The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

On a pay-what-you-wish Saturday evening in late February, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum rotunda was dense with visitors to a new show, “Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe.“

Suddenly, a bugle squawked out a few notes, and from two upper ramps banners unfurled. One was painted with the words “Wage Theft.“ The other carried a drawing of a world globe accompanied by the phrase “1% Museum.“

A call-and-response chant began: “Who is building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi?“

“Migrant workers in labor camps! Is this the future of art?“

Then a single voice called out: “The Guggenheim Museum has a museum empire. The Guggenheim should not be on the wrong side of history.“

After about 20 minutes of this orchestrated interruption, which included a tossing of leaflets and the posting of a manifesto, the demonstrators left the premises.

They were members of an activist political group called G.U.L.F. (Global Ultra Luxury Faction), which is affiliated with two larger groups, Gulf Labor and Occupy Museums. For two years Gulf Labor, a coalition of international artists, has been protesting, largely through the web, the state of what some critics likened to indentured servitude of laborers, many from South Asia, brought in to work on a new Guggenheim franchise located on Saddiyat Island — “Island of Happiness” — just off the coast of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

Asked for a response to the protest, the Guggenheim’s director, Richard Armstrong, said the complaints were misplaced. Construction on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, designed by Frank Gehry, had not yet begun at the time of the demonstration. G.U.L.F. countered that all the labor-intensive structural groundwork that would make the building possible — roads, sewage systems — had been underway for some time, and reports of worker abuses were rife.

Whatever the reality, in the eyes of at least some art world citizens, the Guggenheim was doing at the very least a convincing impersonation of a globalizing corporation with new headquarters, built by and for the rich at the expense of the poor, to supply a luxury leisure and tourist spot in the Middle East with global art exhibitions.

Global — as in globalism and globalization — has been a period-defining word in talk about art and its institutions in the last few decades. And along with certain other zeitgeisty terms like multiculturalism and postmodernism, it once had a utopian ring.

When the economy, including the art market, bottomed out at the end of the 1980s, walls came down, and long-excluded art came in. Not only did the art of African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Native Americans gain admittance, but so did new art from Africa, Asia and South America, art that we barely even knew existed.

Back then, globalism seemed to hold one main promise: finally bringing us all, with our manifold colors and languages, to the table, where we wouldn’t all just break bread side by side, we’d cook up whole new fusion cuisines.

Even before the financial crisis in the late 1980s, there were indicators of incipient change. One came with the 1984 exhibition “‘Primitivism‘ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern“ at the Museum of Modern Art, organized by William S. Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, that paired examples of traditional African, Oceanic and Native American objects with Western modern art. The take-away idea was to demonstrate the ingenious use Western artists had made of those “primitive“ sources. Non-Western art objects were reduced to illustrating Western accomplishments.

The response was explosive. In a widely read review in Artforum, the critic Thomas McEvilley, who died last year, slammed the museum with accusations of cultural colonialism. The curators came back with a defense, only to have Mr. McEvilley demolish it and, by doing so, to decisively accelerate a broad rethinking, already underway, of the blinkered attitudes of Western museums toward the rest of the world.

The debate had international repercussions. In 1989 an exhibition called “Magiciens de la Terre,“ organized by Jean-Hubert Martin at the Pompidou Center in Paris, was conceived as a corrective to the MoMA exhibition and had the distinction of being one of the first truly global museum shows, bringing together 50 contemporary artists from Europe and North America with 50 from Africa, Asia, South America and Australia.

But in a different way from MoMA, it gave the non-Western work a primitivizing gloss, beginning with the title. Art by the Western artists was, for the most part, presented for cool contemplation, but the work chosen by many of the non-Western participants had an ethnographic spin as if the objects were expected to do something: heal, receive prayers, create magic, be spiritual. Despite the show’s stated intention to create something like a globalist balance of values, a West-in-control-of-the-rest perspective remained intact.

Still, a door to a larger view of the world did open. But has it stayed open, and if so, how wide?

In terms of genuine globalist reach, MoMA is a more expansive institution than it was in 1984, but only in the area of contemporary art. Global modernism remains either outside its ken or perhaps hidden away in its storage vaults. In any case, we rarely see it.

The Guggenheim has been more on the ball, though too often in a self-aggrandizing, one-shot way. For a show in 1996 imported from the Royal Academy of Arts in London, called “Africa: The Art of a Continent,“ it jammed hundreds of “traditional“ African objects, representing dozens of cultures, into its rotunda in an inchoate, context-free display. It took roughly the same omnibus approach in “China: 5000 Years“ in 1998 and in “Brazil: Body and Soul,“ which opened in 2001. It was no coincidence that these blockbusters came at a time when the museum was working hard to establish international branches.

The situation at the museum has improved. The Guggenheim has mounted some large Asian shows since — a Cai Guo Qiang retrospective in 2008, the 2013 Gutai show — and there are on-staff Asian art curators. But the museum’s much advertised global art acquisition initiative has gotten off to a disappointingly stingy start. The first installment, last year’s “No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia,“ was small and tucked away in a side gallery.

In New York it has been left to smaller museums, often short of money, to pick up the globalist slack in a consistent and venturesome way. These include the Queens Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, the Studio Museum in Harlem and Asia Society. Most innovative of all was the Museum for African Art, which opened in 1984 and revolutionized ideas about how to present non-Western culture in a Western context. Dismayingly, last year the museum changed its mission and name — it is now the New African Center — leaving its future as an exhibiting institution unclear.

And, of course, what has changed most boldly over the last decade is the global art landscape and the place of museums in it, a story still very much in the process of unfolding. With “Magicien“ as an originating model, international biennials and art fairs have proliferated. Essentially pop-up events, they plunk down large shipments of price-tagged pluralism everywhere, standardizing and neutralizing the experience of “difference” — editing it to a manageable market and determining what we will see in our big, ostensibly “global” museums, the “1%” as the protesters had it.

Some of the newest of these institutions are in the Middle East and China. For the last several years China has indulged in a spectacular binge of museum construction, thanks both to competitive nationalism and to new wealth. New regional museums of archaeological or other traditional material abound. So do private museums housing personal collections amassed by members of the newly rich. There are even museums of world culture, all but unheard-of outside the West until now. Two state-run museums that opened in Shanghai in 2012, one devoted to modern and the other to contemporary art, are mandated to show at least some Western work.

In Hong Kong, among the exclusive shops and restaurants of the developing West Kowloon Cultural District, the colossal M+ museum is in operation even though its building won’t be finished until 2016. The institution’s bias is 20th- and 21st-century Asian-centric work, but it will incorporate significant Western material.

The M+ pointedly calls itself a visual cultural museum rather than an art museum. But with a starter collection that appears to draw heavily on the internationally approved contemporary Chinese canon, it could, without strong curatorial direction, adhere to a now standard-issue global format.

Is there any place to escape from this model among new or newish museums outside the Western sphere? Southeast Asia presents serious possibilities, with a lively art scene and interesting contemporary spaces in Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. And Africa, where large-scale Western-style museums are all but impossible to sustain, produces alternatives almost by default.

