May 29, 2012, 1:41 pm

By CAROL VOGEL

The Tate in London has received a gift of nine artworks by major 20th-century British artists, including a David Hockney, a Lucian Freud and a Rachel Whiteread.

The banker and philanthropist Ian Stoutzker and his wife, Mercedes, of Salzburg, Austria, who have been generous supporters of the arts in Britain, selected the artworks from their holdings because they fill gaps in the Tate’s collection, the couple said.

“The gift was an initiative from the Stoutzkers,’’ Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, said at a news conference on Tuesday. “They don’t receive any tax benefit from this gift but in the current climate they were very keen to make it public because they wanted to encourage others to give works to the national collection.’’

The works will go on display together at Tate Britain in October.

May 22, 2012, 4:47 PM
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has received a bonanza from one of its longtime trustees, according to a report in The Boston Globe.

Saundra Lane has given the museum 6,000 photographs, 100 works-on-paper and 25 paintings. Included in the donation is the entire photographic estate of Charles Sheeler, which amounts to some 2,500 photographs, along with the same number of images by Edward Weston. There are also 500 photographs by Ansel Adams.

The works-on-paper are primarily by American masters, including 20 drawings and watercolors by Arthur Dove, 20 by Sheeler and seven by Stuart Davis.

The gift comes more than 20 years after Ms. Lane and her husband, William, who died in 1995, gave the institution 90 American paintings and works-on-paper by artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley and Jacob Lawrence. Many of these canvases hang in galleries named after the couple in the museum’s American wing.

Cloud City, this summer’s commission for the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: May 25, 2012

Participatory art is all the rage these days, an ever-expanding category and, increasingly, a means for museums to signal their hipness to the younger, broader audiences they so desperately want to attract. Nothing says accessible like something you interact with physically.

Such art comes in many guises. It can range from relatively domestic tasks, like cooking a meal, to intricate trompe l’oeil environments that replicate or exaggerate huge chunks of reality. Somewhere in between are essentially abstract structures that sometimes involve the use of lights or mirrors, or sometimes jungle-gym-like arrangements that you navigate one way or another, walking under or through, or climbing over, perhaps pausing to sit or lie down.

Often borrowing from science, design or architecture, they might be described as fun-house formalism. It’s not all bad, but a lot of it is fairly mindless.

You could probably trace its origins partly to Richard Serra’s disorienting torqued ellipses of steel of the ’90s. Among the most extreme and certainly the least time-consuming recent iterations are Carsten Höller’s slide-through tubes. One of the most successful is Anish Kapoor’s giant, extravagantly reflective, biomorphic stainless-steel sculpture, nicknamed “The Bean,” in Millennium Park in Chicago.

Tomás Saraceno’s “Cloud City” is a particularly prominent example of fun-house formalism by virtue of its being the latest summertime commission for the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It consists of a 28-foot-high aggregate of 16 interconnected 12- and 14-sided polyhedrons the size of small rooms that are made of polished steel and clear plexiglass. By being reflective or see-through, they greatly complicate and even discombobulate the experience of the structure and everything around it.

The Met is calling the piece site-specific, and it certainly benefits from having great views to reflect, but really it is just a big, climbable piece of plop art, amenable to most any rooftop or plaza. Clearly the museum was hoping to repeat the triumph of Mike and Doug Starn’s “Big Bambú,” a looming, walk-on, bamboo-and-bungee-cord scaffoldinglike structure that enveloped the roof two summers ago like an architectural growth.

The Saraceno lacks such an organic feel, even though it resembles an enlarged model of molecules or a cluster of shiny if quite heavy soap bubbles. Walk up and through it (15 visitors at a time, with timed tickets), and it becomes adamantly Piranesian. You find yourself sorting through the elaborate, often dizzying, interpenetrating reflections of its structure, the sky, the Met, the city, Central Park. Up becomes down; the towers and facades of Central Park West seem to change places with Fifth Avenue’s.

You see yourself, or your fellow visitors, everywhere. Sometimes the modules close in on you, like little boat cabins; sometimes they resemble open cockpits, like the one Stuart Little strapped to the back of his trusty pigeon.

It is fun up to a point, like a perception-testing science experiment or a bit of walk-in Cubism expanded to the scale of an architectural folly, but it’s not very original. Futuristic architectural complexity has been better conjured by a host of other artists, including Franz Ackermann and Sarah Sze. Olafur Eliasson has orchestrated far more effective perception-twisting, walk-in environments.

