The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Posted on Thu, Jul. 19, 2012BY MEREDITH RUTLAND

“Odalisque in Red Pants” by Henri Matisse

The courier pulled the $3.7 million Henri Matisse painting from a red tube, carefully unrolling the bundle for the would-be buyers.

The piece, “Odalisque in Red Pants,” was wrapped in other paintings to make it less conspicuous. After all, moving a stolen French masterpiece through international airports and Miami streets isn’t easy.

Documents released by the U.S. Attorney’s Office detail how a pair of undercover agents posing as buyers tracked down the 1925 painting and finally arrested Pedro Antonio Marcuello Guzman, 46, of Miami, and Maria Martha Elisa Ornelas Lazo, 50, of Mexico City.

The painting, missing from a Venezuelan museum for about a decade, had been swapped for a forgery at the Caracas Contemporary Art Museum.

The museum purchased the piece in 1981 for more than $400,000. It was on loan for a short time to a Spanish exhibit in 1997.

In December 2002, the museum reported it painting stolen. A few months later, museum leaders told the public about the theft.

While the theft itself remains unsolved, Marcuello told the FBI it was an inside job – supporting museum director Rita Salvestrini suspicions that the painting was taken by someone with access to the museum.

Investigators from Venezuela, Spain, France, Britain, Interpol and the FBI pursued an array of leads, according to an AP article after the theft. And rumors circulated like wildfire with guesses as to where it would end up.

A Caracas newspaper suggested the swap happened during the loan in Spain. The AP said French police were investigating a lead that the painting was taken to Matisse’s home country. The AP also reported the FBI suspected the painting was taken by a Venezuelan woman living in Miami Beach, who stored the painting in Miami before smuggling it to Spain.

Marcuello told an FBI agent that a friend had tried to sell the painting in Spain, but it fell through when he couldn’t agree on a price. It didn’t say whether the painting was in Spain during the time of the arranged sale.

The piece found its way to Ornelas’ home in Mexico City, where she looked up the piece online to see what she was dealing with. Her husband is one of Marcuello’s “main associates,” Marcuello told the FBI.

After an agent met with Marcuello, he arranged for Ornelas to get a visa, hop on a plane and come to Miami with the painting. She carried the multi-million-dollar artwork through customs Monday at Miami International Airport.

After a few meetings at a coffee shop and a Miami Beach restaurant, the two agents made arrangements to meet in a room at the Loews Hotel to purchase the painting from Marcuello and Ornelas.

Agents promptly arrested the duo.

A hearing is set for Friday. They are accused of possession of stolen property and face a maximum of 10 years in prison if convicted.

A previous version of this article misspelled then name of Matisse’s painting.

© 2012 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miamiherald.com

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/19/v-print/2902882/fbi-3-million-matisse-painting.html#storylink=cpy

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times - Nancy Spector, of the Guggenheim, speaking, and curators listening at a training program in Manhattan.

July 18, 2012
By RANDY KENNEDY

Over the last decade, as the contemporary art world has grown to planetary size — more galleries, more fairs, more art-selling Web sites, bigger museums, new biennials almost by the month — it has sometimes seemed as if a new kind of cultural figure has been born as well: the international curator, constantly in flight to somewhere.

The phenomenon is not wholly new. Roaming European curators like Harald Szeemann and Germano Celant set the terms in the 1960s. But the art world’s transformation has transformed the curatorial field, and this week you needed go no further than a few places in Manhattan to sample its increasingly global sweep. One afternoon in a meeting room near Madison Square Park a young Australian curator who specializes in aboriginal art was sitting next to a Yale-trained painter-art-professor-curator from Tennessee, who sat across a table from fellow curators from London, Beijing, Mexico City, Madrid (by way of Brazil) and Berlin (though working in Albania). In previous months curators from 20 other countries, many of them far from contemporary art’s beaten paths — Sri Lanka, Latvia, Nigeria, Bulgaria — had been in the city for the same reason.

Each of the curators had paid $1,900 — and in some cases more, for airfare and lodging — to come to New York for a 10-day training and networking program recently established by Independent Curators International, which has been known through most of its three decades for helping turn curators’ ideas into traveling exhibitions that are rented by established museums.

But over the last three years this nonprofit organization, based in modest offices overlooking lower Broadway, has reinvented itself, and its profile has begun to rise along with the profile of the profession.

While not exactly lucrative — the most recent snapshot by the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the estimated mean salary of a curator, broadly defined, in the United States at $53,540 — the profession has grown rapidly in cachet. The word itself has seeped into the language, a little too deeply. (“Curate your Facebook profile like you curate your life,” a social media blog counseled recently.) And while the term “independent curator” is misleading — curators are usually attached to institutions or programs, if only temporarily — the example of itinerant curators who have become art-world celebrities in recent years, like Okwui Enwezor, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Neville Wakefield, has had an effect.