Institutions like Bandjoun Station in the western region of Cameroon; Zoma Contemporary Art Center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and Raw Material Company in Dakar, Senegal, are all small, artist-built-and-run institutions that multitask as exhibition venues, archives, libraries, studios, guesthouses, gathering spots and schools.

Far from being part of the floating world of a market-driven museum culture, they’re thoroughly grounded in a local context, yet, through social media, networked internationally. Given their slender means, they have to stay flexible, light on their feet and open to alteration. In most cases, the one component they lack is a permanent collection. Deeply committed to the idea of art being, intrinsically, a form of social activism, their very existence carries a political charge.

Our big globalizing institutions of modern and contemporary art carry no such charge. Despite their fabulously rich holdings in art, any spark of a vision of the museum as a community of cultures, a forum of equal Others, is hard to find. In this context, globalism is shut down, out of fuel.

Even unbuilt, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi feels like a white elephant, corralled on the Island of Happiness with others of its kind: an Abu Dhabi branch of the Louvre designed by Jean Nouvel, and a performing arts center designed by Zaha Hadid, all constructed by people who will most likely never get in the doors and whose art is still hard to find in comparable museums in New York. Yet it would take a real cynic not to speculate about how this might be different. What if seemingly incompatible institutional features — humane local wisdom and custodianship of treasures of art — could be made to coexist? We’d have museums that are on the right side of history, and in which the future of art would be secure. That ideal is worth storming an empire for.

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George Lindemann Journa by Goerge Lindemann - "For the Whitney’s Move, Boxes and Burly Men Just Won’t Do" @nytimes by ROBIN POGREBIN

The Whitney Museum's new space is in the final stages of construction. Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Anyone who has ever unwrapped a chipped piece of Wedgwood understands the headaches and peril associated with moving.

Now imagine what the Whitney Museum of American Art is going through as it plans to transport more than 14,000 items, including delicate pieces like Alexander Calder’s sculpture “Circus” and landmark paintings like Edward Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning” — to its new downtown home.

Let’s just say the logistics go well beyond buying some Bubble Wrap.

There are intricate packing and crating concerns, matters of truck scheduling and insurance and, of course, security, as artwork worth hundreds of millions of dollars is transported through Manhattan. When the Barnes Foundation moved its museum to Philadelphia from the suburbs for its 2012 opening, the movers, as a precaution, stripped all the signage from their trucks.

“Everything about it is monumental,” said Ron Simoncini, who was the director of security at the Museum of Modern Art when that institution moved to and from temporary quarters in Queens during its 2004 renovation. (The move from Manhattan took 400 truck trips and involved about 100,000 works of art, MoMA said.)

“It’s not like moving a business or moving a home,” Mr. Simoncini added. “It’s not like you call Staples.”

The Whitney’s transfer from its Upper East Side home at Madison and 75th Street to Gansevoort and Washington Streets in the meatpacking district is still a ways off.

The museum will shut down after its Jeff Koons retrospective closes on Oct. 19, and staff members will start moving into the new building in the fall. The art will be transported after that, so that the museum is ready for its spring opening. (A firm date has not been set.)

“We’re still making plans for the actual moving of art,” Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, said in an interview last week.

The new $760 million project, at the base of the High Line, designed by Renzo Piano, is entering the final stages of construction. (Members of the news media are to get a look at its progress on Thursday.)

Mr. Weinberg said it was not yet clear how many trucks will be involved, how many trips they will take and when they will begin pulling up to the new museum; those details will not be released even when they are determined, because of security concerns.

The Whitney, however, is no stranger to moving, Mr. Weinberg said; the downtown location will be its fourth. Founded in 1930, the museum opened on West Eighth Street in 1931, then moved to an expanded site on West 54th Street in 1954 and finally to its current building, which was designed by Marcel Breuer and opened in 1966.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art signed an agreement in 2011 to occupy the Breuer building for at least eight years.

Mr. Weinberg said he is excited at the prospect of being able to put more of the Whitney’s permanent collection on view. In the new building, which includes outdoor areas, the museum will double its total exhibition space to 63,000 square feet.

It will also be able to consolidate its administrative operations; the Whitney’s staff is spread around five different locations. “We have not all been under one roof for eight years,” Mr. Weinberg said.

John S. Stanley, the Whitney’s chief operating officer, is overseeing the move, Mr. Weinberg said.

“It’s one set of details after another,” said Mr. Stanley, who added that he did not yet have a cost estimate.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Rarely One for Sugarcoating" @nytimes by BLAKE GOPNIK

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "The Industrial Art of Those Talented Bugattis" @nytimes by JOHN LAMM

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "More Public Art for Governors Island" @nytimes by CAROL VOGEL

“Painted Phone,” one of Mark Handforth’s works to be shown on Governors Island. Credit Timothy Schenck Photography/The Trust for Governors Island

When a new 30-acre park opens at the southern end of Governors Island on May 24, it will boast a grove of hammocks, two ball fields, a formal garden and play areas with climbable structures and spray showers. It will also be part of an ambitious backdrop for a new public art program taking shape on this 172-acre island, the former Army and Coast Guard base in New York Harbor. The city took control of Governors Island in 2010, and each year there’s more to do and see, attracting thousands of visitors during the summer months.

The new Governors Island Park, with sweeping views of New York Harbor, Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, will be a canvas for artists to create site-specific installations. Susan Philipsz has composed a sound piece inspired by the island’s military history. Based on the notes of the taps military bugle call, it will be played every day at 6 p.m. “It’s like the ghost of the former military base,” said Tom Eccles, who is organizing the island’s public art program.

Mr. Eccles, director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., said he was trying to create “a sense of journey and discovery which is uniquely suitable to finding works of art in the landscape.” He asked the sculptor Mark Handforth to create an exhibition consisting of four totem-like sculptures, surreal works that include “Painted Phone,” a 30-foot bronze tree with lopped-off limbs cradling a blue phone. The works by Mr. Handforth will be in place for about two years. Ms. Philipsz’s sound composition is permanent.

The British artist Rachel Whiteread is creating a cast concrete structure resembling an abandoned shed, to be placed permanently on Discovery Hill, south of the new park. Set for completion in 2015, it will look like a found yet familiar object hidden in the woods.

A BARNETT NEWMAN FOR SALE

Being able to say that an artwork has been on “long-term loan” to a major museum can be an irresistible sales pitch for an auction house. Ask the experts in Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department about “Black Fire I,” a 1961 canvas by Barnett Newman to be auctioned there on May 13, and they will immediately note that it has been at the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1985.

A seminal example of Abstract Expressionism, it pairs Newman’s luminous use of a black palette with his signature device: the zip, a feathery band of a contrasting color used to define the composition of a canvas. The work, with an estimate of about $50 million, is being sold by the Daniel W. Dietrich II trust, named for a Philadelphia collector.

Just a year ago, Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, sold Newman’s “Onement VI,” from 1953, at Sotheby’s in New York. It fetched $43.8 million.

