to blame Mr. Deitch alone for the air of crisis that now surrounds the museum. He has certainly hurt its image and he has failed to make much of a dent in its more urgent financial problems. But he did not create those. They preceded him by many years and are part of a tortuous history with many players. The museum has long been financially fragile; its board has rarely provided the kind of financial support that an institution of its quality requires and deserves. It continues not to, which brings us back to Mr. Broad.

His bailout of the museum four years ago gave him a dominance on the board that caused some trustees to leave and suggested to many people the possibility that his bailout might someday morph into a takeover that would merge the museum’s exemplary collection of art with his own, more predictable, market-driven one. It didn’t help that within months of Mr. Deitch’s appointment Mr. Broad finalized plans to build his own museum across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art, now scheduled to open within a year or two.

Given Mr. Broad’s fraught history with other Los Angeles museums, his denials about taking over this one remain hard to trust. In an interview in The Los Angeles Times he said, “If I wanted to do that, why would I have saved MOCA?” But he hasn’t so much saved it as staved off its demise, and without more money either from him or other trustees, the place is more or less on life-support. (It is interesting to note that its $14.3 million budget for the fiscal year 2011 is a little below the $16 million of the Hammer, a museum with roughly one-quarter its gallery space. And yet, while the Museum of Contemporary Art’s staff has been whittled down to a skeletal 45, the Hammer has 95.)

Meanwhile a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed piece by Mr. Broad contributed to a widespread and unhelpful binary view of the situation, calling the museum’s great exhibitions of the past “insular” and Mr. Deitch’s vision “populist,” a gross simplification and misrepresentation on both counts. Mr. Broad also cited attendance as a sign of a show’s success, a very limited idea of the cultural benefits of museums to say the least.

Whether or not Mr. Deitch was the best person for the job now seems largely moot. He is the one who said yes, who showed up and has thrown himself into what may actually be a kind of mission impossible, with or without his many errors in judgment. At this point he, Mr. Broad and the other trustees only have one another. They have got to make it work. The main way for this to happen is for the other board members to step up to the plate and give enough money to counterbalance Mr. Broad’s contributions and his views. You can’t have a one-person board any more than you can have a one-person museum.

For his part Mr. Deitch has to become a real museum director. He has to stop organizing exhibitions — in part to create more of a firewall between his new job and his previous identity. He has to hone his fund-raising skills and hire and cultivate curators, including, as The Los Angeles Times said in an editorial on Friday, a new chief curator — which of course will take money.

And although one can be grateful for the wake-up call delivered by the departures of the four artist-trustees, artists need to reassert themselves in the life of this museum. They have the numbers and the clout to make a difference. Above all they have the vision. The Los Angeles cultural world cannot turn its back on an institution that has been so central to its stature as one of the world’s greatest art capitals.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 23, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Los Angeles Museum on Life-Support.

GENEVA

SIMON STUDER started his career in a basement vault in a warehouse complex near the heart of this city, known for international banks and outrageous prices. It was a strange job. Every day, someone would open the vault and lock him inside until it was time for lunch. Then he’d be let out of the vault and, after eating, he’d be locked in again until it was time to go home.

He was taking inventory for one of Switzerland’s best-known gallery owners, who rented the space. “I was checking sizes, condition, looking for a signature,” Mr. Studer recalls, “and making sure the art was properly measured.”

This might have been a tedious way to spend four months, but what was being tallied and assessed was the handiwork of Pablo Picasso. Not hundreds of pieces, but thousands — shelf upon shelf of drawings, paintings and sculptures. It was Mr. Studer’s first peek at the astounding wealth stuffed inside the Geneva Freeport, as this warehouse complex is known.

The second peek came when he realized what the guy in the vault next door was doing: counting a roomful of gold bars.

“That’s the Freeport,” says Mr. Studer, who now runs his own gallery. “You have no idea what is next door and then you happen to be there when they open a door and, poof, you see.”

That Picasso gig was about 25 years ago, and all evidence suggests that the Freeport is more treasure-crammed than ever. Though little known outside the art world, this surprisingly drab series of buildings is renowned by dealers and collectors as the premier place to stash their most valuable works.

They come for the security and stay for the tax treatment. For as long as goods are stored here, owners pay no import taxes or duties, in the range of 5 to 15 percent in many countries. If the work is sold at the Freeport, the owner pays no transaction tax, either.