“This whole phenomenon is really a post-millennium thing,” said Kate Fowle, a longtime British curator who took over as the executive director of Independent Curators in 2009 after working for a year as the curator of a new art center in Beijing. “It’s a profession growing at a very, very fast rate.”

Although precise numbers are hard to come by, Ms. Fowle said that an indication of the field’s size worldwide was that in the two and a half years since her organization started a training program in 2010, 672 applicants from more than 62 countries — “many more than we ever expected,” she said — have vied for what has turned out to be about 150 spots in the program, chosen by a jury. Two sessions are held each year in New York, each with room for only about 14 participants. And the popularity of the program quickly led Independent Curators to begin collaborations with other groups to start parallel training sessions elsewhere: in Philadelphia, Mumbai, Beijing and southeast Brazil, at the privately financed contemporary art complex known as Inhotim.

In New York this week the latest participants, ranging in age from early 20s to early 50s, spent time with some of the most prominent professionals of the city’s museums and nonprofit spaces: Nancy Spector, the chief curator at the Guggenheim; Scott Rothkopf, from the Whitney; Laura Hoptman from the Museum of Modern Art; Matthew Higgs from White Columns. The subjects and discussions — from the aesthetic subtleties of plinths and sandpaper tape to ideas about organizing exhibitions against one’s own taste — were as expansive and amorphous as the job description.

Ms. Spector spoke about the difficulties of “grappling with the authority” of the Guggenheim’s architecture (“I sometimes think that I can’t install in a square room anymore”), but also, more extensively, about the dangers of the “helicopter model of international curating,” which too often leads to superficial understanding of cultures and their art — and to bad shows, she said.

Mr. Rothkopf, who was headed to another curators’ conference in Boston the next day, extolled the virtues — those he joked might seem almost “neocon” in an accelerating art world — of working closely with museum collections and with artists over long periods of time to create exhibitions “that shape an argument.”

“I want to have some voice as a curator,” he said, “not just as a kind of movie producer.”

An unofficial theme of the gathering was a desire among many curators to find ways to to define themselves against the juggernaut of the commercial art world while still being able to pay the bills.

“It’s very hard for people doing this in China to find the right kind of place, that doesn’t feel like just a part of the market,” said Su Wei, an independent critic and curator from Beijing. Meaghan Kent, who worked for Chelsea galleries for many years and recently started a nonprofit program, site95, that organizes shows in temporary urban spaces, said that many curators she knows are as creative about their livelihoods as they are in their work with art and artists.

“There are a lot of people out there who are artist-curator-bartender-whatevers, and they just put it all together to make it work,” she said. “They want to be able to have the freedom to make things up as they go.”

Emilia Galatis, a curator from Perth, Australia, who spent part of last year in the desert meeting aboriginal artists, said that visiting New York and talking to curators from around the world underscored for her how far off the radar of contemporary art aboriginal art remains, and how narrow the focus of the curatorial field can be despite its size.

“It’s really hard even to talk precisely about global curating when the world is still so diverse,” she said.

But Mr. Su said that the more he traveled as a curator, the less diverse the art world was coming to seem. “I was at another curators conference just before I came here, in Guangzhou, and all the things we were discussing there weren’t much different from what we’re discussing here today.”

 

By Catherine Eade

PUBLISHED: 07:49 EST, 18 July 2012 | UPDATED: 08:02 EST, 18 July 2012 

A Matisse painting stolen more than ten years agohas been recovered in a sting by FBI agents.

Yesterday a man and a woman tried to sell the1925 painting ‘Odalisque in Red Pants’to undercover federal agents posing as art collectors at the Loews Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida.

The masterpiece, worth nearly £2million, had been on display in the Sofia Imber Contemporary Art Museum in Caracas, Venezuela, but in 2003 it was discovered to be a fake.

 

Recovered: Odalisque in Pants, painted by Henri Matisse in 1925, had been missing for over 10 years when it was discovered the painting in the museum in Caracas, Venezuela was a forgery

The FBI have not yet named the pair, or revealed whether they are implicated in the theft of the painting, but its recovery is big news for those in the art world.

Agents from Interpol, the FBI and Venezuelan, British, Spanish and French police have been searching for the 1925Henri Matissepainting for nearly 10 years, but no one knew where it was.

‘Odalisque in Red Pants’had been on tour to other museums several years previously and at some point been switched with a forgery.