But from certain points, especially in a prowlike dead-end module near the top, you’ll also enjoy some of the best views of Central Park’s green ocean of treetops ever, or at least since “Big Bambú.” They come as an immense, calming relief from the forced and busy artifice of the piece.

Richard Perry/The New York Times
Tomás Saraceno's sculpture is open to the public on the roof of the Met.

Mr. Saraceno, 39, who was born in Argentina and lives in Frankfurt, has an exhibition career barely a decade long, and a résumé that bristles with interdisciplinary collaborations. Perhaps with reason, he is widely admired as a visionary. On paper, at least, much of his work optimistically predicts a future when people will live above the earth in mutating, cloudlike cities, free of the tensions of nationalism.

In exhibitions, he often gives viewers a further taste of this vision with a variety of immense, ingeniously engineered, suspended spheres. Made of clear plastic, anchored by black elastic cords or flexible geodesic networks of cables, they can often be (gingerly) inhabited — walked through, sat in or lain on. They look astounding, hovering above the big halls that museums increasingly design to house such spectacles, and suggest a playful generosity of spirit, but they also resemble big, pillowy, transparent trampolines.

Even so, his best efforts may fit more easily into the realm of scientific or technical feats than into that of art. In 2010, with the help of a sizable team of scientists, specialized photographers and computer programmers, he built “14 Billions,” supposedly the first three-dimensional model of a black widow spider’s web — a greatly enlarged, walk-in version made with black elastic cord that was exhibited in Sweden and Britain. In photographs it looks for all the world like a crazed piece of fiber art; learning its inspiration makes it seem more appropriate to a natural history museum.

The previous year Mr. Saraceno filled the premier gallery of the 2009 Venice Biennale with an immersive installation of lacy, tethered polygonal orbs of black elastic that suggested transparent brains, exploding stars and dandelion puffballs. Its very title — “Galaxy Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web” — pinpoints the seamless slide from macro- to microcosmic that characterizes many of Mr. Saraceno’s efforts. It also evokes the view among some physicists that the structures of spider webs hold clues to the origins of the universe, further evidence of the interdisciplinary usefulness of his pieces.

It can be interesting to read about Mr. Saraceno’s art, especially the incredible effort involved in realizing it, but as you read quotations from his highly knowledgeable, skilled, enthusiastic collaborators, the works also assume a too-big-to-fail aspect. Too many people enjoy working on, bouncing on and navigating these things. They must be good.

But the cloud of admiring discussion is largely tangential to the congenial, rather ordinary structure on the Met’s roof, which is there to be considered as a work of environmental sculpture, not a hypothesis about the future or the nature of the universe.

Buzzy, kaleidoscopic effects aside, “Cloud City” is weak in the here and now: slightly creaky, devoid of any feeling for materials or sense of craft. To be fair, it departs from  Mr. Saraceno’s prevailing use of pliable plastic and the cocoonlike softness this material permits; he doesn’t seem as adept, yet, with rigidity and metal.

He has tried to soften the brittleness of “Cloud City” and to complicate its optics by stringing some of the modules with black-cord polygons similar to those that figured in his Venice piece. But these seem little more than decorative afterthoughts, Darth Vader versions of the big white snowflake that hangs every Christmas above Fifth Avenue and 57th Street.

The recurring mantra about Mr. Saraceno’s work is that it combines architecture, art and science. It does, but unequally: Art is the loser, the part he has thought through and connected to the least.

The natural world is implicitly, elaborately, endlessly interesting as is, without one iota of human intervention. Nature and the built environment affect and shape everyday life in myriad, unavoidable ways. His work underscores these truisms: nature as an endless source of inspiration, human need as a constant prod to innovation. But on the roof of the Met, at least, it largely skirts the challenges of transformation and originality that might make it of more lasting interest as art.

“Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City” is on view through Nov. 4 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.

 

• By KIMBERLY CHOU

  May 25, 2012, 8:36 p.m. ET

(Philip Montgomery for The Wall Street Journal

Ellsworth Kelly with two of his plant drawings earlier this week in New York. 'Shape and color are my two strong things,' he says.

Throughout his career, American abstract painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly—famed for panels of saturated color, grids of varying shades like organized confetti and shapes layered upon each other—has nurtured a second occupation: closely observed drawings of plants.

On June 5, 74 of these works—six decades' worth—will go on view at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I've got to draw," Mr. Kelly said. "And drawing for me is the beginning of everything."