JEWISH MUSEUM’S NEW LOGO

Delving back to ancient sacred geometries and that most ubiquitous of forms, the Star of David, may seem too obvious a reference for the Jewish Museum, which was faced with the task of designing a new graphic identity. But the design, below, to be introduced on Tuesday, seems both familiar and modern. Sagmeister & Walsh, the New York design firm, has created graphics that will appear on the museum’s admissions tickets and banners, signs, gallery guides, gift wrap and even the menu in the museum’s cafe. By June they will also grace a revamped website.

“The old identity didn’t work anymore — it wasn’t adaptable,” Claudia Gould, who has been the Jewish Museum’s director for nearly three years, said of the current logo, featuring the museum’s name in a red box.

Stefan Sagmeister, one of the firm’s partners, said that it had approached “a lot of people involved with the museum — board members, employees, the director — and asked them what they thought the Jewish Museum should be.” Several similar adjectives emerged: intimate, inclusive (meaning multigenerational) and elegant.

“The new logo may be based on a hidden sliver of imagery that comes out of history,” Mr. Sagmeister said, describing the hexagram shape, a sign of Jewish identity since the Middle Ages but also a symbol used by other cultures. “But it has a contemporary look. It’s very necessary to attract a younger audience, and with this design I think you can feel the difference.”

A JUDD FOR ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

When it came to filling a gap in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the single greatest priority for James Rondeau, its chairman of contemporary art, has been to find a 1960s stack, one of those serial boxlike units that are perhaps Donald Judd’s most popular works. “It’s something I knew we had to have since I arrived here in 1998, and probably curators before me were on the lookout for one too,” Mr. Rondeau said.

Through the Mnuchin Gallery in New York, the Art Institute was able to acquire “Untitled (DSS 120)” from 1968, what Mr. Rondeau believes is among the last of the artist’s 1960s stacks still in private hands. Judd, who died in 1994, created his first stack in 1965. This one, measuring 10 feet from floor to ceiling, consists of identical stainless steel and Plexiglas boxes cantilevered from the wall at regular intervals so they form a column of alternating solids and voids.

The work was included in exhibitions of Judd stacks at the Art Institute earlier this year and the Mnuchin Gallery last year. Like many museums, the Art Institute does not disclose what it pays for acquisitions. But this stack was offered at a Christie’s auction in 2009, when it sold for nearly $4.9 million.

George Lindemann Journal by George "Most Wanted and Most Haunted" @nytimes by By HOLLAND COTTER

Visitors at “Warhol: Jackie” at Blain/Di Donna, a gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Credit Byron Smith for The New York Times

A half-century ago this week, the 1964 World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows, Queens. With Belgian waffles, Michelangelo’s “Pietà” and a Tent of Tomorrow, the event was a last postwar blast of guilt-free consumption, Sunday school piety and faith in the future as a good place to be. It was also the scene of a smashup in progress, as the America of the 1950s ran into the 1960s.

The momentum had jolted into high gear a year earlier. With the Kennedy assassination, an era of lost illusions had begun. So had a time of anger. As the fair opened, the Civil Rights Act was stalled in Congress. The country’s involvement in Vietnam was escalating. The Beatles had landed and set off a youthquake. The city itself, anxious to get clean for tourism, was beefing up on vice squads.

To a degree hard to imagine now, contemporary art had a reflective active role in this feverish picture. No artist took the cultural pulse more precisely than Andy Warhol. And we see his diagnostic instincts already fully developed in two remarkable New York exhibitions: “13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World’s Fair,” at the Queens Museum, and “Warhol: Jackie” at Blain/Di Donna, a gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

View slide show|11 Photos

Warhol’s Worlds

Warhol’s Worlds

Credit Byron Smith for The New York Times

By 1964, Warhol was a different artist from the one he’d been just a few years before. Gone were the filigreed drawings of boots and shoes that had made him a commercial design star. He left advertising and office life behind and set up shop in a ratty loft on East 47th Street that he called the Factory. There he made multiedition silk-screened paintings of subjects that he considered typical American themes: cheap food, tabloid violence and celebrity worship.

With the help of close friends and lots of speed, he turned out vast series of individual images, including soup cans and Coke bottles, car wrecks and electric chairs. He also did portraits of Marilyn Monroe, by then two years dead, and of the recently widowed Jacqueline Kennedy. In each case, the original likeness was lifted from news media sources, then reproduced exactly and repeatedly, like faces of saints in the Byzantine Catholic churches of his Pittsburgh youth.

During the same months he was doing all this, he was also working on a public commission: a new work to be displayed, along with that of nine other young Americans, on the facade of the New York State Pavilion at the World’s Fair. The pavilion’s architect, Philip Johnson, selected the artists (Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Rauschenberg were among them), assigned them a uniform size and left the choices of form and subject up to them.

Stumped for ideas, Warhol arrived at the theme for his fair project by chance. On a visit to a friend’s home, he came across a 1962 New York City Police Department brochure of mug shots titled “The 13 Most Wanted Men.” That was that. He reproduced, large, the head shots of the mostly young Italian-American and Irish-American crime suspects on Masonite panels and had the panels installed high on the pavilion’s exterior.

Managerial alarms went off. Word came down that the piece was unacceptable, had to go. Workmen came and blotted out its images with aluminum-colored house paint. Who made the censorship decision? It wasn’t Johnson. Accusatory eyes turned to Robert Moses, the fair’s demagogic president, who had a big stake in uplift and would have hated Warhol’s jailbirds. But with worries that the fair would be a flop (financially, it was) and the prospect of African-American groups protesting his hiring practices, he probably didn’t notice.

The real culprit seems to have been the New York governor, Nelson A. Rockefeller, who was running in the 1964 presidential election and feared that the ethnic content of the Warhol commission would cost him votes. Yet the few surviving photographs of “13 Most Wanted Men” in situ tell a simpler and even realer story: The piece was plain outrageous. Not only did it literally elevate criminality and violence for all to see (one of the mug-shot subjects looks badly beaten up); it also generated, for those in the know, homoerotic “rough trade” vibes that gave the label “wanted men” an extra spin.

Those rare photographs of the piece during its brief intact existence are in the Queens Museum show. (The pavilion itself, in poor condition, still stands.) So are, strikingly, nine of “13 Most Wanted Men” paintings that Warhol made on canvas, for gallery display, after the commissions were done. And all are given deep context through a wealth of supporting material.

A Stygian black “Little Electric Chair” painting from 1964-65, on loan from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, underscores the punitive, death-obsessed direction of so much of Warhol’s work at the time. And a homoerotic reading of the public commission is reinforced by the presence in the show of “13 Most Beautiful Boys,” a series of filmed head shots of various young men, gay and straight, who visited Warhol’s studio, beginning in 1964.