TheSofia Imber Contemporary Art Museum had bought the original painting in 1981, but how and when the painting was replaced with a replica, and by whom are questions still unanswered. 

 

Scene of the sting: The swanky Loews hotel on Ocean Drive, Florida, where undercover FBI agents posing as art collectors nabbed a man and a woman selling the Matisse painting that had been missing for over 10 years

The director of Caracas Museum, Rita Salvestrini, suggested that the switch many years ago had been done by an insider. She said in 2003, when the forgery was first discovered, ‘There had to be inside complicity. You can’t just make the switch freely inside the museum.’

 

There are clear differences between the original and the replica, which Salvestrini explained at a press conference: The fake has a dark shadow behind the dancer, while the original does not. In the lower right hand corner, the genuine painting has seven green stripes. The fake has six.

The Sofia Imber museum purchased the painting from the Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1981 for $400,000. It has been on display ever since, except for a brief loan for a Spanish exhibition in 1997. 

 

 

Spot the difference: The fake, right, has a dark shadow behind the dancer, while the original, left, does not. In the lower right hand corner of the genuine painting there are seven green stripes. The fake has six.

Portrait of the artist: Henri Matisse (1869 ¿ 1954) was a French artist known for his use of vibrant colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship

Caracas newspaper El Mundo speculated that the Matisse may have been swapped during the 1997 Spanish exhibition loan. Other clues suggest the painting may have been stolen in 2000.

In November 2002, Miami art collector Genaro Ambrosino heard the piece was up for sale and contacted Rita Salvestrini.

She pointed out that the painting was in the museum and was not for sale, but after experts examined it they declared it aforgery. 

Salvestrini has subsequently discovered that over the years ahandful of people in the art world had heard rumours that ‘Odalisque in Red Pants’ was being offered for sale.

Some gallery owners had been approached and been offered the painting but investigators have yet to name anyone thought to be complicit in the painting’s theft and recent reappearance.

‘The people who knew that the piece was being circulated around the world never informed us,’ said Salvestrini. ‘The thing is, it didn’t occur to anyone the piece could have been authentic.’

‘Odalisque in Red Pants’ is not the only painting by Henri Matisse to have been logged in the FBI’s  National Stolen Art File (NSAF) database of stolen art and cultural property:

In 2006 the French painter’s 1904 masterpieceLuxembourg Gardens was stolen from aRio de Janeiro museum during the carnival, along with paintings by Picasso, Dali and Monet.

A SERIES OF SUCCESSFUL STINGS: THE FBI ART CRIME TEAM EXPLAINED

The FBI’s rapid deployment Art Crime Team was created in 2004 and is composed of 14 special agents, each responsible for art and cultural property crime cases in specific geographic regions.

The Art Crime Team is coordinated through the FBI’s Art Theft Program in Washington, D.C. where agents receive specialized training in art and cultural property investigations.

Once trained they can assist in art-related investigations worldwide in alongside foreign law enforcement officials and FBI legal attaché offices. 

Stolen objects are submitted for entry to theNational Stolen Art File (NSAF) by law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad. When an object is recovered, it is removed from the database.

Since its inception, the Art Crime Team has recovered more than 2,650 items valued at over $150 million including:

Francisco de Goya’s 1778 painting Children With a Cart. The painting was stolen while being transported from the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio to the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Around 100 paintings stolen from a Florida family’s art collection in a fine art storage facility, including works by Picasso, Rothko, Matisse and others, were recovered from Chicago, New York and Tokyo.

Rembrandt’s Self Portrait (1630) was recovered in a sting operation in Copenhagen carried out in cooperation with ICE and law enforcement agencies in Sweden and Denmark. The FBI had also previously recovered Renoir’s The Young Parisian. Both paintings had been stolen from the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm in 2000.

700 pre-Colombian artifacts were recovered in Miami in a sting operation in coordination with the Ecuadorian authorities.

Three paintings by the German painter Heinrich Buerkel (1802-1869), stolen at the conclusion of World War II and consigned for sale at an auction house near Philadelphia in 2005.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2175275/Stolen-Matisse-painting-recovered-Undercover-FBI-agents-recover-stolen-Odalisque-Red-Pants-Florida-sting.html#ixzz214jMX0of

Damon Winter/The New York Times
Scenes from Christian Marclay's video installation at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center.

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: July 16, 2012

It’s a bad habit, I know — or maybe a professional vice as a film critic — but at some point during a movie I always check my watch. I also make sure to know, going in, just how long the movie will last. These may serve as reminders that whatever I’m seeing is only a movie.