"Plant Drawings" includes his first of the genre, made in Boston and Paris in the late 1940s, as well as others made as recently as last year in upstate New York. Mr. Kelly describes his earliest attempts as "a little brutal," and his later work, refined to contour lines and "voluptuous" shapes, as more sophisticated. "When I finish, when I compare it to what I looked at, it's never as good. Nature wins," he said. "But now, 40 years, 30 years, 20 years later, I see that I was pretty good."

Mr. Kelly, 89 years old this month, spoke to The Wall Street Journal this week. Below, an edited transcript.

Wall Street Journal: When did you begin to draw plants?

Ellsworth Kelly: "Ailanthus" [1948] is the first plant drawing that I did, in Boston. Later on you'll see a drawing of just the branch that I made, 40 years later. "Hyacinth" [1949] was the first one I did when I was in Paris. It was cold and the hotels were not very well heated, so I bought a flower in the flower market and brought it into the hotel room to think about spring.

In Paris, I continued drawing constantly, people, and then when I got back to New York, I drew plants, rather. In my studio down in Coenties Slip, I had a loft with a roof. I planted sunflowers and all kinds of things on the roof. From then on, in the summers, I would continue to draw.

“'Drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.'”

Why and how do you draw?

My ideas come, and I draw. And I draw because I have to note down my ideas. Not so much in the plant drawings. I have to see my plants.

© Ellsworth Kelly/Metropolitan Museum of Art

Detail of 'Apples,' by Ellsworth Kelly

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation. And I think artists all work that way really. I'm not special. But I like plants, and I don't think anyone else draws like this, today. I'm special in that way.

How do the plant drawings speak to your relationship to shapes?

The negative space is like one of my shapes, and when you look at a drawing of mine you can call off the number [of shapes]. Matisse draws what I call the essence of the plants. He leaves a shape open. He'll do a leaf and not close it. Everybody used to say, oh, I got it all from Matisse, and I said, "Not really."

[Mine] is a different kind of spirituality. It's more a portrait of a plant. I do the contours, and I make space by overlapping. I don't want to put shading in because they're about drawing, not about shading.

Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.

Write to Kimberly Chou at kimberly.chou@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 26, 2012, on page C20 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: An Abstract Master Puts On a Plant Show.

May 23, 2012, 3:04 p.m. ET

By ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Tom Crane

The Barnes Foundation’s new Philadelphia campus.

Philadelphia

The richness and the eccentricity of the Barnes Collection is legendary; its unequaled concentration of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings far exceeds the number in any major art museum. (Imagine, if you can, 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 46 Picassos, 59 Matisses and 18 Rousseaus.) Installed in a dense mix of Asian, African and American Indian art and artifacts, with decorative ironwork scattered among the iconic images, it defies all rational curatorial practice. For Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951), the physician who devoted a fortune made from a drug of his own invention, Argyrol, to the creation of this extraordinary collection, every item expressed his obsessively personal vision and idiosyncratic ideas about art.

The collection is owned by the Barnes Foundation, established in 1922 under a legal arrangement called an indenture of trust, with the specific stipulation that everything was always to remain exactly as it was in Dr. Barnes’s lifetime. It has been housed in a small building in the Philadelphia suburb of Merion, Pa., commissioned by Dr. Barnes from the distinguished American classicist Paul Cret. The burlap-covered walls of the domestically scaled interiors were crowded with the unconventional groupings he called “ensembles,” meant to provide “teaching moments” about line, color and space to the students of the art school that was part of the foundation. He would wander between his home and the galleries at night, rearranging the unorthodox hangings. Access was limited and visibility was poor, but once you had been there you never forgot it. The Barnes’s quirky magnificence is increasingly rare in today’s corporatized and homogenized art world.

A sampling of some of his collection shown at the Philadelphia Academy in the 1920s was met with outrage and derision. Dr. Barnes retaliated by refusing entry to any member of the Philadelphia establishment, an embittered payback that he nurtured for the rest of his life. When he died in 1951, his will reconfirmed the terms of the indenture, including the stipulation that nothing could ever be moved or changed, to protect his legacy, but also to foreclose any attempt by the Philadelphia art establishment to take over the collection, no longer underappreciated and now enormously valuable.

Michael Moran/OTTO

An exterior detail of the new building.

