WHEN Eli Broad, the art collector and philanthropist, decided to build a museum in downtown Los Angeles, he named it The Broad. That pretty much ruled out asking anybody else for money, said Barry Munitz, a governor of the Broad Foundation. The museum, about to break ground on a Diller Scofidio & Renfro building, will have an initial $200 million endowment and has no plans to seek outside funding, according to Joanne Hyler, who will be its director.

But there’s another Broad museum, this one nearing completion at Michigan State University, in East Lansing. Mr. Broad (pronounced Brode), a Michigan State alumnus, and his wife, Edythe, gave $28 million to that cause — far less than the cost of the museum’s new Zaha Hadid building. And that means the museum’s director, Michael Rush, has to raise money before the museum opens this year. “We still have a few million to go,” he said by phone.

But who will donate to a museum named for one of the wealthiest couples in America? (Its official name is the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum.) As Lou Anna K. Simon, the president of Michigan State University, said at an event to publicize the museum, “Some people think Eli can just write another check.” Not only that, but the name on the door suggests that no mater how much a donor contributes, the credit will go to the Broads.

Luckily, Mr. Rush said, the university’s hundreds of thousands of alumni are known for their school spirit. It also helps that the museum is offering naming opportunities; one gallery will bear the name of Edward Minskoff, the New York real estate developer and a Michigan State graduate. Mr. Minskoff wrote in an e-mail that the Broad name, if anything, encouraged him to give. “Eli is one of the most important collectors in the world, and it will only serve to attract other prominent contributors,” he wrote.

Often, though, putting a wealthy donor’s name on the door discourages giving, according to Mr. Munitz and other experts. (He named the Menil Collection in Houston, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis as three museums facing that challenge.)

When Mr. Munitz was president of the J. Paul Getty Trust — endowed by the oil company founder — “it was hard to ask for money with a straight face,” he said. But the trust, he said, is not without need; it is wealthy enough “to do anything it wants to do, which is different from being able to do everything it wants to do.” These days, he said, it seeks donors for some purposes.

Fund-raising may be easier for an institution named for a less towering figure than J. Paul Getty or Eli Broad. The Skirball Cultural Center, a Jewish museum in Los Angeles, was named for Jack Skirball and Audrey Skirball-Kenis, wealthy Californians, but its director, Mr. Munitz said, “has always made it clear that the institutionwouldn’t survive and prosper without other major donors.” One such donor, Lloyd Cotsen, the former president of the skin care products company Neutrogena, endowed what is now known as the Cotsen Auditorium at the Skirball Cultural Center. “There wasn’t the sense that other donors would be in the Skirballs’ shadow,” said Mr. Munitz, who is the president of Mr. Cotsen’s foundation.

In Arkansas, the Crystal Bridges Museum was built with a gift from Alice Walton, an heir to the Wal-Mart fortune, and received $800 million in additional funds from the Walton Family Foundation. Don Bacigalupi, the museum’s director, said it had not been difficult to raise additional money. One reason, of course, is that the museum isn’t named Walton.

But even if it had been, Mr. Bacigalupi said, that might not have discouraged donors, because of excitement in the community about the project, which, he said, was fueled by the Walton association.

The museum has signed up 6,000 members, about twice as many as its top executives had expected, since it began its membership program last year. And many of those members gave far more than the $35 minimum — in some cases, thousands of dollars more. Asked if the donors were looking to curry favor with the Waltons — who control much of the economy of this part of Arkansas — Mr. Bacigalupi answered no. After all, being one of thousands of members is akin to being anonymous. Larger donors are not anonymous — the Willard and Pat Walker Charitable Foundation gave $10 million to defray the cost of bringing school groups to the museum (even covering lunch and transportation). But Mr. Walker made his money as a Wal-Mart executive, and the Walkers are part of what Mr. Bacigalupi described as a group of prominent families who pitch in to support each other’ projects. He said the museum was benefiting from a “tradition of generosity” in northwest Arkansas.

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By ANN LANDI

Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Taos, N.M.