Time is basic to the particular illusion that cinema creates. With the exception of an occasional stunt like “High Noon” or “Russian Ark,” a film’s running time will not correspond to its narrative span. Decades can pass within the space of a few hours; irrelevant stretches can be pruned away and crucial seconds slowed down. It did not take long for the early film pioneers to figure out that they could jump forward, backward or sideways. And it has always been obvious to spectators that the time up there on screen is not the same as the time down here in the seats. One reason to go to the movies is to escape the tyranny of the clock.

“The Clock,” an installation at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center until Aug. 1, at once celebrates those illusions and explodes them. Concocted by the Swiss video and sound artist Christian Marclay, “The Clock” is a beguiling dream of eternal cinema and also a startling wake-up call, the most literal-minded and also the most abstract use of the medium you can imagine. No need to check your watch or discreetly illuminate your cellphone: the clocks, watches and conversations on screen will tell you the time, with unfailing accuracy. And unlike any movie you have ever seen — even though it is composed of nearly every movie you have seen, and then some — this cinematic object has no beginning or end. At midnight the numbers turn over and it starts again.

Because of certain practical limitations, “The Clock,” first shown in New York at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 2011, will run continuously only from Friday morning to Sunday night; from Tuesday to Thursday, it can be viewed from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. After waiting in line, you are ushered into a darkened room where you can sit for as long as you like. And of course you will know exactly how long that is.

To say that you lose track of time would be absurd, since nearly every shot that does not show a timepiece includes one character asking another for the time. And as the top of a given hour approaches, your awareness becomes more acute: that’s when the bombs go off, the trains depart, the executions take place — all the stuff that has the people on screen anxiously glancing over their shoulders or plucking back the cuffs of their jackets.

Then, all of a sudden, it’s too late. On Sunday evening, when I parked myself in the comfortable, makeshift theater in the atrium, it was 8:10. Up on the screen, patrons at opera houses, theaters and concert halls were settling into their seats, their upturned faces a mirror of our own. There was Hannibal Lecter; there was Woody Allen. And here, as the minutes ticked by, were apologies for the late start. Here, too, were late-ish suppers (Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung tucking in, courtesy of Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love”) and early bedtimes (Scout Finch tucked in by Gregory Peck in a lovely scene from “To Kill a Mockingbird.”)

This scrambling of characters’ and performers’ names is a side effect of Mr. Marclay’s cleverly induced cinephile fever. As you watch his deftly shuffled scenes, you can’t help but engage — silently, please! — in a game of visual Name That Tune. This is both stimulating and somewhat enervating. With the wrong friends, a trip to “The Clock” could devolve into an endless film-nerd trivia night.

After a while, though, the compulsion to identify everything and everyone — Jimmy Stewart! Gloria Grahame! MacGyver! “American Gigolo”! — recedes. But a curious and far from unpleasant mixture of excitement and frustration is likely to remain for as long as you stay. Which may be longer than you anticipate, since “The Clock” generates a peculiar kind of suspense. Mr. Marclay’s sources are works of narrative, which means they turn on the expectation of what will happen next.

But what happens next is that you are thrown — or rather eased — into another movie. Film proceeds by means of phantom continuity. The imperceptible gaps between the frames and the smooth cuts between shots fool the eye and the mind into perceiving a steady flow of action. This is enabled by a syntax that after more than a century, we absorb intuitively: A man walks through a door and we will see him on the other side of it.

In “The Clock,” though, it is a different man and a different house, a different movie. The overlapping sound creates a new illusion: that all movies are contiguous, part of a boundaryless second reality that reflects our own even as it obeys its own spectral, magical logic.

There is Big Ben — the undisputable star of “The Clock,” as measured in screen time and sheer charisma. And here are his lesser cousins: on train stations and the walls of banks, in living rooms and next to beds whose inhabitants are usually just about to wake up. After 11 a.m. you witness a rash of late, panicked rising, sometimes in strange company. Those not in bed can be found at work or in church. The hour before noon is also a popular time for funerals, autopsies and preparations for murder. Even in the midday sun, there is no escaping death.

Except, perhaps, in “The Clock” itself, which stops time by surrendering completely and obsessively to its imperatives. Many of the people on screen are ghosts, rendered immortal — or at least undead — by the machinery of illusion. It is hard to walk out of Mr. Marclay’s loop because inside it you are protected from the dreadful inevitability of endings.

Of course you do have to leave — My God! Look at the time! — and re-enter the ordinary tick-tock of existence. The ghosts will keep going in your absence, though, and you can indulge in the fantasy that Mr. Marclay might be at work on a sequel called “The Calendar.”