The ensuing years brought problems of access, administration, deferred maintenance, and disputes and lawsuits with the local community. Mismanagement and the depletion of the endowment eventually led to insolvency and the need for large infusions of cash. A consortium of Philadelphia art institutions and philanthropists, all of whom Dr. Barnes detested, came up with the funds, but with the nonnegotiable provision that the collection had to be moved to Philadelphia. A petition to make the move was granted by the court as a permissible modification of the terms of the indenture. The enemy took over.

A new, vastly enlarged complex that contains the Barnes Collection and expanded administrative, educational and social facilities has just been completed on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, close to the Rodin Museum and not far from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Critics have denounced the relocation as a steal and a violation; defenders point to increased public access, enhanced programs and additional amenities. There were some conscientious objectors who suggested that the job should be turned down on principle. When Tod Williams and Billie Tsien of New York won the commission through a competition held by the Barnes Foundation, they even received the architectural equivalent of hate mail. They faced a formidable challenge: The one part of the indenture that could not be broken was the prohibition of change—the shapes and sizes of the galleries and the hanging arrangements must all remain the same. The architects had to create a replica that could pass for the real thing.

I take history and authenticity seriously. I have never disguised my defense of originals over copies, or my distaste for the Disneyfication of reality or the more genteel “authentic reproduction,” an oxymoron that devalues the creative act by glossing the knockoff with a false veneer of respectability, because a faux is a fake is a phony, by any other name. And I have been one of the most ardent defenders of the small, personal museum that you remember with particular affection, as opposed to the awe inspired by the increasingly affectless grandeur of our enormous arts institutions that expand relentlessly as their price of admission rises.

So how does it feel to have one’s core beliefs turned upside down? The “new” Barnes that contains the “old” Barnes shouldn’t work, but it does. It should be inauthentic, but it’s not. It has changed, but it is unchanged. The architects have succeeded in retaining its identity and integrity without resorting to a slavishly literal reproduction. This is a beautiful building that does not compromise its contemporary convictions or upstage the treasure inside. And it isn’t alchemy. It’s architecture.

The solution goes far toward resolving the problem of the accommodation of the auxiliary functions of today’s museums that increasingly dominate and destroy the art experience. The genius is in the plan. Architecture is not just buildings, but the way in which they are put together to direct our progress through a calculated sequence of spaces, and how those relationships control our movement and mood. In this case, they lead us, physically and emotionally, away from the distraction of the social entertainments and support services to the Barnes itself.

More

Saving Dr. Barnes’s Vision

Two long, rectangular, parallel buildings are joined by a soaring interior court, surmounted by a lightbox that filters daylight through a series of baffles into the court as a softly diffused glow, supplanted by artificial light at night. The entry building has the support facilities; the facing building, across the court, contains the collection. At no point do the two buildings touch. Their only connection is through the court, which is also the only way to get to the collection and serves as barrier, buffer and lounge.

The carefully choreographed procession begins with an approach through an allée of trees flanked by long, flat pools of water in a parklike setting designed by landscape architect Laurie Olin. It takes you to a tall slit in the outermost building, where an offset door makes you turn right into an entry area, avoiding an immediate, direct full view of the interior. You turn again to face the serene void of the court, and only then do you see the entrance doors of the Barnes Collection, in the second long building, directly parallel, across the way.

Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien practice a kinder, gentler modernism, with an enormous sensitivity to materials and textures, and a particular affinity for crafts. They responded immediately to the love of pattern, color and craft that informed all of Dr. Barnes’s acquisitions. Because they knew that the long, flat expanses of wall would lack Cret’s enriching classical ornament, they did not go to the original quarries for the closest match. A warmer, more varied Negev stone is divided into elegantly proportioned sections mounted on stainless steel with slender bronze fins for accents. Delicate reveals for window setbacks add surface interest.

Behind its entrance doors, the “new” Barnes is an uncorrupted, enhanced experience. The paintings are rehung in their original configurations, in rooms of the same size and proportions, the walls covered in the same burlap, windows facing south, as at Merion. If you look closely, you will see many small, subtle details that keep the building from being a lifeless, born-dead replica. Every aspect of the design followed intensive study of the original architecture and the collection—for relevance, not reproduction.

There were infinite drawings and models of the profiles of door frames and ceiling moldings; the simplified woodwork departs from classical formulas to incorporate motifs from Dr. Barnes’s interest in native crafts and cultures. There are hanging fixtures, as at Merion, carefully updated. Fabrics are inspired by Dr. Barnes’s African textiles. Full daylight comes through the windows, and gently raised, coved ceilings that make the galleries feel much more spacious have concealed illumination by Fisher Marantz Stone for a balance of natural and artificial light that reveals the glory of the paintings. The second-floor balcony has been enlarged to permit a better view of Matisse’s spectacular “La Danse,” and his “Joy of Life,” once in a stairwell, has been given its own space. Brooklynites mourning the loss of their Coney Island boardwalk to a concrete replacement will find it in the handsomely recycled wood of the court floor.