The enigmatic Agnes Martin, who spent parts of her life in this small mountainous enclave and died here in 2004, gained international acclaim for her spare, luminous canvases, fields of washy color traversed by delicate hand-drawn lines, generally in the shape of a grid. These understated works can carry a big impact, producing a meditative response in viewers and inspiring reams of appreciative criticism. Like many of the Minimalist artists with whom she is often associated, Martin could extract infinite variations on a theme, producing both small drawings and huge paintings that use the grid as their underpinning.

Agnes Martin:

Before the Grid

The Harwood Museum of Art

Through June 17

Yet Martin—born in 1912, the same year as Jackson Pollock—did not arrive at her winning strategy until she was in her late 50s, and her earlier work is not well known. Indeed, she did her best to seek out and destroy paintings from the years when she was taking her first steps into full-blown abstraction. In honor of her centenary, the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos has tracked down a generous selection of works the artist made in her 30s and 40s. In addition to a couple of self-portraits and a few watercolor landscapes, these include biomorphic paintings made when the artist had a grant to work in Taos in the mid-1950s. They are lyrical works in subdued colors, taking on motifs from nature, like "Mid-Winter" (1954) and "The Bluebird" (1954), or hinting at grander, curiously archaic subjects ("The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden," 1953). This last is an explosive semifigurative work, in which the doomed couple are broken into a frenzy of jagged shapes, but more typical are several untitled paintings that show hovering, vaguely geometric or oozy, lifelike forms (the "biomorphs" of biomorphism). The museum has also included three early grid paintings from 1959 and 1961 and a selection of later works on paper in the entry hall, a preamble to the Harwood's permanent gallery of seven large paintings from 1993-94.

 

March 14, 2012

By Adam Lindemann

I will never cease to be amazed by how much consensus I find among New York’s leading art critics as they all hail and salute the same things, or for that matter, as they all gang up and bash the same things, as they did with Maurizio Cattelan’s recent Guggenheim retrospective.

 

The unanimity bothers me; I wish someone would offer some counterpoint to the prevailing view, bring some fresh air into the dialogue. What’s the point of everyone saying the same thing? Do they really all like the same things or are they afraid to step out and say something different, even provocative? If I were an artist, I think I’d get suspicious if everyone in town chimed in about how wonderful I was...

Read more at: adamlindemann.com

By TOM L. FREUDENHEIM

Spies in the House of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art, through August 26

Playing House

Brooklyn Museum, through August 26

***

New York

'Artists are the secret constituency of museums." That's the opening textual salvo in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's incoherent photography exhibition "Spies in the House of Art." It also has little to do with the show's other claim—that the exhibition demonstrates how "artists explore the secret life of museums and their collections." Museums are filled with secrets, among them attribution disputes, art deaccessions and exchanges, unsavory provenance issues, and power struggles within and between trustees and staffs.

Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

'Untitled #207' (1989) by Cindy Sherman.

At best, the argument that this show "surveys various ways museums inspire the making of works of art" is evident in a few of the photographs on view—most notably the large Cindy Sherman portrait that conjures up an Old Master painting (and wonderfully confuses you as to precisely which one it might be). But, by their very celebrity, Ms. Sherman and other oft-seen artists in this show have long disposed of the notion that they constitute a secret museum constituency....

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

James Rosenquist's "F-111" is so familiar by now that memory has begun to smooth its shark-tooth edges and recall the Cold War period it exemplifies with nostalgic sighs. For some of us it's hard to recall a time when this wicked satire of the U.S. Military-Industrial-Consumer Complex was not around. A controversial hit when first exhibited almost half a century ago, the painting was quickly designated a Pop Art icon in textbooks. Students have been parsing its candy-colored tapestry of incongruous images on art-history quizzes for decades.

© 2012 James Rosenquist/Museum of Modern Art/James Rosenquist/VAGA

The Museum of Modern Art's installation restores this 86-foot-long, four-sided behemoth to the original arrangement intended by the artist.

What's jarring about its current installation at New York's Museum of Modern Art is that, until now, museums may never have done justice to the piece. That's reason enough to visit the fourth floor, where until July 30 the 86-foot-long behemoth can be seen as Mr. Rosenquist introduced the painting in 1965 at the Castelli Gallery in New York: a four-sided, wraparound mural for a space (23 feet by 22 feet) little bigger than a squash court.