Once it exits the premises — either because it’s been sold or because the original owner has moved it — taxes are owed in the country where it winds up. But for as long as a work is in the Freeport, it’s as if it resides in a no-man’s land where there is no Caesar to render unto.

Only a few years ago, in fact, the Freeport was officially not part of Switzerland. The buildings have since been patriated, but they and a handful of lesser-known freeports in different parts of Switzerland remain the closest thing to the Cayman Islands that the art world has to offer. It’s a haven where the climate — financial and otherwise — is ideal for high-net-worth individuals and their assets.

How much art is stockpiled in the 435,000 square feet of the Geneva Freeport? That’s a tough one. The canton of Geneva, which owns an 86 percent share of the Freeport, does not know, nor does Geneva Free Ports and Warehouses, the company that pays the canton for the right to serve as the Freeport’s landlord. Swiss customs officials presumably know, but they aren’t talking. Suffice it to say, there is wide belief among art dealers, advisers and insurers that there is enough art tucked away here to create one of the world’s great museums.

“I doubt you’ve got a piece of paper wide enough to write down all the zeros,” says Nicholas Brett, underwriting director of AXA Art Insurance in London, when asked to guess at the total value of Freeport art. “It’s a huge but unknown number.”

The number is about to grow. At the Freeport, construction has begun on a new, 130,000-square-foot warehouse that will specialize in storing art. It is scheduled to open at the end of 2013.

In the coming years, collectors and dealers will also have a variety of other high-security, customs-friendly, tax-free storage options around the world. Luxembourg is building a 215,000-square-foot freeport, scheduled to open in 2014 at its airport. In March, construction began on the Beijing Free Port of Culture at Beijing Capital International Airport.

There has also been talk of doubling the size of the freeport in Singapore, a gleaming, high-tech operation that is so sleek it’s hard to believe a “Mission: Impossible” sequel hasn’t been filmed there. It opened in 2010, next to Changi airport, and caters to Asian collectors who are ferried in white limos from the tarmac to the warehouse.

THIS construction boomlet is a novel way to gauge the art market’s strikingly swift recovery from a precipitous fall in 2008, when sales at auctions, the industry bellwether, shrank in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Global sales in 2011, both at auction and in private deals, were estimated at $64.1 billion, according to Clare McAndrew, an art economist, That total is just shy of the record high of $65.8 billion set in 2007 — and well ahead of the 2009 trough of $39.4 billion.

At the high end, some works are fetching prices that far exceed the heights of five years ago, when the phrase “art market bubble” was commonplace. In June, Christie’s sold a 1981 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat for $20.1 million, a record for the artist at auction and a figure that far surpassed the $14.6 million it sold for five years ago at Sotheby’s. The same month, “Blue Star,” by Joan Miró, sold at Sotheby’s for close to $37 million, more than double the sum it earned at auction in Paris in 2007.

In record time, the art market decline of 2009 has given way to new anxieties about overinflated prices. (“How long can the art market walk on water?” read a headline in a July-August issue of The Art Newspaper.) A major reason, Ms. McAndrew says, is the arrival of Chinese buyers in large numbers, as well as buyers from Russia and the Middle East. Then there is the newfound sense among collectors worldwide that art is a smart commodity to buy in the midst of economic turmoil.

“People have realized that art is a safe haven asset when other markets are doing poorly,” Ms. McAndrew says. “In general, art holds its value over time, and in some cases it increases.”

Granted, some freeport users are people who have been collecting for years, purely out of passion, and suddenly find that pieces they bought decades ago are now worth sums so immense that keeping them at home is a gratuitous risk. But more typical are collectors in need of storage and tax relief because they never intended to display what they had bought.

The difference between a room of Picassos and a stack of gold bars isn’t what it used to be. And that bothers people like Michael Findlay, a director at Acquavella Galleries and author of “The Value of Art.”

“The art business now attracts people who are parking money, who are speculating and who want social status,” Mr. Findlay says. “The flaw in their thinking is that from a historical perspective, the great private collections were put together by people who bought art because they could afford it and liked it. When these people spent money on art, they considered it spent and they had something to enjoy for the rest of their lives. It was for personal use. The art spent no time at a freeport.”