 

By ANDREW JACOBS and CLARE PENNINGTON

Published: July 16, 2012

BEIJING — The frothy contemporary-art scene here has lost some of its ebullience in the three and a half months since a German art handler and a Chinese associate were detained on charges that they undervalued imported art to avoid customs duties.

Gallery openings are a bit more subdued, anxious art dealers have been keeping a low profile, and several wealthy collectors have been barred from leaving China while the investigation continues. Auction house giants like Sotheby’s and Christie’s have been asked to cooperate with the authorities in what has become a wide-ranging investigation.

“Lots of people here are not going into work, or they are only using junior staff at their offices and galleries,” said a Beijing gallery director who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the tension surrounding the issue. “They can’t arrest everybody, but everyone is still nervous.”

In the meantime Nils Jennrich and Lydia Chu, employees of the art-handling company Integrated Fine Art Solutions, languish in a Beijing jail on suspicion of smuggling, a crime normally associated with the illegal importation of drugs or arms. The charges carry a maximum of a life sentence.

Mr. Jennrich, 31, the company’s general manager and a German citizen, was taken away on the evening of March 30 during a raid of the business’s Beijing offices; hours later Ms. Chu, 29, its operations manager, was summoned for questioning. Mr. Jennrich’s family and colleagues have expressed concern for his health, saying he has been forced to share a cell with 11 others. During the first days of his detention, they added, he was interrogated for 36 hours straight, a violation of Chinese law.

“It’s a living nightmare,” said Mr. Jennrich’s fiancée, Jenny Dam, who said the couple had planned to marry in May.

No trial date has been set.

The detentions have put a spotlight on the mercurial Chinese legal system and raised questions among collectors and industry executives about the potential pitfalls of China’s fast-growing art and antiques market, which last year surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest, according to the European Fine Art Foundation. The crackdown, industry professionals have warned, could dissuade Chinese collectors from bringing home art purchased abroad.

Some have privately questioned the government’s motivation, noting that Integrated Fine Art Solutions has handled the work of Ai Weiwei, the maverick artist who has earned the government’s wrath for his criticism of the ruling Communist Party. Others have suggested that the case is aimed at taking down a foreign-owned company to clear the way for a well-connected domestic player that recently began lavishly investing in the art-handling business.

“China is supposed to be a lot more integrated with the world economy,” said Jonathan Schwartz, chief executive of Atelier 4, an art logistics company based in New York. “The decision to throw someone in jail tells you that China is not really playing by similar rules as the other large nations that are dealing with culture and transit.”

The Foreign Ministry has declined to comment on the case.

Speaking from Hong Kong, the chief executive of Integrated Fine Art Solutions, Torsten Hendricks, dismissed the allegations — that the accused tried to help buyers avoid $1.6 million in import duties — saying his company does not get involved in art valuation.

“We forward, store and install artwork, that is all,” said Mr. Hendricks, who was also questioned in Beijing by the authorities but was later allowed to leave the mainland. “Determination of value, the statement of this value, is not our responsibility.”

Legal experts said that art handling firms simply work with the values provided by their clients, but that Chinese law is murky on whether individuals employed by shipping companies can be held liable for undervaluing a work.

Nancy M. Murphy, a lawyer at the Beijing firm Jincheng, Tongda & Neal, who is advising Mr. Jennrich’s family, said she hoped that the authorities would take into consideration whether the accused personally profited from undervaluing the work in question.

Ms. Chu’s fiancé, Benoit Granier, said he found the accusations hard to fathom, given Ms. Chu’s modest life, including sharing an apartment with five others. “She’s just trying to find a way in her life,” he said.

Setting aside questions of Mr. Jennrich’s and Ms. Chu’s culpability, several industry experts say the practice of undervaluing art and antiques on Chinese customs forms is widespread. The International Convention of Exhibition and Fine Art Transporters, a trade organization, noted the problem last year in a newsletter and suggested that the practice was harmful to all involved. “There is no way around these regulations without breaking the law,” it wrote.

In China imported art is often levied with duties that can reach 35 percent of an object’s value. Many industry veterans complain of a customs process that is notoriously onerous.

International art experts acknowledge the difficulty of valuing contemporary art, noting that a wild jump in price at auction after a piece passes through customs does not necessarily suggest undervaluing at the border.

Ms. Murphy, the lawyer, said it took an experienced appraiser to know the difference between fraud and the vagaries of a white-hot art market.

She suggested that the arrests were aimed at sending a message to bigger players in the international art scene. “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey,” as she put it.

The crackdown has touched other companies and individuals. Officials have detained three Chinese citizens, including the editor of an art magazine and the chairman of an art investment company. A Chinese transport company, Noah Fine Art Shipping Agency, was forced to turn over a list of its clients, according to The Oriental Morning Post.