Most interesting of all, though, is the purely documentary material. The curators — Larissa Harris of the Queens Museum, Nicholas Chambers of the Andy Warhol Museum, along with Anastasia Rygle and Timothy Mennel — have performed miracles of archive diving. And they’ve surfaced with newspaper clips, letters, telegrams, contracts and other ephemera that flesh out the fate of the commission, which the news media barely reported and to which the public remained largely oblivious.

These materials also flesh out a sense of America at that time: a country startled by its own suddenly detonative tensions, tensions that made the World’s Fair, that “Olympics of progress,” anachronistic in its own day, and that give the Queens show, like many dedicated to Warhol, a keyed-up, caustic, slightly nasty edge.

A break in this mood comes in a set of four small 1964 portrait paintings, in cerulean blue and black, of Jacqueline Kennedy. Based on cropped news photographs, they catch her smiling on arrival in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and monumentally veiled at her husband’s funeral days later. The themes of violence and mortality that link so much of Warhol’s art from this period are here, but the pictures seem to belong to a different, graver world. Its essence is distilled in the other show, “Warhol: Jackie,” at Blain/Di Donna.

Organized in collaboration with Bibi Khan, a former curator of the Andy Warhol Foundation, this show is devoted to silk-screen paintings, with a few prints, of the first lady, based on eight news photos, including the one of her standing, stunned, as a witness at Lyndon B. Johnson’s emergency swearing-in. Despite the limited range of images, the paintings, alone or grouped, are astonishingly varied, with subtle differences in tonal values and weights of pigment, and forms coming in and out of focus, as if seen through curtains of static.

Much that seems cold and cynical in Warhol is here: in the mass production, in the voyeurism, in the opportunistic appeal to pop-cultural emotion. The repeated images — he made more than 300 “Jackie” paintings — are like a 1960s equivalent of today’s 24-hour television and Internet news cycle, repeating the same tragic data in an endless loop to a tinkly soundtrack.

But the “Jackie” pictures also evoke a specific type of image, one tied to desire, devotion and a salvational hope: the religious icon. In this light, the Blain/Di Donna show might be seen as a shrine to a black-and-blue Madonna, the “Most Wanted Men” as a roll call of martyr-saints. The saving grace of Warhol’s best art is that a sense of critical morality is always, if almost by accident, operative. And in 1964, when two damaged decades were slamming together, and he felt caught in the wreck, he called on it.

George Lidnemann Journal by George Lindemann "The Deep Freeze in Art Authentication" @wsj by Jennifer Maloney

Joe Simon, left, sued the Warhol foundation after it said his 'Self Portrait' wasn't an authentic Warhol. Madeleine Farley

As contemporary-art prices soar, collectors want assurances that works are authentic. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to get an answer.

A series of high-profile authentication disputes have made art historians reluctant to offer opinions, and prompted several artist estates and foundations to disband their authentication boards.

The authentication deep freeze means uncertainty for artworks that haven't previously been authenticated or included in an artist's catalogue raisonné, or scholarly inventory. Such works may end up occupying a murky middle ground and sell for less than authenticated works, experts say. "There are people who are willing to take educated gambles," said Peter Stern, an attorney who specializes in the art world. Others can't be sold at all.

In 2007, Joe Simon, a London-based filmmaker, sued the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts after the board ruled inauthentic a silk-screen featured during the artist's lifetime on the cover of his catalogue raisonné. The foundation announced in 2011 it was disbanding its authentication board after it says it spent more than $6 million fighting the suit. Mr. Simon said he dropped it because he couldn't afford to continue.

"Protecting collectors, it's not our job," said Michael Straus, chairman of the Warhol foundation. "I don't think putting the burden of that due diligence on an artist estate, especially in the absence of sufficient legal protections, is appropriate."

In February, a group of collectors sued the Keith Haring Foundation, saying the organization had cost them at least $40 million by publicly declaring their paintings "counterfeit" and declining to consider information that could establish their provenance. The foundation's authentication board was dissolved in 2012.

Collectors sued the Keith Haring Foundation after it declared some works, including this one, counterfeit. Connie Grisley Images

The case with the greatest chilling effect for scholars was one that led to the closure of Manhattan's Knoedler & Co. gallery. Last year, Long Island art dealer Glafira Rosales pleaded guilty to conspiring to pass off a Queens artist's paintings as works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and others. Former Knoedler President Ann Freedman named a long list of experts who she claimed had seen and endorsed the paintings before they were revealed as knockoffs. The reputations of several art experts were tarnished and at least one has been sued by a collector who bought a fake.

A bill introduced in the New York legislature in March could offer some relief to New York-based art experts. The bill aims to make it more difficult for collectors and dealers to bring lawsuits against art historians whose opinions they contest. Lawsuits have been brought against experts both for finding works inauthentic and for wrongly authenticating works that turned out to be fakes.

Even as many artists' heirs decline to perform official authentications, some continue to hold considerable influence in the marketplace.

In a recent deposition, Mark Rothko's son, Christopher Rothko, said he has twice been invited by an auction house to view Rothko paintings discovered since the publication of the Rothko catalogue raisonné. One of those paintings —which was authenticated by David Anfam, the author of the Rothko catalog—sold at Christie's for $33.7 million, Christie's said.

Last month, Christie's postponed a sale after the sisters of Jean-Michel Basquiat alleged in a federal suit that some works in the collection of Basquiat's onetime lover, Alexis Adler, were of "questionable authenticity." Six of the works had been approved by the estate's now-defunct authentication committee. Many others hadn't been evaluated.

"Now without the authentication boards, it's a real tricky situation for everybody," Ms. Adler said.

Write to Jennifer Maloney at jennifer.maloney@wsj.com

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Is This Rothko Real?" By Jennifer Maloney

For nearly 30 years, Douglas Himmelfarb has tried to prove his painting is a Rothko -- but no one will authenticate it. Marco Garcia for The Wall Street Journal

Douglas Himmelfarb spotted the painting in 1987 at an auction preview in South Los Angeles. The offerings that day were a mix of furniture and no-name artwork. This canvas was large and dirty, and depicted three rectangles of color stacked on top of one another. A handful of people stood clustered around it as someone pulled it off the wall and turned it around. On the back was a signature:

MARK ROTHKO

CAL. SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS

EX. NO. 7

A woman scoffed, Mr. Himmelfarb recalls: "Mark Rothko did not paint in California, and there is no such thing as the California School of Fine Arts."

Mr. Himmelfarb, at the time a 35-year-old ad writer and estate-sale scavenger, drove home to Santa Monica and ran to the library. He discovered Rothko had spent the summer of 1949 in California, as the painter first explored the stacked-rectangle structure for which he would become famous. The California School of Fine Arts definitely existed—Rothko taught there in 1949 before it was renamed the San Francisco Art Institute.

The next morning, Mr. Himmelfarb returned to the family-run auction house and bought the painting, unchallenged, for $319.50 with tax.

Since that day, he has been on a mission to prove his painting is real.

After decades of setbacks and dead ends, the collector recently obtained what three scholars believe is compelling photographic evidence linking the painting to Rothko.