The only obvious intervention, the insertion of a classroom and an interior garden between the galleries at either end, may disturb some, but they relieve the aesthetic overload without disturbing the illusion or the flow.

I have been waiting a long time for a building like this. It’s not about flashy starchitect bling, high-tech tricks, minimalist sensory deprivation or narcissistic egos. The Barnes is all about the Barnes. This is what architecture does, when it does it right.

Ms. Huxtable is the Journal’s architecture critic.

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By ERIC GIBSON

One of the longest and bitterest

Michael Moran/OTTO

The new museum faithfully re-creates the experience of the Barnes’s original installation.

Philadelphia

One of the longest and bitterest battles the art world has ever seen—the fight over the future of Philadelphia’s storied Barnes Foundation collection—has, for now, anyway, come to an end with the opening of the superb new facility on Benjamin Franklin Parkway. It is a win for both advocates and opponents of the move from the foundation’s original location in suburban Merion.

Long in financial peril thanks to a sorry, two-decade-long record of mismanagement, the institution is at last on a sound footing. At the same time, the integrity of Albert C. Barnes’s vision has been preserved. The new museum faithfully re-creates the experience of the original installation and makes Dr. Barnes himself present as never before.

Its successful outcome notwithstanding, this was a battle that needed to be joined. For at stake was the future of a one-of-a-kind collection and an important episode in the history of American taste, a subject the general public knows too little about.

For Dr. Barnes was a collector like no other, a man whose contributions to the art life of this country were unprecedented in his time and have been unmatched since. Unlike today’s Fashion-Victim Medicis, he didn’t chase after the latest hot thing but bought what moved him; didn’t regard art collecting as a means of social advancement but as an all-absorbing intellectual and spiritual quest; built a permanent home for his collection as an educational institution, not as a monument to himself.

Central to this didactic purpose were the installations, the so-called “ensembles,” nonchronological groupings of objects that mixed media, periods and styles, cultures, fine and decorative arts. Dr. Barnes’s aim was twofold: The point of the ensembles was to show the continuity of all art. In particular, Dr. Barnes wanted to show that modern artists were indebted to, rather than dismissive of, the traditions of the past. And in his teachings and writings, Dr. Barnes drew on his scientific background (as well as the writings of Henry James, John Dewey and George Santayana) to bring a new rigor to the criticism of art, replacing approaches he found intellectually flabby or simply beside the point. He emphasized the formal properties of painting—line, color, space and the like. Today his method might seem rather narrow. But it still has value, particularly as a way into a painting for someone with no prior knowledge—Dr. Barnes’s intended audience. And it’s a welcome antidote to the theory-drenched obscurantism that passes for art criticism today.

In the galleries, Dr. Barnes’s curatorial outlook made for some pretty strange artistic bedfellows. One typically head-snapping juxtaposition places a proto-Cubist Picasso painting of a head near a 16th-century French wood sculpture of the crucified Christ—and those are just two objects among more than two dozen on that wall. The total effect of a single room and certainly of a whole visit could be both confusing and exhilarating. Indeed, one might speak of the Four Stages of the Barnes Experience: Bewilderment, Curiosity, Insight, Appreciation. Whether or not they ultimately “got” the Barnes, all visitors who entered left knowing they had partaken of an art experience of unparalleled richness and intensity. Hence the protracted uproar over the proposed move and earlier rescue plans going back some 20 years. People who know and love the Barnes felt something precious and irreplaceable was in danger of being lost.

The more so because the Barnes’s future too often seemed to be hostage to other agendas. For example, it isn’t entirely clear if the idea hatched in 2002 to move the Barnes downtown happened because it really was thought to be the only way to save the financially beleaguered institution, or because relocation would help then-Gov. Ed Rendell to realize his dream of turning Benjamin Franklin Parkway into a center of cultural tourism. (Around the same time, the state was also negotiating to establish an Alexander Calder museum on the parkway, an effort that ultimately came to naught.)

Still, there was only one relevant issue once the decision to move was made: Would the result be a Disneyfied simulacrum—the Barnes in quotation marks, as it were? Or would visitors have the same intimate, revelatory encounter with works of art in the new locale as in Merion?