This old/new arrangement alters the experience and perhaps even the meaning of the work. On previous occasions when I had stood in front of the 10-foot-high images—a turbocharged montage that splices together a U.S. fighter-bomber, a Firestone tire, a vanilla-frosted cake, a light bulb, a girl beneath a hair dryer, a nuclear-bomb explosion, a beach umbrella and a plate of spaghetti—the items were presented tautly stretched across one wall or at most two walls. Installed in this manner, viewable from far away, "F-111" could be digested as entertainment. Despite the threat of human extinction in the combustible ensemble, the work had the eye-catching appeal of a billboard along Sunset Boulevard for a disaster movie. (Mr. Rosenquist's sense of humor and spectacle is not unlike Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern's in "Dr. Strangelove." Indeed, their black comedy about nuclear Armageddon was released in 1964, as the artist began work on his painting.)

In the current MoMA installation, however, the violence isn't so easily laughed off. Bent around the four walls of a tiny space, the piece now offers uncomfortably little area for the visitor to step back. The confinement is menacing. Being forced to look at the mural from a few feet away is like examining the X-rayed stomach contents of a giant anaconda, one that has slithered its way into your dining room and is flexing its coils. The aggressive, cynical maleness of the piece is almost overwhelming.

Mr. Rosenquist has said he made it in angry reaction to U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam, a claim that has never squared with the fetishistic rendering of the sleek, deadly instrument for which the work is named. Rather than an earnest work of protest, "F-111" has always seemed patriotic, an ironic salute to national might and knowhow. (After all, the atomic bomb was an American invention.)

The silhouette of an F-111, the most advanced jet aircraft of its day, runs the length of the work and is painted on 23 aluminum panels. This high-tech material supplies the undercarriage for the images and is in some ways inseparable from them. Our eyes are asked to run along the shiny metallic skin.

Pop Art is permeated by ambiguity toward the bounty of America's consumer society, and Mr. Rosenquist's attitude is no different. He just amped up his mixed emotions in a work of unprecedented size and complexity. (Its gigantism reflects his training in commercial art, painting billboards above Times Square during summers in the early 1950s.) As with Warhol, the visual language inserts images from magazine advertising and journalism into a re-edited commentary on the culture at large. David Salle and Barbara Kruger are but two artists who in the 1980s adapted these photo-mechanical techniques to make large paintings as combative as "F-111."

New Wave cinematic rhythms for images on this scale were unheard of in 1965. Read like a strip of film, they are connected by jump cuts instead of clear transitions. The central figure (and the only human) is a smiling blond girl, a figure lifted from a 1950s Saran Wrap ad. Wearing lipstick and with her hair in ribbons but inside a hair dryer, she's a child aspiring to sophistication beyond her years. The machine on her head is also a jet engine—cone-shaped, blasting heated air, made of reflective metal—and may be sucking her up with a force she is unaware of.

Knowingly or not, Mr. Rosenquist may have woven her into his design under the influence of the so-called Daisy television ad. Broadcast in 1964 only once, but analyzed widely while "F-111" was being constructed, that notorious attack by Lyndon B. Johnson's political team on Barry Goldwater as a dangerous extremist operated on a similar sneaky level to make its point.

It, too, featured a fair-haired girl and a nuclear explosion. Standing in a field, she counts the petals she is pulling off a daisy. Suddenly an anonymous voice interrupts her and starts counting down to zero as the camera narrows to her eye. The screen then fills with a mushroom cloud. Created by media guru Tony Schwartz, the Daisy ad never mentions Mr. Goldwater. It ends with a written message: "Vote for President Johnson on Nov. 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home."

As in advertising, the images within Mr. Rosenquist's panorama act on us subliminally, not logically. Other meanings that were elusive before are harder to ignore in cramped quarters. The spaghetti in tomato sauce, which dominates the right side of the mural, no longer seems merely to represent an unappetizing meal out of a can typical of the American diet in the 1950s and '60s. Viewed up close, the strands of pasta are alarmingly squirmy, like maggots or spilled human intestines.