Given how lucrative the art market has become, Chinese authorities have a keen interest in reducing tax dodging. Last year China accounted for 41 percent of worldwide auction revenues and about 30 percent of the overall art and antiques market, according to artprice.com and the European Fine Art Foundation.

Karen Sanig, the head of art law at Mishcon de Reya, a firm based in London, said that customs authorities around the world often impose fines after accusations of undervaluing art but that they rarely use their full powers to detain suspects. “It is unusual for two agents from a shipping firm to be arrested,” she said.

Integrated Fine Art Solutions is a relatively small player in art shipping but it has high-profile clients, including the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art — one of China’s best-known museums — and it handles major international art fairs in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

A number of art professionals, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of drawing unwanted attention from the authorities, have suggested that the government may simply be trying to remove the competition as it prepares to enter the lucrative art-handling business.

Two weeks before the detentions, the state-owned Beijing Gehua Cultural Development Group presided over the groundbreaking for a free-trade zone in the capital that will include an advanced art-handling warehouse. According to the state news media, Gehua is investing $785 million in the venture.

There is little precedent for the case against Ms. Chu and Mr. Jennrich, although if the recent prosecution of a Belgian Sinologist accused of smuggling an ancient sarcophagus out of China is any indication, the punishment may be stiff. In 2008 the Belgian, Kurt de Raedemaeker, was convicted of illegally exporting the relic, despite his insistence that he had obtained the necessary government permits.

He received a life sentence, but after spending some time in prison he was allowed to serve his sentence in a Beijing hotel. The former Belgian ambassador, citing Mr. de Raedemaeker’s heart problems, called the punishment a “slow death sentence.” Mr. Raedemaeker, who was 48, died in March in his hotel room.

 

By Kelly Crow
July 13, 2012, 5:55 p.m. ET

Retired plastics manufacturer and Chicagoan Stefan Edlis has learned to say no when expanding his collection of modern and contemporary art. Size matters, for starters: If an artwork he admires can't fit under the 9-foot ceiling of his apartment, he says no. If he likes an artwork but already owns a better example by the same artist, he walks away. He won't take a work home unless he and his wife, Gael Neeson, are ready to live with it now. Under his rules, he's collected such masters as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Cy Twombly. Five years ago, Mr. Edlis, now 87, famously sold one of his Andy Warhols, "Turquoise Marilyn," to hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen for $80 million. On the heels of Mr. Edlis's recent $10 million gift to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, where he sits on the board, he agreed to discuss his collection. Below, an edited transcript.

"I grew up in Vienna. My parents had zero interest in visual art—they loved music—and my sister wrote about Nordic sagas, so nobody really noticed when I started collecting stamps. I was 15 when we came to the U.S. in 1941. I didn't set out to be a collector, but in my early 20s I saw this article in Fortune about Pablo Picasso, and I cut out all the images in it and put them on my wall.

When I started buying art in the 1970s, my greatest school was actually the auction houses. Abstract Expressionism was still the thing back then, but I preferred Pop. Still do. In our bedroom, all the works are by Roy Lichtenstein. He's like a breath of fresh air to me.

Jeremy Lawson
Collector Stefan Edlis and his wife, Gael Neeson.

We also have six pieces by conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan, including this untitled sculpture of a donkey sitting on its haunches like a dog. It's a nod to Goya's donkey etchings. Is Cattelan a jokester? Is he a fraud? I like asking those questions.

I'd like to buy more work by Katharina Fritsch: she makes these gigantic black sculptures of rats—but she does all her own work, so she's got a slow output. Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have the right formula; they have assistants to help them out. Hollywood producers don't act in their own movies, after all. We have an early 1990s shelf of medical instruments by Damien that I really like. Everything he deals with explores life and death. Will he continue to do good work? Doesn't matter; his artistic importance is already settled.

The most recent artist I've added is Ugo Rondinone. I saw his white waxy trees at the Venice Biennale in 2007. He likes to play with light and weight. Overall, though, I try to stay skeptical: A hedge-fund guy once told me his analysts can really only track 35 stocks at a time, so I try to stick to 35 artists. Sometimes I edge up to 40."

A version of this article appeared July 14, 2012, on page C14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Strict Rules to Buy Rule-Breaking Art.

LONDON — When the Tate Modern opened its sleek glass doors in May 2000, its directors and curators expected around two million people in the first year — an ambitious number for a contemporary art museum.

Five million came.