Thanks to the architects, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, who understood from the beginning the delicate nature of their task, the Barnes experience today is identical to what it was previously. They have created a carefully staged entrance, ensuring that the hurly-burly of the everyday world is left behind so the visitor enters the collection in the proper frame of mind to absorb its riches. It’s an arrangement that recalls Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with its new entrance pavilion by Renzo Piano, which now houses all the necessary but distracting museum functions such as ticketing and coat check to ensure that once inside the Venetian palazzo you are able to focus exclusively on art and taste.

Inside the Barnes’s galleries the architects have made subtle enhancements, such as using a special glass in the windows to admit more daylight than was possible in Dr. Barnes’s day, and reflecting artificial light off raised ceilings. The result is the best of both worlds: The works of art are more visible than previously, and yet the installation is so thoroughly and convincingly replicated that there are times you have to remind yourself that you’re on the parkway, not in Merion.

Especially welcome is the new temporary-exhibition gallery that will be used for shows exploring Dr. Barnes’s life and career in art. The inaugural exhibition, “Ensemble: Albert C. Barnes and the Experiment in Education,” uses works of art and archival material to provide visitors with an excellent primer on Dr. Barnes, his collection and his aesthetic formation. There was nothing like this in Merion, and it is certain to go a long way to dispel the aura of strangeness that has long attached to Dr. Barnes, his vision and his method.

Not everything is perfect. The architects have broken the sequence by inserting an interior garden between two sets of lateral galleries at one end, and done the same thing at the other end with a classroom. It’s a decision that orphans the outermost rooms, thus diminishing the overall effect of the installation. We also could have done without Ellsworth Kelly’s banal geometric sculpture “Barnes Totem” gracing the forecourt. Talk about a downer.

Most perplexing of all, the large, day-lighted central atrium has been named in honor of Walter and Leonora Annenberg. Whatever his virtues as a collector and philanthropist, Annenberg was a longtime foe of Dr. Barnes. If any aspect of this new arrangement is likely to have Dr. Barnes fulminating in his grave, it’s the presence of the Annenberg name on this new museum.

Those are, however, details. The fact is that after touring this new facility, you come away convinced that the Barnes Foundation is poised at the beginning of a bright new future—one that will allow its magnificent collection to become better known, Dr. Barnes’s ideas to be more widely understood, and the man himself to be recognized as the generous, idealistic visionary he was instead of the eccentric curmudgeon of popular caricature. It’s a future that could scarcely be imagined until now, and one that everyone, including those of us critical of the Barnes’s stewards in the past, has a stake in seeing come to pass.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal’s Leisure & Arts features editor.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times
The heirs of Malevich sought to recover paintings, including the ones displayed above center and right.

By DOREEN CARVAJAL

The lending and borrowing of famous artworks is the essence of cultural exchange between museums in the United States and abroad. So routine is the practice, and so universally valued, that the American government has traditionally protected it with a law that shields a lent work from being seized by anyone with a claim to legal ownership while the art is on display here.

In recent years, though, American museum directors have come to fear that this safeguard has eroded, and that foreign museums, dreading entanglement in costly ownership battles, are more hesitant to make loans. So they have asked Congress to increase the security for global art swaps.

But a nonpartisan effort to do so, which sailed through the House of Representatives on a voice vote in March, has slowed in the Senate amid an unexpected storm of protest from those who say it goes too far in blocking efforts by owners to recover looted treasures. The bill would prevent all claims, except those filed by families whose valuables were taken by the Nazis in World War II. But even they will find the process harder if the bill becomes law, opponents say. Other scholars and legal experts question why the Holocaust alone, among atrocities affecting ownership, is being afforded special treatment.

“This is a master attempt to put away all the legal claims,” said Marc Masurovsky, a historian and co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project. “How can you excuse 28 different kinds of plunder and only outlaw one subset of one subset? What is the point here? The only people who have anything to gain are the museum directors. So we’re basically saying it’s fine to plunder?”

The driving force in favor of the stronger legislation, known as the Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act, has indeed been the Association of Art Museum Directors. The organization is concerned that it is no longer enough for museums to arrange for a special waiver from the State Department to shield a work from seizure while it’s on loan for an exhibition in the United States.

In Paris, the International Council of Museums was initially in favor of the new legislation, but, given the criticism, is now encouraging “further consultation,” according to Julien Anfruns, director general of that organization, which offers mediation as an alternative to court.