Mr. Himmelfarb's long struggle highlights a crisis in the obscure but high-stakes world of art authentication. As prices for blue-chip artworks soar—the record for a Rothko is nearly $87 million—authentication is increasingly important because collectors want assurances before they open their wallets.

But in recent years, art historians, artist estates and foundations have become more reluctant to issue opinions on an artwork's authenticity. The threat of costly litigation brought by collectors contesting decisions has prompted foundations including the Keith Haring Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to fold their authentication boards. (See story below.) And in the wake of a recent art-fraud case that closed Manhattan's Knoedler & Co. gallery, some art historians have stopped giving opinions altogether.

                                  

HIGH STAKES Paintings by Mark Rothko have soared in value over the past decade. The record, set in 2012 at Christie's in New York, right, was $86.9 million for 'Orange, Red, Yellow.' Christie's

An Art-World Titan

One of the giants of 20th-century art, Mark Rothko was part of the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s that introduced radical new directions in art, producing monumentally scaled abstract works and shifting the art world's focus from Europe to New York. Rothko, who became known for his large fields of intense color, is credited with creating more than 800 paintings over the course of his five-decade career. Born in what is now Latvia in 1903, he settled in New York in 1923 and by the early 1960s had become an international art star. He died in 1970.

Prices for his works, which were popular with collectors during his lifetime, have soared at auction in the past decade. After Rothko's "Orange, Red, Yellow" set a record of $86.9 million at Christie's in 2012, two of his paintings sold at Christie's last year for $46 million and $27 million. The works that fetch the highest prices are brightly hued examples of his signature stacked-rectangle paintings, often in reds, oranges, and blues. Forgeries have emerged, most notably in the recent art-fraud case that involved the Knoedler gallery, which sold fake Rothkos and other knockoffs that had in fact been created by an artist living in Queens.

A Born Collector

As a child growing up in Chevy Chase, Md., Mr. Himmelfarb wandered through Washington, D.C. art museums and haunted a local antique shop. He bought his first painting, for $30, at age 8 and had acquired a sizable collection by the time he was 17. After earning a degree in English from the University of Maryland, he went to work for an ad agency in Washington, moving to California a few years later.

In the late 1980s, he became friends with a pair of sisters in Los Angeles whom he met while art hunting. A year later, they named him their legal heir. He quit the ad business and began restoring a property they gave him—a courthouse in Malibu—and later acquired and restored other properties.

Mr. Himmelfarb and the sisters, Ruth and Ella Hirshfield, lived together in Bel Air and Honolulu. Now 61, Mr. Himmelfarb still lives with and serves as a caregiver for the sisters, who are in their 90s.

Mark Rothko © Brooklyn Museum/Corbis

Wooing a Top Rothko Scholar

After buying "Ex. No. 7" in 1987, Mr. Himmelfarb traced it back to Mollye Teitelbaum, a Los Angeles collector who sold it to the auction house while going through a divorce, according to her son Murray Teitelbaum, of Ojai, Calif. Ms. Teitelbaum and her ex-husband, Ben Teitelbaum, had acquired a large but mostly undocumented collection at auctions and through a San Francisco dealer, their son said. The couple made many art-buying trips to San Francisco, visiting artist studios and galleries and paying in cash. Mollye and Ben Teitelbaum both died in the 1990s.

"Ex. No. 7" was one of a pair the Teitelbaums had owned since at least 1964, Mr. Teitelbaum said. The other, with a similar signature and labeled "Ex. No. 4," is now owned by the younger Mr. Teitelbaum.

If one were deemed authentic, the other likely would be, too.

Mr. Himmelfarb began reading as much as he could about Rothko. At the same time, he began a correspondence with David Anfam, a British art historian who would become the world's leading Rothko authority.

In the late 1980s, Dr. Anfam was about to embark on a decadelong project at the National Gallery of Art in Washington to publish a catalogue raisonné, or official inventory, of Rothko's works on canvas. When a work is included in a catalogue raisonné, it is generally accepted as authentic.

Dr. Anfam initially thought Mr. Himmelfarb's painting held promise, according to documents in a bankruptcy-court case that Mr. Himmelfarb filed last year after overleveraging his properties. Hoping to use his painting to pay off creditors, he subpoenaed correspondence and other documents that illustrate his efforts to prove the painting's authenticity.

Dr. Anfam visited Mr. Himmelfarb in California around 1988, briefly inspected the painting and said he would study it in more depth at a later date, both sides confirm.

In 1989, Dr. Anfam wrote to the collector: "I very much look forward to the opportunity to assess your fascinating 'Rothko,'" according to a letter filed in the bankruptcy case.

In 1993, Mr. Himmelfarb visited Dr. Anfam at the National Gallery. The two men were photographed together on the roof of the museum. Dr. Anfam inspected the painting again around 1994, according to William Harbig, Dr. Anfam's legal adviser.

In 1998, shortly before the catalog was published, the collector and Dr. Anfam had a heated phone conversation, Mr. Himmelfarb says.

Dr. Anfam revealed that he had discovered in Rothko's archives a black-and-white photograph he believed was of "Ex. No. 7." The collector felt that the presence of a photo of his painting in the artist's personal files was incontrovertible proof of its authenticity. But Dr. Anfam demurred, saying anyone could have put the photograph there. Mr. Himmelfarb says he became angry, asking: "What do you think, I snuck into his house and stuck the photograph in his personal file?"

He says he then called Dr. Anfam a f---ing imbecile.

According to Mr. Himmelfarb, Dr. Anfam replied that he could tear up the photo if he wanted to, and hung up.

Dr. Anfam declined to answer questions from The Wall Street Journal about his dealings with Mr. Himmelfarb. He referred some questions to his legal adviser, Mr. Harbig. Mr. Harbig acknowledges that Dr. Anfam discovered the photo but said the historian "doesn't remember any argument. And he also says that he has never hung up on anyone."

The catalog was published soon after. In a devastating blow to Mr. Himmelfarb's campaign, it didn't include "Ex. No. 7," though it named Mr. Himmelfarb in the acknowledgments. The catalog listed at least six black-and-white photos of paintings, each with the following attribution: "Known only from a photograph in the R.A.," or Rothko archives.

"He harbored this grudge against me," Mr. Himmelfarb says. "If you can tell me why this is not a Rothko and prove it to me, I'm happy to walk."

Mr. Harbig, the legal adviser, said: "To David, scholarship is like a holy grail. I have great difficulty believing that he would not include something in the catalogue raisonné simply because he had a personal animus against the owner of the painting."

Mr. Himmelfarb admits to a penchant for speaking bluntly, sometimes too much so. At an opening party for an art museum once, he says he criticized the design, calling it a "penitentiary for art," not realizing that the architect was standing nearby.

"I think I had a little too much braggadocio after I found the painting," he says. "Maybe that's part of the problem. I thought, 'This is great, and I did it.'"