MoMA has restored some of the shocking energy that "F-111" must have had in 1965. (Curiously, the dead spots in the work are also easier to detect; Mr. Rosenquist never quite figured out how to make it turn the corners at the Castelli Gallery.) It's still hard to accept the mural as an antiwar statement on a par with "Guernica," a comparison the artist vainly invites. Then again, he was addressing the escalating madness of Vietnam in the 1960s, not the destruction of a Spanish village in the 1930s. In retrospect, he may have created the first (and only?) psychedelic masterpiece.

—Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 10, 2012, on page C13 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Destruction All Around.

• By KELLY CROW

In the early 1980s, German artist Gerhard Richter painted 24 views of flickering white candles, and not a single one sold. When one of those "Candle" canvases came up at Christie's in London this past fall, it sold for $16.5 million.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

A visitor at the blockbuster retrospective 'Gerhard Richter: Panorama' at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie; it will travel to Paris in June.

Few people can pinpoint the moment when an artist becomes iconic in the way of Pablo Picasso or Andy Warhol, but right now the art world is trying to anoint Mr. Richter. Last year, his works sold at auction for a total of $200 million, according to auction tracker Artnet—more than any other living artist and topping last year's auction totals for Claude Monet, Alberto Giacometti and Mark Rothko combined. At Mr. Richter's gallery in New York, the waiting list for one of his new works, which can sell for $3 million apiece, is several dozen names long.

In November at Sotheby's, London collector Lily Safra paid $20.8 million for Mr. Richter's 1997 eggplant-colored "Abstract Painting," an auction record for the artist. Other artists have sold individual works at higher prices—Jeff Koons, for example—but in terms of volume at auction, Mr. Richter currently tops the market.

The artist's ascent is being driven by market demands as much as curatorial merit: Auction houses and museums, eager for new masters to canonize, are showcasing Mr. Richter's works around the world at an ever-increasing clip. An influx of international collectors and dealers are also seizing the moment to buy or sell his pieces at a profit—including art-world tastemakers such as Russian industrialist Roman Abramovich, French luxury-goods executive Bernard Arnault, dealer Larry Gagosian, Taiwanese electronics mogul Pierre Chen and New York hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen.

   

 

Germany's Gerhard Richter's artworks sold at auction last year for a total of $176 million, more than any other living artist. Kelly Crow has a profile of Richter and his work on Lunch Break. Photo: Sotheby's

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Getty Images

German artist Gerhard Richter.

Mr. Richter's work is uniquely suited to the tastes of the current art market. Like Picasso, he paints in a number of different styles—from rainbow-hued abstracts to poignant family portraits—giving collectors plenty of choice. Like Warhol, he is prolific, which ensures a steady volume of his works in the marketplace—yet enough of his works are in museum collections that he has avoided a glut. And ever since the deaths last year of painters Cy Twombly and Lucian Freud, collectors searching for another senior statesman have started giving his work a closer look.

Collectors are paying a particular premium for Mr. Richter's larger abstracts from the late 1980s, which have all the visual impact of a work by Francis Bacon or Mr. Rothko, artists whose prices spiked before the recession. These abstracts are also immediately identifiable as being Mr. Richter's creations, making them easy status symbols. San Francisco dealer Anthony Meier says, "Collectors want an iconic work in a format that everyone recognizes. Monkey see, monkey do."

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Mr. Richter, 80 years old, isn't a household name in the U.S. yet, but he's revered in Europe. Born in Dresden, he fled the former East Germany months before the Berlin Wall went up. He has spent the past six decades experimenting with ways to refresh traditional painting categories like the still life. He's best known for haunting family portraits that evoke smudged newspaper clippings—a wry response to Pop that won him a pre-eminent spot among Europe's postwar painters. He also uses an oversized squeegee the size of a car bumper to create layered abstracts. That he flits between several painting styles, rather than sticking to one signature look, has always confounded some audiences, yet the toggling is actually his calling card, the painter as polymath.

A blockbuster retrospective, "Gerhard Richter: Panorama," has been crisscrossing the art capitals of Europe, having just traveled from London's Tate Modern to Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, where it will show through May 13. So far, the show has drawn large crowds; it heads to Paris's Centre Pompidou in June.