To date, more than 56 million visitors have passed through the massive industrial spaces of the Tate Modern, transformed by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron from a disused power station into a cultural center that has altered the nature and expectation of the museum-going experience, making it as much a tourist attraction as an art destination.

On Wednesday, the Tate Modern will open a new set of doors. They lead off the Turbine Hall into three enormous underground concrete cylinders, former oil tanks that once powered the refinery and held a million gallons of the viscous black gold. Known as the Tanks, they will become the first exhibition spaces in a major museum permanently dedicated to exhibiting performance, installation and experimental film.

The Tanks’ opening, heralded by a 15-week festival of performance and installation art that is part of the London 2012 festival, is phase one of a larger extension that should be completed by 2016. Also by Mr. Herzog and Mr. de Meuron, it will include what Mr. Herzog described in a telephone interview as “a pyramidal shaped building” set on top of the tanks, adding further education and gallery spaces.

The Tanks, said Mr. Herzog, are something quite different.

“They have something archaeological about them; it’s like discovering something in nature and you step aside and look at it, recognize its beauty,” he said. “We felt very aware that this aspect of a found space had a real quality for performing arts. We wanted them to look like they had always been like that, not as if they were “architecture,” so our goal was simply to find the least intrusive way to treat them that would preserve their rawness.”

That rawness was important, as an alternative setting for the museum to show and experience art, said Chris Dercon, the director of the Tate Modern.

“We need new, dark spaces for the kind of art that came into being in the 60s,” he said. “Artworks involving projection, performance, participatory events where the spectator is part of the art. Every big museum has a black box theater, but very few have these heterogenous spaces, where anything could happen.”

Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate Museums, said the Tate had been aware of the Tanks’ potential from the outset.

“When we first went into them in the mid-90s, we saw the incredible possibilities of those raw spaces, which were closer to the kind of environments that artists were actually working in than the white cube space of the traditional gallery. What developed later was a realization that they should be used for performance.”

That realization speaks of one of the major museum currents over the last decade: the growing acceptance of performance art and experimental film work as valid elements of contemporary art-making rather than fringe activities.

“A few years ago performance art was seen as marginal,” Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times in a 2007 review of Performa 07, a biennial performance festival started two years earlier by RoseLee Goldberg, who wrote a seminal early history of the form in 1979. “Dealers couldn’t sell it,” Mr. Cotter continued, “museums couldn’t show it; critics didn’t know what to say. It was some hippie-dippie remnant of the 1960s and ’70s, when art was ‘experimental,’ which meant you couldn’t prove it was bad or good.”

By 2010, when the Museum of Modern Art presented a four-decade survey, “The Artist is Present,” of Marina Abramovic’s work, there was no longer any doubt that there was a broad public ready to accept the idea of crossover, non-genre specific live art — and even more people were prepared to be fascinated by the charismatic Ms. Abramovic. During the show’s three-month run, the artist sat every day, unmoving, for seven hours, in the atrium of the museum as a thronging public queued to sit opposite her in silence.

“I think there is a reason why we all want to have encounters with people in the flesh at a time when we have an increasingly disembodied relationship with the world through digital media,” said Charlotte Higgins, the chief arts writer of The Guardian newspaper. “And surely artists’ increasing attraction to performance is a backlash against the sheer commodification of art that has happened over the last decade. The idea of contemporary art as part of the luxury goods market is not an appealing idea, especially in light of the financial chaos that we are living with.”

There is also the fact that artists themselves have become increasingly comfortable, over the last decade, with a blurring of disciplinary line. The trend has been clear to anyone involved in dance, which has increasingly found its way into museums over the last few years, and seen choreographers like William Forsythe, Trisha Brown, Jérôme Bel and Boris Charmatz straddle the lines between theatrical performance and installation, conceptual art and participatory experience.

“I think younger audiences are much more open to crossover than was the case 25 years ago,” said Mr. Serota, the museum director. “The growth of digital products, Internet and e-mail, interactivity and blogs have stimulated an appetite for dialogue and discussion, and an engagement with performance. And artists are spending more time in conversation with peers in other areas because they have more access to the work.”

The Tate Modern itself, and its mega-scale Turbine Hall installations, is quite possibly another element in the equation. Whether visitors basked in the virtual warmth of Olafur Eliasson’s fake sun in his “Weather Project,” or laid themselves upon Ai Weiwei’s field of 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds (until the dust stirred up was decreed a health hazard), the collective, interactive experience of these artworks has generated its own momentum and a new set of norms for the museum-going experience.

When performance art first emerged as a major artistic current in the 1960s and 1970s, on the other hand, its very nature seemed antithetical to incorporation by an institution — partly because the artist’s medium was largely his or her own body, partly because the idea of a time-based experience meant that the act couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be reproduced.