The 15-year Quest for a Photo

A few years after losing the fight to have his painting included in the Rothko catalogue raisonné, Mr. Himmelfarb set out on a new quest: to get his hands on that black-and-white photograph of his painting. He knew that the catalogs are often revised, with works added and subtracted, as new information comes to light. If he could find the photo, it could help him prove the painting was genuine.

Mr. Himmelfarb figured the photo was in one of two places: the National Gallery of Art, where Dr. Anfam worked on the catalog, or the archives maintained by the artist's children, Christopher Rothko and Kate Rothko Prizel.

The collector hired Gerald Nordland, a former director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and acquaintance of Rothko, to research the painting. In 2002 and 2003, Mr. Nordland wrote to the Rothko family and the National Gallery requesting access to the photograph, arguing that it "could be significant in supporting the authenticity of the painting," according to letters filed with the court. Mr. Nordland got nowhere.

In 2008, Mr. Himmelfarb was hosting a cocktail party at an estate he had purchased in Honolulu when Stephen Little, then-director of the Honolulu Academy of Arts, wandered into the library and let out a yelp.

"He said, 'What is a Rothko doing in Honolulu?'" Mr. Himmelfarb recalls.

Intrigued by the collector's story, Dr. Little spent the next three years researching the painting of his own accord. He became convinced that the painting wasn't only real, but illustrated "the most critical transitional moment in Rothko's career," Dr. Little wrote in a 2010 essay.

Emails and letters filed in court and reviewed by the Journal map out Dr. Little's efforts.

In 2009, Dr. Little wrote to Christopher Rothko, requesting photographs of the back sides of a few paintings in the Rothko family collection. The request was rebuffed.

"I am afraid that the Rothko family, as a matter of strict policy, does not involve itself in questions of authenticity. I am sorry that I cannot be more helpful," Mr. Rothko replied to Dr. Little in a letter.

Dr. Little also lobbied Ruth Fine, then a curator at the National Gallery who was working on an inventory of Rothko's works on paper, to consider "Ex. No. 7"—and Mr. Teitelbaum's "Ex. No. 4" —for inclusion in a planned addendum to the inventory of works on canvas.

In 2010, she wrote that she would consider looking at both paintings.

But by the following year, Ms. Fine had decided not to. When Mr. Himmelfarb approached the Pace Gallery in 2011 for an authentication, Pace contacted a colleague of Ms. Fine at the National Gallery. The colleague, Laili Nasr, replied: "The painting is not a lost oil painting, it was fully known to David Anfam at the time of the publication of the works on canvas catalog and we do not see any reason to alter Anfam's decision in this case."

National Gallery spokeswoman Deborah Ziska said that in the past couple of years the institution canceled its plans to publish an addendum to the works on canvas inventory because the works on paper volume, including some 2,600 works, had become "such an enormous undertaking."

"The National Gallery of Art does not authenticate works of art, although the publication of a catalogue raisonné implicitly authenticates the works listed therein," she said, adding that the 1998 "book reflects the scholarship at the time it went to press."

Ms. Fine, who is retired, and Ms. Nasr, now project manager of the works on paper project, declined to answer questions about why they decided not to reconsider the painting.

In 2011, Dr. Anfam authenticated a newly discovered Rothko painting that sold at Christie's for $33.7 million.

The same year, in separate correspondence with Dr. Little and Christopher Rothko, Dr. Anfam wrote that he wouldn't reassess Mr. Himmelfarb's painting but he hoped the National Gallery would do so.

"Indeed, it's a scholarly obligation, don't you think?" Dr. Anfam wrote to Dr. Little in a 2011 email reviewed by the Journal.

The pressure on Mr. Himmelfarb to authenticate and then sell the painting continued to mount. He had already lost the Malibu courthouse, which he had turned into a banquet hall, in 2010. To save his other properties from foreclosure, he had been trying to secure a loan against the painting. In October 2012, Mr. Himmelfarb's attorney wrote to Dr. Anfam, accusing the historian of having "discouraged people from purchasing, lending upon and/or acknowledging" the painting as a Rothko. The attorney threatened Dr. Anfam with "legal action" if he disparaged the painting.

"David will never, under any circumstances, give an opinion on Mr. Himmelfarb's painting," Dr. Anfam's legal adviser said. The art world, he added, has become "a very litigious environment."

Finding the Photo

In 2013, Mr. Himmelfarb filed for bankruptcy in a bid to save his last remaining property, the estate in Honolulu. Hoping to establish the value of "Ex. No. 7" and use it to pay off creditors, Mr. Himmelfarb was now able to take depositions and use subpoenas to request information as part of the bankruptcy proceedings. He asked for records from the National Gallery, Christopher Rothko and Marion Kahan, the Rothko family's collection manager.

Among the records they turned over was a copy of the photo—the same black-and-white image that Dr. Anfam had alluded to 15 years earlier.

In depositions for the bankruptcy case, Ms. Kahan and Mr. Rothko confirmed that the photograph was of Mr. Himmelfarb's painting. Ms. Kahan said that she found it in a file of 17 black-and-white photos from a box of photographs in the Rothkos' warehouse. Of the 16 other photos—all reviewed by the Journal—at least six appear to be identical to photographs reproduced in the catalogue raisonné, accompanied by the note: "Known only from a photograph in the R.A."

Mr. Rothko and Ms. Kahan declined to comment. In his deposition, Mr. Rothko said that each time they were previously asked for the photograph, they looked but couldn't find it.

When they turned the photo over to the court, Mr. Rothko's attorney stipulated that it be accompanied by a disclaimer, saying in part: "Ms. Kahan and the Rothko family… specifically caution against drawing any undue inference of authenticity" from it.

Last week, the U.S. District Court in Honolulu completed the foreclosure of Mr. Himmelfarb's Honolulu estate—his final remaining property.

'An Absolute Genuine' Rothko

Gerald Nordland, the former San Francisco museum director, is now 86 years old. Told by a reporter that Mr. Himmelfarb had finally obtained a copy of the photo, Mr. Nordland said: "Oh my God. Good!"

"If there is a chance for one more that we can find legitimate, then I think that widens our way of looking at Mark's work," he said.

Peter Selz, a former curator and museum director who organized Rothko's first show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961, believes the painting is real.

"I think I know Rothko's work as well as anybody," said Dr. Selz, 95 years old, who wrote an essay last year asserting the painting's authenticity. "This is an absolute genuine painting by Mark Rothko," he said.

But he said that without the Rothko family or David Anfam vouching for the painting, there is little Mr. Himmelfarb can do.

In his court deposition, Christopher Rothko was asked if he knew anyone who currently authenticates Rothko paintings.

"I don't know of any individual, no," he said.

Write to Jennifer Maloney at jennifer.maloney@wsj.com

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Bare Knuckles at Sotheby’s Auction House" @nytimes By ALEXANDRA STEVENSON and MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED

Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesAndy Warhol’s “Liz #1 (Early Colored Liz)” on the block at Sotheby’s, which faces a shareholder challenge on May 6.

Directors of Sotheby’s gathered in their wood-paneled boardroom with an urgent goal: how to mollify Daniel S. Loeb, the outspoken hedge fund mogul who is the auction house’s largest shareholder.