For his part, Mr. Richter seems a reluctant commodity. At a time when superstar artists typically have a different dealer for every continent, he funnels nearly all his new works through New York dealer Marian Goodman. Both are soft-spoken and rarely attend high-profile auctions. The pair has declined lucrative licensing deals and private commissions. For years, their combined efforts have helped his price levels retain an air of integrity. Ms. Goodman, speaking on behalf of the artist, who declined to be interviewed himself, said, "He has an honest market."

Ol auf Holz Museum Ludwig, Koln;ln/Privatsammlung © Gerhard Richter 2012

Mr. Richter has created more than 3,000 paintings, but nearly 40% of them (including 'Betty,' pictured here) are in museum collections, which has prevented a market glut.

Not everyone is ready to bet on Mr. Richter. Jose Mugrabi and David Nahmad, major dealers in Warhol and Picasso, respectively, said they don't think Mr. Richter has enough heft to compete with the market presence of those modern masters. Mr. Mugrabi said Mr. Richter's art is more fashionable now than it used to be, but not more important.

Trends in contemporary art, as in fashion, can also change quickly, so it's unclear whether Mr. Richter's prices will keep climbing or drop again over the long run. In the late 1980s, prices for Frank Stella's geometric paintings rose quickly to nearly $4 million before reaching a plateau in 1989 that he hasn't matched at auction since. Mr. Rothko's abstract paintings also soared to $72.8 million during the market's last peak in 2007, but nothing by him has sold for half as much in the past couple of years. Art adviser Nicolai Frahm says he's counseling his collector clients to hold off seeking Mr. Richter's works "until his prices equalize."

Sotheby's

Russian industrialist Roman Abramovich is among the influential collectors who have helped to make Mr. Richter's market. Mr. Abramovich paid $15.1 million for Mr. Richter's 1990 'Abstract Painting' at Sotheby's.

Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art, said he thinks such lofty comparisons to Picasso and Warhol will hold up, though. "Richter doesn't want to be the next king, but he has taken painting farther than just about anyone else," he said.

Richter's Rise

Mr. Richter works out of a pair of pristine studios in Cologne, including one attached by a garden path to the home he shares with his third wife, Sabine, and their young son, Moritz. Mr. Richter suffered a stroke a few years ago, but he remains fit and moves easily, his face framed by a jaunty pair of translucent eyeglasses.

The son of a Dresden schoolteacher, Mr. Richter grew up in communist East Germany, steeped in the academic rigors of Soviet Realism. Some of his first jobs included painting murals of cheery workers for the state. In 1959, he saw Western contemporary art for the first time at an exhibition called Documenta in the German town of Kassel; afterward, he told friends he would have to rethink what he knew about art after seeing Jackson Pollock's drippy splatters and Lucio Fontana's punctured canvases.

Sotheby's

Part of Mr. Richter's appeal to collectors: He paints in a wide range of styles, from colorful abstracts to hazy portraits. His 'Sailors' sold for $13.2 million at Sotheby's.

Two years later, he and his wife, Ema, enlisted a friend to sneak them by car into West Berlin so he could study art without political constraint. The couple moved to Düsseldorf, and by the end of the summer the Berlin Wall had gone up. He never saw his parents again.

Over the next decade, the artist grappled with occasional homesickness—and the legacy of his country's role in the war—by painting portraits of his relatives that looked like black-and-white photographs, only hazy. The subjects included his "Aunt Marianne," who was exterminated by the Nazis because she was mentally ill, and his "Uncle Rudi," a Nazi soldier who died fighting in the war.

Rudolf Zwirner, one of the artist's earliest dealers, was impressed when he saw the work in 1962; few German artists were addressing such disquieting topics. For years after the war, wealthy American collectors who were championing Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol considered German art "taboo," Mr. Zwirner said, so he and other dealers cultivated collectors for Mr. Richter nearby. Their prices rarely topped $1,000. "I sold Richters to my physician, my neighbors, my brother—anybody I could convince," he said. To this day, it's not unusual for bourgeois families in the region to own dozens of works by the artist; one collector in Munich owns 70 works. By the time Mr. Richter was invited to represent Germany in the 1972 Venice Biennale, his pool of countrymen collectors was deep.