The issue is particularly important in the United States because victims of looted art consider this country a legal refuge where they can press claims against powerful state institutions in Eastern Europe and Russia.

  But concern on the part of American museum directors has grown since a federal court ruling in a 2005 case said that although the waivers can prevent outright seizures, they do not block claimants from filing lawsuits to recover artworks.

The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by the heirs of the abstract painter Kazimir Malevich, who sought to recover paintings from the Stedelijk in Amsterdam while they were on loan for an American exhibition. The Dutch museum believed its State Department waiver protected the works from seizure. But the judge ruled that the family could still sue.

The new bill, sponsored by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, would in effect overturn the judge’s decision and bar lawsuits, except those related to art looted by the Nazis or their agents. The bill would cover loans from the state-owned foreign museums like the Louvre or the Prado, but not private ones.

“If lenders perceive a potential risk, it can prevent artifacts from traveling and therefore potentially deny people in our community the opportunity to learn about cultures,” said Elizabeth Pierce, a spokeswoman for the Cincinnati Museum Center in Ohio, the home state of Representative Steve Chabot, who introduced the legislation in the House.

Russia, for example, has banned art loans to the United States, fearing that works could be seized because of a continuing legal battle in the United States with the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement over 40,000 books and manuscripts that are in Russian government possession. (To reduce tensions, the movement has promised not to sue, but the ban remains in place.)

In sponsoring the legislation, Senator Feinstein cited exhibitions in her state that “may have been endangered,” including one last year at the de Young Museum in San Francisco featuring loans from the Picasso Museum in Paris. A spokeswoman for the Picasso museum, Emilie Augier-Bernard, said she was not aware that anyone had raised claims regarding any of those works.

Despite the efforts to exempt Holocaust-era claims, the fiercest opposition to the bill has come from those who maintain that the exception is too narrowly drawn because it covers only people who lost art directly to the Nazis or their agents.

Experts say many Jewish families lost art, not directly to the Nazis, but because they were pressured to abandon it as they fled or had to sell pieces quickly for a fraction of their worth. Opponents of the bill, like the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a New York organization that seeks restitution for Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, contend that the bill would prevent even these heirs from suing. Some opponents said that they believed that the bill was fast-tracked without a hearing in the House not because Congressional officials did not anticipate opposition, but because museums wanted to be discreet about pushing legislation that would block people from reclaiming looted art.

“Clearly, this is an effort to get the bill passed in the middle of the night,” said Charles Goldstein, a New York lawyer for the Commission for Art Recovery, which works on Holocaust restitution cases. Mr. Chabot’s office said the bill moved swiftly because support was bipartisan and because there was no opposition at the time of the House vote.

Dan Monroe, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, defended the legislation’s special handling of art looted by the Nazis, as opposed to works that might have been taken during, say, the Cambodian civil war or the Bolshevik Revolution. He described the Holocaust as “so massive and egregious that there are few if any other situations that rise to the same level of injustice.”

“To assure the ability to present art and culture to the American public from sources around the world,” he continued, “there are some inherent limits to how museums can act to redress all possible injustices.”

But others are uneasy about granting special treatment.

Derek Fincham, an assistant professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston who specializes in cultural heritage law, said the exclusion probably also reflected the notion that the bill would be difficult to pass without an exception for Holocaust-era claims.

“To put it bluntly, how many Cambodians donate to political campaigns?” he said. “All of this goes back to political influence on a money level, which is unfortunate.”

Corinne Hershkovitch, a lawyer in Paris who specializes in recovering plundered art, said she questioned whether a bill that tried to distinguish between the severity of atrocities was sound. “There should be a common system for all looted art,” she said. “If you offer protections just for one group, it will seem illegitimate.”

Allan Gerson, a specialist in international law who has a client trying to recover paintings seized by the Bolsheviks, agreed. “Why are Nazi storm troopers looting art any different from Bolshevik storm troopers?” he said.

In California in 2009, a federal appeals court struck down a state law that sought to extend the statute of limitations in lawsuits filed there against museums and galleries by people who had art taken from them during the Holocaust. The ruling did not focus on the special nature of the protection, but on constitutional flaws in the statute. When California enacted amended legislation in 2010, it covered artworks lost in all periods.

Jo Backer Laird, a lawyer who specializes in art law, said the pending Senate bill was founded on the view “that the Holocaust is simply different.”