Yet on that day, in late February, even as the board was debating whether to give the investor the two board seats he had demanded, Mr. Loeb suddenly struck. He nominated three director candidates, officially declaring war against the art world stalwart.

That battle — being closely watched in Manhattan socialite and art circles as well as on Wall Street — is now heading to its final stages as both sides lobby other shareholders before the company’s annual meeting on May 6.

On Thursday, Mr. Loeb gained a significant advantage as the influential proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services recommended that shareholders vote for two of the three board nominees he has proposed, including himself. (Glass-Lewis, I.S.S.’s rival, is, however, supporting the Sotheby’s slate.)

Michael Nagle for The New York TimesWith a 9.6 percent stake, the mogul Daniel S. Loeb is Sotheby’s biggest shareholder.

Mr. Loeb, 52, is no stranger to no-holds-barred corporate battles, but this one is different in several ways. For one, it is almost as much a test of his reputation as an art aficionado as it is of his skills as an investor.

Known for his focus on contemporary and feminist art, Mr. Loeb has regularly made ARTnews’ list of the 200 biggest collectors. Works that have graced his Manhattan office or homes include a seven-foot-wide metallic pink-and-blue Jeff Koons egg — which he reportedly sold for $5.5 million — and a Martin Kippenberger sculpture of a crucified frog.

As part of its defense, Sotheby’s has publicly questioned Mr. Loeb’s art expertise, irking him in the process.

For Sotheby’s, the hedge fund challenge comes as the 270-year-old auction house is grappling with a seismic shift in the business of selling art. Fierce competition and the rapid sprouting of new millionaires and potential clients in emerging economies like China have forced auction houses to reconsider their traditional models.

“Sotheby’s is like an old master painting in desperate need of restoration,” Mr. Loeb has argued.

The battle is reverberating not just among investors but also within the exclusive and close-knit circles of the art world. Some have questioned whether Mr. Loeb, as an upstart, is doing what’s best for the business of art.

“I think what people may be concerned about is that although he is a significant collector, his primary focus is finance and he is not an art world insider,” said Jeff Rabin, a co-founder of the art consulting firm Artvest Partners.

Founded in London in 1744 to sell off several hundred rare books, Sotheby’s has been one of the most prestigious names in the art world. It is the oldest listed company on the New York Stock Exchange.

Yet it was hit hard during the financial crisis. For the last year, activist investors have circled the company, anticipating a broader shake-up of the art market.

“The big question for Sotheby’s is how to adapt to a changing market without losing what makes them special and different,” said John D. Shea, the chief executive of Proxy Mosaic, a firm that advises shareholders in activist situations.

To Mr. Loeb, Sotheby’s has not adapted quickly enough, leaving it ripe for the sort of corporate agitation that has made billions for himself and investors in his firm, Third Point. His playbook: buying a large stake in a company, and using that position to call for shifts in strategy and, often, board seats.

According to Mr. Loeb, Sotheby’s has fallen behind its chief rival, Christie’s, in recent years, especially in the Impressionist and Modern art beloved by today’s mega-collectors, like hedge fund moguls. For example, while Sotheby’s reported its biggest-ever night of contemporary art auctions in November, with $390 million in sales, Christie’s equivalent night fetched $691 million in sales. (Christie’s, however, is privately owned by the French businessman François-Henri Pinault and does not report financial results.)

Mr. Loeb has accused Sotheby’s of rebating the fees its takes for selling multimillion-dollar works, while also taking less of the buyer’s fees to attract more business. He has taken issue with the auction house’s strategy of focusing on top clients and headline sales. He has even criticized board members’ relatively low holdings of their own company’s stock.

In Sotheby’s view, Mr. Loeb has disrupted its business for months by contacting major employees and positioning himself as their new boss, while also suggesting that prominent art world figures consider becoming the auction house’s chief executive.

In the fall, he met with Jeff T. Blau, chief executive of the Related Companies, to discuss a possible move to Related’s Hudson Yards complex or the Time Warner Center, according to people briefed on the matter.

Company officials have also complained that Mr. Loeb has sometimes misunderstood the business. Moving Sotheby’s out of its current headquarters, for example, would make life difficult, given how customized it already is for the auction house.

And they have alluded to accusations that Mr. Loeb has committed “greenmail,” the frowned-upon practice of buying up big stakes in companies and then forcing them to buy the shares back. After winning an activist campaign at Yahoo — one of his biggest victories to date — the Internet company bought back the majority of Mr. Loeb’s stake a year later for $1.2 billion, yielding a significant profit.

Tyrone Siu/Reuters“Bloodline: Big Family No. 3” by the Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang, on preview at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong this month.

Though the billionaire investor first met with Sotheby’s last August, he came out swinging in October, when, in a typically Loeb-like letter, he disclosed a 9.3 percent stake. He now has a 9.6 percent stake.

He accused the auction house’s chairman and chief executive, William F. Ruprecht, of having outstayed his welcome while being paid a salary that “invokes the long-gone era of imperial C.E.O.s.” Ultimately, he demanded Mr. Ruprecht’s resignation.

Sotheby’s responded by instituting a poison pill, a defense that would limit activist investors from owning more than 10 percent of a company, a move that Mr. Loeb sneered was a “relic of the 1980s.”

Unusually, Mr. Loeb then went quiet, even as another hedge fund manager, Mick McGuire of Marcato Capital Management, announced a multipronged plan for the company to generate $1.3 billion in cash for shareholders. Mr. McGuire, who has a 6.6 percent stake, said this week that he would vote with Mr. Loeb at the annual meeting.

By January, Sotheby’s announced its own initiative to return $450 million to shareholders through dividend payouts and stock buybacks, after concluding a financial review initiated by its new chief financial officer, Patrick S. McClymont.

“We spoke with many of our shareholders, and we asked people for their thinking on these topics,” Mr. McClymont said at the time.

Privately, Mr. Loeb was holding talks with Mr. McClymont and Domenico De Sole, the dapper co-founder of the luxury clothier Tom Ford and Sotheby’s newly installed lead independent director. By winter, the hedge fund manager had dropped his demand that Mr. Ruprecht resign, a matter of some satisfaction for the company.

Sotheby’s offered to make Mr. Loeb a director and to give him plum board committee assignments, including its nominating committee. But Mr. Loeb, irritated by what he perceived was a disinterest in listening to him, argued that a single directorship could not drive home real change, and repeatedly demanded two seats.

Now the two sides are contesting three board seats.

Mr. Loeb has nominated himself and two associates, including Olivier Reza, a former investment banker whose jeweler family has done business with Sotheby’s. The auction house’s slate includes Jessica Bibliowicz, a financier and daughter of Citigroup’s former chief executive, Sanford I. Weill, and Robert S. Taubman, whose family rescued Sotheby’s from a hostile bid in the 1980s, but whose father was convicted in a big price-fixing scandal a decade ago.