Christie's

Mr. Richter's 1982 'Candle' painting sold in October at Christie's for $16.5 million.

In the years that followed, Mr. Richter churned through several different series—like those candles—which didn't sell as well as the angst-ridden paintings of his German contemporaries like Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. But in the mid-1980s, he began making brightly colored abstracts, and collectors pounced. San Francisco collectors Donald and Doris Fisher, who founded the Gap retail chain, bought several of these works.

The real turning point for Mr. Richter came in 1995 when New York's Museum of Modern Art paid $3 million for a suite of 15 grisaille paintings called "Oct. 18, 1977." The artist painted this cycle in 1988 as a response to the arrest, trial and grisly death in 1977 of a group of young German anarchists-turned-terrorists. Mr. Storr, the Yale dean who then served as the museum's senior curator of painting and sculpture, began planning a major survey of Mr. Richter's work for the museum.

As soon as word leaked about the museum show, Mr. Zwirner said his phone started ringing with American collectors seeking Richters. A year later, in 1996, Sotheby's in London put a Richter on the cover of one of its sale catalogs. Back in Germany, longtime collectors started getting letters from auction houses: Did they care to sell a Richter?

MoMA's long-awaited survey opened six years later, in 2001, and suddenly series that had seemed random when they debuted, like his "Candle" works, seemed relevant, said Sotheby's specialist Cheyenne Westphal. Three months after the exhibit opened, the auction house sold his "Three Candles" for $5.3 million.

Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris

Mr. Richter with his longtime dealer, Marian Goodman

Two years after that, a lawyer and collector based in Zurich named Joe Hage began gathering auction prices and exhibit details about the works in Mr. Richter's oeuvre. He started a website, gerhard-richter.com, and began posting the results online.

For newer, Internet-savvy collectors, Mr. Hage's site has proved popular because of all that its tallying has revealed. Mr. Richter has created 3,000 paintings—fewer than Warhol's 8,000 silk-screens but considerably more than Salvador Dalí's 1,200 works. He's also heavily traded, with more than 200 of his works turning up at auction every year, which provides buyers with a regular stream of price points to analyze. Museums own roughly 38% of his works, though, including half of his most coveted works, those large squeegee abstracts.

By 2006, an influx of newly wealthy collectors began competing hard for contemporary art, spiking values for dozens of artists including Mr. Richter. Sotheby's began shipping its top Richters to Hong Kong so potential bidders there could see his works. In May 2006, a bidder at Berlin's Villa Griesbach auction house paid $1 million for Mr. Richter's 1971 portrait of "Mao." The following summer, the same painting came up for bid at Christie's in London and sold for $2.5 million.

Then came the snowball: In February 2008, the artist's eldest daughter, Betty, sold her 1983 "Candle" for $15.8 million, triple the high estimate, at Sotheby's. Three months later, Mr. Abramovich dropped $15.1 million for Mr. Richter's green-gray "Abstract Painting" from 1990. It was only priced to sell for up to $7 million. With that, collectors recalibrated Mr. Richter's high bar to $15 million or more.

© Gerhard Richter, Courtesy The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Mr. Richter's 1997 'Abstract Painting,' which Lily Safra bought for $20.8 million at Sotheby's.

During the recession that followed, potential sellers of Mr. Richter's masterworks largely sat on the sidelines, but by late 2010, as the market perked up again, a fresh set of collectors began embellishing their collections with Richters. That November, Sotheby's got $13.2 million for his 1966 "Sailors," a work that spent years in the New Museum Weserburg in Bremen. The buyers were Houston hedge-fund manager John Arnold and his wife, Laura.

A pivotal sale four months ago sealed the deal. At Sotheby's in New York, London collectors Marc and Victoria Sursock offered up eight Richter abstracts; all sold for well over their asking prices, including the abstract that went to Ms. Safra for $20.8 million. Last month in London, collectors came back for more: Christie's got $15.5 million for a green Richter abstract, while Sotheby's sold a creamy abstract to a former Zurich nightclub owner, Carl Hirschmann, for $4.8 million.