MANY art warehouses are so unobtrusive that you can walk by them and never know it. The Geneva Freeport isn’t one of them. A quarter of a mile away, you can see the name of the place, Ports Francs — which is French for free port — in red letters on the outside of a windowless white building facing a commuter thruway. From a distance, it looks like a multiplex movie theater.

Driving up, you expect a checkpoint, armed guards, retina scans, German shepherds and X-ray machines. But none are in sight. There is some fencing and barbed wire, but less than you’d think. This isn’t to say that security here is lax — dealers, movers and collectors describe the place as impregnable, and locks and cameras abound. But nothing about the site says Fort Knox.

Unless you notice the Swiss customs officials, who are not particularly obtrusive, this could pass for a large self-storage operation in Queens. It sits about two miles from the center of Geneva, next to a post office and amid a hodgepodge of gray and unremarkable bridges and streets.

Media tours of the Freeport are rare, but there have been more in recent years as the government and the company that operates the facility strive to reassure the public that there is nothing mysterious or unscrupulous going on here. In part, this is a hangover of some bad publicity. In 2003, Swiss authorities announced that they would return hundreds of antiquities stolen from excavation sites in Egypt, including two mummies, sarcophagi, masks and statues. Some of the items were reportedly painted in garish colors so they could be smuggled in as cheap souvenirs. The ringleader of this group was eventually sentenced to 35 years in prison.

The episode helped to spur some regulatory changes, including a rule that requires tenants to keep an inventory using a specific template. It is hardly a huge change — customs officials were always allowed to ask to see any container they wanted — but experts say the rules were enacted, in part, to counter the Freeport’s undeserved image as a place where anything goes.

“The legislative changes were in response to the criticism,” says Eva Stormann, an attorney based in Geneva who specializes in art law. “But much of that was based on a wrong understanding of how the Freeport works. It is a highly reputable place.”

On a June afternoon, a tour of the Freeport is given by Florence May and Gilbert Epars, marketing directors for Geneva Free Ports. The first stop is a wine cellar piled high with crates stamped with names like Château Mouton Rothschild, Dom Pérignon and Château Petrus.

Art, it turns out, is just one category of valuable stored in these buildings. Things like cigars, Lamborghinis, soap and Porsches show up, too. There is also a silo large enough for 45 tons of grain.

Honestly, grain. It’s the last bit of evidence that when the original Freeport here opened back in 1888, it wasn’t for rarefied assets at all. It was designed for agricultural goods, and anything else that can be stored in bulk, and regarded as a place to keep stuff briefly while it traveled from on part of the country to another.

But the upside of the "temporary exemption of taxes and duties for an unlimited period of time,” as it’s called, caught the eye of a more upscale crowd. Wine lovers among them.

“There are about three million bottles of wine here,” says Mr. Epars, after doing some quick math in his head.

What you won’t see on this tour, weirdly enough, is art. It is all behind dozens of locked doors up and down a series of featureless hallways. The only hint that you stand amid Monets, Rothkos and Warhols — or works by artists of their stature — is a number of discarded frames sitting near a large vault in the basement of one building. That and a wooden crate that, according to a label on its side, held a painting by Jules Olitski, a Russian-born artist who died in 2007.

The concentration of so much great art in one place has started to make insurers nervous. The problem is that most art insurance provides what is called “worldwide coverage,” which means that the work is insured wherever it is. But if so much art is packed in a mere 31 acres of terrain, what would happen if disaster struck?

“The nightmare scenario is a plane crash, or a fire, or a flood,” says Adam Prideaux, an insurance broker at Blackwall Green in London. “But Freeport authorities are reluctant to give out security information, and they won’t give out information about fire divisions, so we don’t know if a fire could spread. Maybe it wouldn’t, but we have no idea because the Swiss won’t discuss it.”

It’s to the point now, Mr. Prideaux adds, that new policies for the Freeport are either cost-prohibitive or impossible to write.

“We can’t actually calculate how much we have insured at the Freeport, and at some point, insurers said, ‘My God, we have unlimited coverage and we have no idea how much of that is at the Freeport,’ ” Mr. Prideaux says. “There are insurers who could be so overexposed that in the event of disaster they will be unable to pay.”