“It is a view,” she continued, “that has a compelling philosophical and moral basis — but one that may be more difficult to justify and implement as a matter of law.”

Posted on Fri, May. 18, 2012 By John Coppola Edouard Duval Carrié "The Messenger,'' by Edouard Duval Carrié, from his exhibition at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, May 2012. “This is my life as a tree, says Edouard Duval Carrié as he singles out an eight-foot-square work that is the centerpiece of his current exhibition at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery. Purple Lace Tree, a backlit mixed media work on water-jet cut aluminum, depicts a single tree, its serpentine roots not anchored in the ground, its beleafed and flowering branches sprawling above. He describes the lone tree as “standing erect, keeping its dignity, yet rootless.” The peripatetic artist was born in Haiti in 1954, immigrated as a child with his family to Puerto Rico, studied in Montreal and Paris before moving to Miami a dozen years ago. Here, he says, he found his anchor: “I’m very happy in Miami. I won’t move!” Duval Carrié also cites the trees as a metaphor for the ecological problems in his native Haiti, which has been severely deforested, as well as symbols of family and history. He has made the images even more concrete by incorporating actual tree branches in his mixed media sculpture, Grand Bois. Many of the works in his current gallery show, The Three Dimensional God and Goddesses Met Their Cousins The Trees, are back-lighted stencils. Duval Carrié says this Haitinizes stained-glass windows by incorporating the technique used in the oil drum metal cutouts. Gallerist Bernice Steinbaum recalls asking the artist which vodou god he would like to be. “He chose the god of light,” she says, “and in this show he plays with light.” Both in his gallery show and in an installation at Davie’s new Young at Art Museum building, Duval Carrié has eschewed the tropical lighting in favor of a dark stillness that conjures up a spirit realm that is simultaneously relaxing and ominous. The subdued lighting and almost cave-like layout of his Spirit of Haiti at YAA contrasts dramatically with the other brightly lit A Knight Foundation Challenge grant to YAA provides free admission for 2,500 low-income children to experience The Spirit of Haiti exhibition and family workshops created and conducted by Duval Carrié. “The museum came to me several years ago,” he says, “and asked me to create an environment for kids to learn in. At the time, I was interested in stenciling and mold making.” Both found their way into his exhibition, which is an assemblage of stenciled cubes, oil drum sculpture, sequined vodou flags and even an altar that form what YAA calls “a story-filled realm of folklore and oral tradition.” Visitors to Duval Carrié’s installation can trace designs from stencils of the artist’s work and build metal sculptures from magnetized squares and circles. This summer the artist will conduct a workshop teaching children how to make molds and resin casts “It’s important for us to have an artist like Edouard Duval Carrié representing the cultural life of our community,” says Sandra Trinidad, YAA’s marketing manager. In fact, the artist represents Haitian and Caribbean art to the Miami community as much as he represents Miami to them. Duval Carrié is Miami’s best-known Haitian artist, but he is also a relentless promoter of other artists from his native country and elsewhere in the Caribbean. Immediately after the opening of the Young at Arts Museum, Duval Carrié was off to Martinque to oversee the installation of Global Caribbean, the first of a series of exhibitions he organized for the Little Haiti Cultural Center in 2010. Martinque is the last stop of a tour that took it to France and Puerto Rico. The third iteration of Global Caribbean will open at LHCC next year. “Miami is placing itself very strongly in the art market, but Caribbean artists are very seldom seen in Miami,” says Duval Carrié, explaining why he embarked on the series of Global Caribbean exhibitions. “I wish Haitian artists were better in tune with the market here and there were more exchanges between Haiti and Miami.” From his studio right across the street, Duval Carrié has been a driving force in the creation and operations of the Little Haiti Cultural Center. “Edouard is a dynamo in our community as an organizer/curator and, of course, as a highly regarded artist,’’ says Miami mosaic artist George Fishman . Duval Carrie is curating an exhibition in conjunction with the symposium at the Little Haiti Cultural Center that was held May 18 and 19 to looked inter-university and professional collaborations aimed at promoting and advancing Haitian culture and society. Next month, Duval Carrié will also be participating in a collaborative exhibition, Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, organized by three New York City museums — El Museo del Barrio, the Queens Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. It features more than 400 works spanning two centuries On the horizon for Duval Carrié is an exhibition of Haitian photography that he will curate next year for the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art. Works by 10 contemporary Haitian photographers and ten from outside the country will be on display, offering contrasting visions of how Haitians and foreigners see the country.

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