Mr. Richter has told friends he thinks his recent auction records are "absurd." But for his longtime collectors, they're paying dividends.

A few years ago, as Berlin endocrinologist Thomas Olbricht was constructing a five-story museum to showcase his art collection, he realized he was running low on cash. So he sold a blue-orange Richter abstract. Mr. Olbricht had paid about $287,000 for it in 1996; Christie's sold it for him in 2008 for $14.8 million.

Today, the museum, called the Me Collectors Room, rises from a narrow street in Berlin's bustling Mitte neighborhood. "I still wish I'd been able to keep that painting," Mr. Olbricht said. "Today, it would be worth $20 million."

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared Mar. 9, 2012, on page D1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Top-Selling Living Artist.

By HENRY ALLEN

On rainy days when I was a kid, I'd lie on the living-room floor and page very slowly through a book called "Modern American Painting."

To a 9-year-old mind uncluttered by art appreciation courses, the paintings weren't good or bad, this school or that; they were uncontrollably spooky, sexy, alluring, mysterious and beautiful.

Peter Anger/The State Historical Society of Missouri

Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry at Benton's home in 1938.

Some I couldn't bear to look at, they made me feel so creepy. (Paul Cadmus's "Coney Island," 1934, with its malignant vulgarity.) Some I could hardly stop looking at, they were so beautiful. (Thomas Eakins's "Max Schmitt in a Single Scull," 1871, with its early-autumn perfection.)

And then there were the five paintings by Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), who is the subject now of an intense biography by Justin Wolff, 72 years after my rainy-day book came out.

"Thomas Hart Benton: A Life" tells the story of the painter's rise and fall as a hero of American art. The fall had already started when I began my studies on the living-room floor, but I didn't know that. Benton had been overtaken by changing times, by the new Abstract Expressionism of his former pupil Jackson Pollock and by public distaste for his own loud rancor toward museums, Modernism, Europe, curators, capitalism, Marxism, homosexuals, on and on.

I knew none of this. All I saw were Benton's paintings, with their quality of being both sinister and beautiful—all those snaky curves and cartoony exaggerations, the locomotives leaning forward like the little engine that could, cruel and plaintive hillbillies, plants growing out of the chthonic earth around the tangible and endangered flesh of "Persephone" (1939). Benton's pictures hit me at a place that language could not explain.

Mr. Wolff, a professor at the University of Maine, doesn't try to explain. He chooses instead to deploy his clear and easy prose in recounting political and aesthetic history.

Along the way, he describes the struggles between those who looked to Europe for aesthetic guidance (Alfred Stieglitz, Stuart Davis, Stanton MacDonald-Wright) and those who looked for it in the American heart (Benton, George Bellows, John Steuart Curry); those who evoked reality (regionalists, American-scene painters, social realists) and those who questioned it (cubists, surrealists, expressionists).

Benton would lose this struggle to the younger artists and critics, but before then he was a national hero, the old master of the Big New Thing, which was the nationalist impulse that also inspired Carl Sandburg's big-shoulders poetry, Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" and Thornton Wilder's "Our Town."

It's hard to believe, but my old book from 1940 began: "America today is developing a School of Painting which promises to be the most important movement in the world of art since the days of the Italian Renaissance." Time magazine had put Benton's self-portrait on its cover in 1934. He'd published his autobiography in 1937. His work was both praised and reviled with passions that no art arouses now, except a Super Bowl halftime show.

Despite his vigorous reading and colorful writing, Benton was no finely sliced aesthete. Instead, he was an angry, hard-drinking, harmonica-playing, well-read little backwoods aristocrat from a small town in southwestern Missouri, a man given to the sad pugnaciousness called a little-man complex. He was called "virile" back when that was a compliment.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY/Vaga

Benton's painting 'Achelous and Hercules' (1947).

Benton was contradictory. He celebrated the American spirit while being a Marxist. He was an American nationalist accused of defaming America by showing its ugliness along with its beauty. He was a good enough politician to get hired to paint historical murals in public buildings. He was fired from his job at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1941 after saying that the typical museum was "run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait."