THE unknown of what’s inside the Geneva Freeport makes it an ideal metaphor for the art market, much of which is shrouded in mystery. Sales at auctions attract attention, but both the value and the volume of private transactions are apparently larger. Perhaps far larger.

Ms. McAndrew, the economist, has surveyed dealers and collectors, and estimates that in the United States, private sales make up 70 percent of all transactions measured by dollar value.

So while it’s widely known that one of Edvard Munch’s four versions of “The Scream” sold at Sotheby’s in June for nearly $120 million, other megadeals are struck in secret. Or mostly in secret. It’s been widely reported that a buyer or buyers in Qatar — the odds are it was the royal family — spent $250 million for one of “The Card Players,” by Cézanne, which would make it the largest sum ever paid for a work of art.

Private deals at the lower end of the market are booming, too. Only three years ago, says Wendy Goldsmith, director of Goldsmith Art Advisory in London, “we’d sit there staring at our phones, willing them to ring.” Now, she describes a conversation with an artist who is “not museum quality,” with eight pieces of newly produced art and a waiting list of 81 people. (“What do you suggest I do?” the artist asked Ms. Goldsmith, a little desperately.)

The lines for the marquee contemporary names are even longer.

“I bought a Gursky for a client,” Ms. Goldsmith says, referring to Andreas Gursky, whose stunning, large-scale photographs come with stunning, large-scale price tags. “I had to write Gursky a letter about my client’s collection. I had to explain why my client wanted this photograph so much. And this piece cost over $1 million. It was like pledging your first born.”

“The machinations are fascinating,” she adds. “They’re also spiraling out of control.”

Signs of this uptick are evident at the Freeport. For years, art-related bustle here consisted of trucks being loaded and unloaded, and business people arriving with dealers or advisers to size up a possible purchase. But in recent years, a handful of galleries have sprung up here, and the first belonged to none other than Simon Studer, the dealer who cataloged Picassos in the basement.

Mr. Studer’s gallery, which opened here three years ago, is on the third floor of a warehouse, and after some extensive interior decorating, including the installation of heating, it looks like a New York loft. Why the Freeport? The rent is inexpensive when compared with that in downtown Geneva.

“And if a person is willing to come to the Freeport, they are serious about buying,” he says. There is not a lot of window-shopping here because there aren’t a lot of windows.

His onetime protégée, Sandra Recio, has opened a gallery next door. “This place also has some mystique,” she says. “You tell people you’re at the Freeport and that sounds intriguing.”

Mr. Studer, who speaks with a light French accent, walks to the rear of his gallery, where he has set up a cozy little viewing room. Works by Giacometti, Balthus and Modigliani hang on walls, there’s a cowhide rug on the floor and a couple of brown leather Barcelona chairs near an easel.

“So you got to look around?” he asks, referring to the tour given the previous day by Ms. May and Mr. Epars. “The place has changed because of the bad reputation from the antiquities stolen from excavations. They want to show that it’s transparent and totally legal.”

There is a newfound vigilance among customs officials, he says. A few days earlier, one of them stopped him on the street near the Freeport:

“He asked me to open my briefcase and show him what was inside. He asked where I was coming from, where I was going. That was a first.”

Asked if he or Ms. Recio has ever seen any art at the Freeport, other than what they sell, they both think for a moment.“I’ve seen taxidermy,” Ms. Recio says. “Animal heads.”

“Most of the time, you get an idea of what is behind these doors through your nose,” Mr. Studer says. “You might smell soaps, or carpets.”

Leaving the gallery, he walks to the elevator and runs into a father and son who sell cigars — rolled in Costa Rica, they say, and filled with the finest tobacco from around the world.

Mr. Studer has an expression on his face that says, “That’s the Freeport for you.”

“It’s nothing fancy, nothing sexy,” he says. “It’s just pure business. It’s a very gray, very boring, dark, Swiss place. But when you go inside, you have some surprises.”

What is the fair market value of an object that cannot be sold?

The question may sound like a Zen koan, but it is one that lawyers for the heirs of the New York art dealer Ileana Sonnabend and the Internal Revenue Service are set to debate when they meet in Washington next month.

The object under discussion is “Canyon,” a masterwork of 20th-century art created by Robert Rauschenberg that Mrs. Sonnabend’s children inherited when she died in 2007.