“People have had this idea that performance art is all about physical endurance, pain, nudity,” said Ms. Goldberg in a telephone interview from New York. “And it was that in the 1960s and 70s, when it was about breaking social rules and reflecting social issues. But one of the reasons I created Performa was to commission new pieces and introduce a new idea of what performance art could be. Contrary to what people often think, it’s actually a very accessible form. Bodies have a narrative, everyone has a comment.”

For the duration of the festival, which runs until Oct. 28, two of the tanks (the third is used for offices) will be given over to performance work by more than 20 artists, including a reworking of the choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s 1982 “Fase”; a three-week residency by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera; an examination of ground-breaking figures in experimental film; and, in the space known as the East Tank, a commission from the Korean performance artist Sung Hwan Kim.

In an adjacent space, known as the Transformer Galleries, the museum will show Lis Rhodes’s “Light Music 1975” and a recent acquisition; Suzanne Lacy’s “Crystal Quilt 1987,” a film of 430 women over the age of 60 that the artist describes in an essay for the museum catalogue as “a tableau vivant,” raising questions about the perceptions of older women.

The desire to preserve a history of performance work and incorporate it into an institutional memory isn’t without its opponents.

“There’s never a way that you could repeat the original thing; it just can’t be done,” said Joan Jonas, an important 1960s figure in conceptual and video art, in a 2010 interview.

“No one would say that a ballet performed in the 1920s shouldn’t be revived,” said Mr. Serota, in response to these observations. “Some of the most exciting artistic practice of the last few decades has been in performance and installation work, but it has been available to relatively few. The great thing now is that we have the chance to both recover the past, and the space to create something new.”

 

But his giving days are largely over, he said, pre-empted by guidelines that most museums now follow on what objects they can accept.

“They just won’t take them — can’t take them,” Mr. Dewey said.

Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, is in a similar bind. An antiquities collector, he is eager to sell an Egyptian sarcophagus he bought from Sotheby’s in the early 1990s. But he is stymied, he said, because auction houses are applying tighter policies to the items they accept for consignment.

“I can’t get proof of when it came out of Egypt,” Mr. Dershowitz said.

Across the country measures taken to curb the trade in looted artifacts are making it more difficult for collectors of antiquities to donate, or sell, the cultural treasures that fill their homes, display cases and storage units.

Museums typically no longer want artifacts that do not have a documented history stretching back past 1970, a date set by the Association of Art Museum Directors, whose guidelines most institutions have adopted. Drawn up in 2008, the rules have been applauded by countries seeking to recover their artifacts and by archaeologists looking to study objects in their natural settings.

But the sweeping shift in attitudes has left collectors stuck with items they say they purchased in good faith many years ago from reputable dealers. One study found that as many as 100,000 privately owned ancient Greek, Roman and related Classical objects in the United States would be unable to pass muster with most museums.

“Objects are guilty until proven innocent,” said James J. Lally, a Manhattan dealer in Chinese art and antiquities.

Collectors and their advocates predict that museums, cultural scholarship and the items themselves will suffer as important gifts are disallowed. Kate Fitz Gibbon, a lawyer with the Cultural Policy Research Institute, warned at a March forum that museums, long reliant on the generosity of collectors, may come to regard the guidelines as a “self-administered slow poison.” “This may sound like an exaggeration,” she said. “But if we continue on this path, there may not be a next generation of collectors, donors and patrons of ancient art, not in the United States of America anyway.” There are many on the other side of the question who view Ms. Fitz Gibbon’s perspective as hyperbolic.

“Antiquities collecting destroys far more than it saves,” said Ricardo J. Elia, an archaeology professor at Boston University who specializes in the global art market. “Looting is driven by the art market, by supply and demand.”

For centuries collectors have helped define artistic taste, and their collections, whether assembled for vanity, beauty, profit or some combination thereof, have been the backbone of museums. But the antiquities trade begins, at its source, with an act of appropriation: the removal of artifacts from a native site to one where, in the case of museums, they can be more accessible to scholars and the public.

Whatever air of nobility once attached to that effort has dissipated recently as antiquities collectors are increasingly depicted as the beneficiaries of a villainous trade.

Collectors and their advocates insist the depiction is unfair, particularly when it recasts acquisitions made decades ago, when cultural sensibilities were different, as the illicit booty of indifferent rascals.

“Even objects that entirely lack history are also not necessarily smuggled or looted,” said William G. Pearlstein, a New York lawyer who advises collectors and dealers in the antiquities trade. “Many owners simply failed to keep records of their objects, which they treated like other household possessions.”

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