With the end of both the Depression and World War II, Benton's we-the-people factuality lost its eminence. Only a few practitioners would hold on to their prestige—Edward Hopper with his beautiful alienation, Grant Wood on the strength of one painting among many fine ones, "American Gothic." The paintings that stood for America in the Cold War world were Abstract Expressionist—Pollock's drips and de Kooning's slashes, the intellectualized art of Rothko and Kline. Benton should have been forgotten as a failed prophet, proof that there's nothing more old-fashioned than yesterday's tomorrow.

Yet he has kept his untidy niche in the rainy-day American mind.

Long after his death at 85 in 1975, critics still go after him, but they don't seem to attack him as much as they defend themselves against him: Robert Hughes once called Benton "flat-out, lapel-grabbing vulgar, incapable of touching a pictorial sensation without pumping and tarting it up to the point where the eye wants to cry uncle." But Mr. Wolff is part of a revisionist movement that concedes dignity to his work.

The biographer begins his book with a description of Benton and his Italian wife, Rita, on Martha's Vineyard in the early 1920s, living without plumbing or electricity amid farmers, fishermen and Indians, soaking up the authenticity that before Benton died had become a brand sold to rich summer people. It was here that he found his groove, after World War I service in the Navy, which, he said, "tore me away from . . . my aesthetic drivelings and morbid self-concerns."

What he meant by "drivelings" was years of failure with various isms and abstractions in Paris and New York. He now began painting the serpentine ecstasies of a real world writhing with the vigor of pagan animism, an animism that would also be employed in the winking trees and frowning skies of Walt Disney—another artist from the Show-Me state.

Thomas Hart Benton: A Life

By Justin Wolff

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pages, $40

Born in Neosho, Mo., Benton was the son of a red-bearded, thick-necked egotist—a lawyer, Confederate veteran and Democratic congressman who made the mistake of marrying a resentful snob from Texas. Tom was named for his violent great-uncle, Sen. Thomas Hart Benton (he once shot Andrew Jackson and he killed a man in a duel). His mother hated his father, and his father hated Tom's incessant drawing. When he was 7, his father began serving four terms as a congressman in Washington, where his mother ascended the social ladder.

Tom was a bad student. He escaped to Joplin, Mo., at 16 to draw for a newspaper before his father sent him to military school, which he fled after football season. He studied art in Chicago, then went to Paris, "fantasizing about Whistler, about genius and about buying a black walking stick," according to Mr. Wolff. He had the air of a genius and the walking stick but not much work to show for them. He returned to New York. He taught, he worked as a longshoreman, painted ceramics and argued politics.

Mr. Wolff chooses to describe Benton's great years, the 1920s and 1930s, by summing up the aesthetic and political battles that surrounded him. There were many sides in these battles, but none of the participants questioned the idea that they were building the ultimate future, the teleological trope of thinkers from Marx to Mussolini to the postwar critic Clement Greenberg. They were all part of a land rush on the American psyche.

By the late 1940s, Benton had lost the claim he'd staked. The new media hero was Pollock, who had been Benton's student and sometime ward since 1930. Benton praised Pollock's abstractions, and the two often exchanged wisecracks. In 1949, 15 years after Benton was on the cover of Time, Pollock was on the cover of Life. Pollock, with his mental problems and alcoholism, would be telephoning Benton until he died at 44 in a car crash.

Benton would keep travelling the western United States, studying the common folk and the landscape. But even as a realist, he was overtaken by the morbid Andrew Wyeth. He kept on selling paintings, encouraged the musical career of his son, T.P., and raised his second child, a daughter named Jessie. He let shrewd Rita manage his career. He painted a mural for the Truman Library and a portrait of Truman, his match in Missouri testiness.

Mr. Wolff fills in the life of Thomas Hart Benton, but his insights don't quite explain the mysterious fascination Benton provoked. He concludes: "We want to pin him down precisely because we cannot."

If only Mr. Wolff could be 9, lying on the floor on a rainy day, looking at the beauty, vulgarity, dark passions and bright fields of "Persephone." Open your eyes, ignore cultivated tastes, and it explains itself.

Mr. Allen, a former writer and editor for the Washington Post, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 10, 2012, on page C9 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: America in All Its Ugly Beauty.