Because the work, a sculptural combine, includes a stuffed bald eagle, a bird under federal protection, the heirs would be committing a felony if they ever tried to sell it. So their appraisers have valued the work at zero.

 But the Internal Revenue Service takes a different view. It has appraised “Canyon” at $65 million and is demanding that the owners pay $29.2 million in taxes.

“It’s hard for me to see how this could be valued this way because it’s illegal to sell it,” said Patti S. Spencer, a lawyer who specializes in trusts and estates but has no role in the case.

The family is now challenging the judgment in tax court and its lawyers are negotiating with the I.R.S. in the hope of finding a resolution.

Heirs to important art collections are often subject to large tax bills. In this case, the beneficiaries, Nina Sundell and Antonio Homem, have paid $471 million in federal and state estate taxes related to Mrs. Sonnabend’s roughly $1 billion art collection, which included works by Modern masters from Jasper Johns to Andy Warhol. The children have already sold off a large part of it, approximately $600 million worth, to pay the taxes they owed, according to their lawyer, Ralph E. Lerner.

But they drew the line at “Canyon,” a landmark of postwar Modernism made in 1959 that three appraisers they hired, including the auction house Christie’s, had valued at zero. Should they lose their fight, the heirs, who were unavailable for comment, will owe the taxes plus $11.7 million in penalties.

Inheritances are generally taxed at graduated rates depending on their value. In this case, the $29.2 million assessment for “Canyon” was based on a special penalty rate because the I.R.S. contends the heirs inaccurately stated its value.

While art lovers may appreciate the I.R.S.’s aesthetic sensibilities, some estate planners, tax lawyers and collectors are alarmed at the agency’s position, arguing that the case could upend the standard practice of valuing assets according to their sale in a normal market. I.R.S. guidelines say that in figuring an item’s fair market value, taxpayers should “include any restrictions, understandings, or covenants limiting the use or disposition of the property.”

In this instance, the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act make it a crime to possess, sell, purchase, barter, transport, import or export any bald eagle — alive or dead. Indeed, the only reason Mrs. Sonnabend was able to hold onto “Canyon,” Mr. Lerner said, was due to an informal nod from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 1981.

Even then, the government revisited the issue in 1998. Rauschenberg himself had to send a notarized statement attesting that the eagle had been killed and stuffed by one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders long before the 1940 law went into effect. Mrs. Sonnabend was then able to retain ownership as long as the work continued to be exhibited at a public museum. The piece is on a long-term loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which Mr. Lerner said insures it, but the policy details are confidential.

Mr. Lerner said that the I.R.S.’s handling of the work has been confusing. Last fall, the agency sent the family an unsigned draft report that it was valuing “Canyon” at $15 million. After Mr. Lerner replied that the children were refusing to pay, the I.R.S. then sent a formal Notice of Deficiency in October saying it had increased the valuation to $65 million.

That figure came from the agency’s Art Advisory Panel, which is made up of experts and dealers and meets a few times a year to advise the I.R.S.’s Art Appraisal Services unit. One of its members is Stephanie Barron, the senior curator of 20th-century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where “Canyon” was exhibited for two years. She said that the group evaluated “Canyon” solely on its artistic value, without reference to any accompanying restrictions or laws.

“The ruling about the eagle is not something the Art Advisory Panel considered,” Ms. Barron said, adding that the work’s value is defined by its artistic worth. “It’s a stunning work of art and we all just cringed at the idea of saying that this had zero value. It just didn’t make any sense.”

Rauschenberg’s combines, which inventively slapped together everyday objects he found on the street, helped propel American art in a new direction.

Though the I.R.S. usually accepts the advisory panel’s recommendations, it is not required to; last year it did not follow the group’s opinion in 7 percent of the cases, according to panel’s annual 2011 report.

So how did the panel arrive at the $65 million figure? Ms. Barron said, “When you come up with a valuation you look at comparable works and what they have sold for at public or private sales.”

The I.R.S. declined to comment.

Mr. Lerner told Forbes magazine, which reported the dispute in February, that Joseph Bothwell, a former director of the agency’s Art Appraisal Services unit, had told him “there could be a market for the work, for example, a recluse billionaire in China might want to buy it and hide it.” Mr. Bothwell has since retired from the I.R.S. Ms. Barron said she did not consider any hypothetical black-market buyer.