Each side has fallen into the timeworn rhythms of a corporate proxy fight, flinging attacks at each other on an almost weekly basis. In its most recent counterpunch, Sotheby’s disclosed on Wednesday its preliminary first-quarter results, including a 34 percent jump in Impressionist and contemporary sales from the same time a year ago. Overall, net auction sales rose 40 percent, to $730 million, while the company’s overall loss narrowed to about $6 million.

In its report on Thursday, I.S.S. wrote that while Mr. Loeb’s plan lacked a solid vision, both his and Marcato’s critiques still had merit. “In the particulars of their criticisms of things like commission margin, there is credible reason to believe their larger criticism about strategic myopia has some credibility,” the advisory firm wrote.

To some outsiders, Sotheby’s seems to be receptive to some of its critics’ recommendations. The question is whether its executives are making certain changes fast enough.

“There is a lot of minutiae with this proxy battle,” said Oliver Chen, a luxury goods analyst with Citigroup. “But there are a lot of big-picture questions — for example, ensuring that the model has another 100 years ahead of it.”

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Full-Barreled Polke" @wsj By Lance Esplund

"Alibis," the Sigmar Polke retrospective now at the Museum of Modern Art, is one of the museum's largest exhibitions ever. It also ranks among the most repetitive and impenetrable.

In gallery six of the Museum of Modern Art’s enormous and noisy Sigmar Polke retrospective, one woman said to another: “Let’s get out of here. I’ve hit my saturation point.” Surrounded by work from the 1970s, she was only about halfway through the chronological survey, “Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010.” Yet I understood and envied her premature exit.

The two women had been dividing their attention between Polke’s large-scale illustrative drawing “Untitled” (1973), a comically exaggerated psychedelic rendition of pornography; and the 35-minute documentary film “Quetta’s Hazy Blue Sky / Afghanistan-Pakistan” (c. 1974-76). Distorted by the artist, it features men smoking cannabis; a costumed monkey performing acrobatic tricks; and a long, vicious bout in which dogs are pitted against a reluctant bear.

Like all of the 11 exhibition spaces in “Alibis,” gallery six is hung salon-style—cheek-to-jowl. But it’s especially trying. Polke (pronounced POLL-ka) was known to have made extensive use of recreational drugs. He also had a tendency, according to a gallery director who worked with him, to use his provocative artwork “to torture his friends.”

Gallery six is crammed with about 40 artworks from 1969 to 1978, including films with clashing soundtracks. Wall text informs us that because these artworks were created during “a time of great social, political and artistic unrest, as well as widespread experimentation with countercultural lifestyles and drugs,” MoMA’s “dense constellation” is intended to “evoke the stimulation of all the senses that occurs during a hallucination.” This is wishful-thinking. Let’s just call this portion of the show the worst leg of a bad trip.

Comprising more than 250 artworks amounting to roughly 370 individual paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, collages, sculptures, installations, soundworks and video screens, which loop more than nine hours of film, “Alibis” is one of the largest exhibitions ever at MoMA. It also ranks among the most repetitive and impenetrable. But according to the museum, bewilderment and nihilism are precisely the point of Polke’s art.

Polke (1941-2010) was born in the Silesian region of eastern Germany, what is now western Poland. He and his family fled Silesia in 1945, just before the end of the war, for what would soon be Soviet-occupied East Germany. In 1953, they escaped to West Germany, where the artist lived until the end of his life.

“Alibis” refers in part to postwar Germany where, to deflect blame for Nazi atrocities, the common line was “I didn’t see anything.” Yet here it has at least a double meaning. The show offers little of aesthetic value to “see.” (“It’s the processes in and for themselves that interest me,” Polke said. “The picture isn’t really necessary.”) The title also refers to Polke’s antiauthoritarian antics: He grew up trusting no one and nothing, which becomes an alibi for his gamesmanship and mistrust of art.

Polke was a postmodernist—he mocked and lampooned all artistic styles (figuration, abstraction, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism) and mediums (painting, film, sculpture, photography, craft, performance art). Jester-of-all-trades, he was actually, according to the show’s curators, “masquerading as many different artists.” But instead of variety we get the same joke—dressed up here as a photograph; over there as a painting—played out over and over again.

Organized by Kathy Halbreich and Lanka Tattersall, at MoMA, and Mark Godfrey, at London’s Tate Modern (where the show will open in October), “Alibis” celebrates Polke’s embrace of accident and chance; his distrust, exploitation and undermining of—as well as his irreverence toward—all things authoritative. Yet his primary target was art.

Deliberately disingenuous and ambiguous, Polke courted randomness through his appropriations and derisions. He riffed on Paul Gauguin, lifting and belittling his Polynesian women; and Albrecht Dürer, whose classic “Hare” Polke reduced to mere cartoon. He also played with Francisco de Goya, Roy Lichtenstein, Kazimir Malevich and Jackson Pollock. He noodled with comic books, magazine advertising, Rorschach tests, pornography and Victorian children’s books; atomic energy, the Berlin Wall, Nazi death camps and post-9/11 drone attacks. Often, Polke mixed artistic styles and political positions in a single soupy, seemingly unfinished artwork, as if—gunning for everyone—his position was: “Kill them all and let God sort them out.”

This sometimes meant killing the artworks themselves. Polke had a penchant for working in unorthodox materials such as soot, goofy printed fabrics, unprimed substrates and Bubble Wrap. A large yellow-orange canvas is dusted with meteorite granulite. A series of hot-pink chromogenic color prints have white halos, which have been made with radioactive uranium. He also embraced errors and accidents—blurring and overlaying negatives in the darkroom and moving images on the copy machine—as well as planned disintegration. Polke diluted photographic chemicals with coffee and dishwashing liquid. In one large painting in a series depicting concentration-camp watchtowers, he treated the finished picture with a light-sensitive silver oxide that eventually will darken completely black.

On the cover of the show’s catalog is a photo of Polke as a boy, controlling a marionette. The point, of course, is that he’s an artist working behind, above and beyond the scene—a master-prankster, a master-puppeteer. We—no less than art—are mere playthings for Polke; and we should be pleased to let him dangle us by the strings.

The great fallacy of this exhibition, however—and of Polke’s oeuvre—is especially apparent in the final gallery, which shifts to a more somber and reverent tone. After the show has pummeled visitors with the artist’s shenanigans, it suddenly want us to take Polke seriously as a craftsman with the aesthetic ability to handle the 2006 commission of a dozen stained-glass windows for Zurich’s Grossmünster cathedral.

Granted, a slideshow of the finished project is the best thing on view here. But you can’t have it both ways. Polke apprenticed early on as a painter at a stained-glass factory. His seven abstract windows exploring Genesis are made of translucent, thinly sliced, artificially colored agate. Naturally attractive, they conjure cellular growth and medieval illustrations of Creation. Yet, like a boy laughing in church, Polke can’t help himself. His windows work doggedly against the established metaphoric, geometric program of the cathedral. They betray Polke’s fundamental irreverence and subversiveness in a show where nothing is sacred.