Still, the notion that the I.R.S. might use the black market in this way to determine a fair market value has surprised some tax experts. James Joseph, a tax lawyer with Arnold & Porter in Washington, noted that the I.R.S. has taxed illegal contraband at its market value, but added: “I don’t know of any instance where the I.R.S. has assumed taxpayers will engage in an illegal activity in order to value their assets at a higher amount. Al Capone went to jail for not paying income taxes on his illegal income, but this is very different than that.”

At the moment, tax experts note that the I.R.S.’s stance puts the heirs in a bind: If they don’t pay, they would be guilty of violating federal tax laws, but if they try to sell “Canyon” to zero-out their bill, they could go to jail for violating eagle protection laws.

Mr. Lerner said that since the children assert the Rauschenberg has no dollar value for estate purposes, they could not claim a charitable deduction by donating “Canyon” to a museum. If the I.R.S. were to prevail in its $65 million valuation, he said the heirs would still have to pay the $40.9 million in taxes and penalties regardless of a donation.

Then, given their income and the limits on deductions, he said, they would be able to deduct only a small part of the work’s value each year. Mr. Lerner estimated that it would take about 75 years for them to absorb the deduction.

“So my clients would have to live to 140 or so,” he said.

 

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Ghosts in the Machine , at the New Museum, features some 140 works, including “Movie-Drome,” a mix of projected films, slides and drawings on the walls of a hemispherical room, by the filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek. 

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: July 19, 2012

If “Ghosts in the Machine,” an ambitious, multitasking, somewhat austere exhibition at the New Museum were itself a machine, it would have lots of moving parts, but not all of them would be performing with equal efficiency.

Walking through this enormous show, which has been orchestrated by Massimiliano Gioni, the museum’s associate director and head of exhibitions, and Gary Carrion-Murayari, its curator, can call to mind one of Marcel Duchamp’s lesser-known quips. In a 1963 interview in Vogue, cited in Calvin Tomkins’s 1996 biography of him, Duchamp claimed that the aesthetic life span of an art object — what he called its “emanation” — “doesn’t last more than 20 or 30 years.” Referring to his most famous painting, the 1912 “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,” he added, “I mean, for example that my ‘Nude’ is dead, completely dead.” Mr. Tomkins suggests that his subject was half-joking, but only half.

The New Museum show repeatedly proves Duchamp about half right. As smart and thought stirring as this exhibition is, it is also a little short on living, breathing artworks, and slightly overloaded with rather stale ones and other objects and diagrams that, altogether, function primarily as interesting period pieces or historical artifacts.

In the catalog Mr. Gioni writes that the show was not conceived as “a classic historical survey” but as a “cabinet of curiosities.” Casting a wide net and moving quickly and a little capriciously across time and national boundaries, it sets out to examine some of the artistic reflections of our machine-haunted, technology-dependent era, especially in the second half of the last century. It is far less interested in bringing together established masterpieces than in using unfamiliar artworks to shed light on a machine-infested terrain that is as social and psychological as it is visual. The exhibition contains just enough powerful art — including some surprising resurrections — to pull it off.

The show’s mixture of marginal art movements and neglected objects ranges from 1960s Op Art paintings by Bridget Riley and Julian Stanczak to a reconstruction of Wilhelm Reich’s notorious Orgone Energy Accumulator from 1940; sitting in it was supposed to unblock the flow of life energy. There are constant swings among decades, allowing you, for example, in the museum’s lobby, to peruse “The Way Things Go,” the brilliantly witty 1987 video of chain reactions involving ordinary objects by Peter Fischli and David Weiss that is often likened to the creations of Rube Goldberg, and then go upstairs and study some drawings from the 1930s by Goldberg himself, sharpening your appreciation of the analogy. There are works by machine-obsessed outsider artists, healers and mental patients, including a series of suspended wire constructions by the self-taught American sculptor Emery Blagdon (1907-86), who thought they could cure illness. One of the show’s few dips into the premodern era is an 1810 engraving based on the delusional drawing by James Tilly Matthews, an Englishman who is generally considered the first person to receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia, that depicts his domination by a machine he called the Air Loom.

A majority of the show’s roughly 140 artworks, diagrams and related objects date from the mid 1950s to the mid-’70s — the halcyon years of postwar art and, not coincidentally, the beginning of the technological blossoming in which we currently find ourselves. The machine theme means that the show largely avoids the period’s dominant styles — especially Pop and Minimalism — favoring the more science- and technology-focused tendencies that they overrode or shunted aside. These include not only Op Art but also Kinetic art and what might be called op-kinetic hybrids, pursued in particular by little-known Italian artists. There are also several computer-generated films and a cache of wan computer-made drawings. This show repeatedly reminds you that every major scientific advance has artistic repercussions, artists who see it as the basis for something new and revolutionary, a way to go beyond conventional notions of touch, authorship and personal expression (even though it sometimes seems that the baby has been discarded with the bath water).

The largely abstract Op and kinetic works are balanced by profusely image-based efforts that predate Pop’s embrace of popular culture, or dissent from its emphasis on painting while also presaging 1980s appropriation art. These include two impressive resurrections of almost-never-seen works: “Man, Machine and Motion,” a large, rather stilted but nonetheless proto-Pop labyrinthine photo installation from 1955 by the British artist Richard Hamilton, and “Movie-Drome,” from 1963-66, by the American avant-garde filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek. A dense, hallucinatory mix of projected films, slides and drawings splayed across the walls of a hemispherical room — originally a converted silo in Stony Point, N.Y. — it saw action fewer than five times. An enthralling rediscovery suggestive of a cross between an animated Rauschenberg silk-screen painting and the Internet’s deluge of images, it is a tantalizing rediscovery.

Duchamp is of course one of the show’s foundational presences, represented by a 1959-60 reconstruction of “The Large Glass” from 1915-23, one of modernism’s earliest and certainly most significant depictions of the machine in art. Its subtitle — “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” — highlights the eroticized fusion of machines and humans that is one of the show’s underlying themes. Next to it stands a frightening bedlike structure inspired by the implement of torture central to Kafka’s 1919 short story “In the Penal Colony.” Complete with an overhead array of needles, it executed its victims by inscribing their crimes on their bodies and was commissioned by the influential Swiss curator Harald Szeemann for his 1975 Duchamp-inspired exhibition “The Bachelor Machines.” (Prior exhibitions about the machine are among this one’s subthemes.)

In another gallery you’ll come across “Crash!,” a short film that the British science fiction writer J. G. Ballard made with Harley Cokeliss in 1971 (more than 20 years before the release of David Cronenberg’s Ballard-based feature of the same name, without the exclamation point). A meditation on the car as the central form and fantasy of modern society — and on the car crash as a kind of wish-fulfillment or consummation — it is both insightful and noticeably dated, especially in its juxtaposition of scenes of a car moving through a carwash and close-ups of a woman showering.

As usual, the stronger works provide built-in criticisms of their neighbors. On the third floor, for example, the rather clinical inertness of the Hamilton photo installation is pointed up by “The History of Nothing,” a 12-minute film from 1963 by Eduardo Paolozzi, another proto-Pop artist working in Britain, that will be new to most viewers. Combining drawings, engravings and photographs with a grinding, spluttering sound track, it depicts a dreamlike urban landscape with a personal intensity that leaves the Hamilton in the dust, while suggesting a missing link between Max Ernst’s collages and the 1968 animation of “Yellow Submarine.”

On the second floor most of the mechanized kinetic works and the eye-buzzing Op reliefs and sculptures keep the eye busy without giving the mind enough to do. Some feel like precursors to nothing so much as screen savers. Exceptions include a piece by the French-Argentine artist Julio le Parc in which big black-and-white moiré circles amusingly suggest woozy eyes, and a small, sweetly solemn motorized aperturelike wall piece in painted wood by the Belgian Pol Bury. More convincing, however, is the straightforward kineticism of Hans Haacke’s 1964-65 “Blue Sail” — a big square of blue chiffon held aloft by the blowing of an electric fan — and Gianni Colombo’s small, dark 1968 walk-in environment, “Elastic Space.” It surrounds the viewer with a luminous, attenuated grid of white cord that is gently stretched this way and that by a quietly whirring motor. Standing inside this work is like inhabiting something akin to a living organism, a friendly, encompassing, unified ghost-machine.

“Ghosts in the Machine” continues through Sept. 30 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery at Prince Street, Lower East Side; (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org.