George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "A Touching Connection" @wsj by Peter Plagens

'Accession V' (1968), by Eva Hesse The Eva Hesse Estate/ Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Austin, Texas

Artists learning from each other via affectionate, reciprocal influence concerning art itself seems a bit of a bygone thing these days. Now it's all about the rocket to stardom of the right graduate school, career connections and sensational subject matter. So the story of the artistic friendship and mutual influence of Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse—told through actual works of art, and correspondence, including one long, lovely and crucial letter—is not only art-historically significant, but poignant. One hopes it will also be instructional.

All of this is abundantly evident in "Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt," the astutely conceived, enlighteningly installed and brilliantly documented exhibition of about 50 works of art and some ancillary material at the Blanton Museum of Art. (Austin is a wonderful city, and the Blanton is a fine museum, but it's a pity that such a valuable show is not, as of this writing, scheduled to travel.)

The downtown New York art world in 1960 did have its cliques, but in the waning days of Abstract Expressionism and the waxing ones of Pop Art there was a certain bohemian earnestness to the scene. It had gotten brainier, with sensuality grudgingly semiburied. Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), who'd attended the Cartoonist and Illustrators School (now the School of Visual Arts) and had been a graphic designer for Seventeen magazine, was an aspiring artist just getting into it. He was still working a day job in the architectural offices of I.M. Pei. A colleague and friend in the firm, the then-junior architect Robert Slutzky, happened to know a young artist named Eva Hesse (1936-1970), and introduced her to LeWitt. LeWitt was "wowed" by the pretty Hesse, but the sexual attraction was not mutual. Still, they became fast friends.

Hesse—born in Germany and a survivor of the war, her parents' divorce, and her mother's suicide—made it to and through Yale University School of Art's graduate program. Her aesthetic—which had an all-too-brief, five-year public exposure before she died of a brain tumor—was organic, personal, intuitive. It was viscerally connected to the body and emphatically expressed by the vicissitudes of her hand.

LeWitt's style of art—maintained through a long career that nevertheless began only with his first solo exhibition at age 36—was diametrically opposite. He abided by a priori, self-set rules, and confined himself in sculpture to variations on the cube and, in wall drawings, to ruled lines.

LeWitt—as can be readily deduced from his intellectualized art—was a cool, steady-as-he-goes kind of guy who in his work, as catalog essayist Lucy Lippard says, "kept a distance from emotional issues." Hesse—if you read between the hagiographic lines—was a bit of a load. "My life and art have not been separated," she said. She was constantly in therapy and was plagued by doubts about the irrepressible goofiness (lumpy shapes, birthday-party colors, odd attachments) of her art. When she went off to a 15-month residency in Germany with her husband, the sculptor Tom Doyle (who was the more well-known artist, with his wife included as a semicourtesy), she was having a tough time of it. LeWitt, with whom she'd kept up an apparently chaste friendship and artist-to-artist correspondence, wrote her there: "You have possibly forgotten your state of mind (I doubt it though). You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it."

LeWitt's April 14, 1965, letter to Hesse is, in fact, one of the great documents of postwar art. In it, he commiserates with her about artists' constant—and necessary—reappraisals of their work, about constantly feeling one can do better, and about the occasional need to make some defiantly bad art. But the core of LeWitt's letter is both marvelously specific to Hesse's problems and applicable to just about every struggling neophyte artist everywhere:

"Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rumbling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning. . . . Stop it and just DO!"

Partially under LeWitt's influence, but mostly at the behest of her own quirky temperament, Hesse progressed from such insouciantly composed abstract mixed-media works on paper as "No Title" (1963), to more gridded versions of the same, to fully gridded gouaches on paper, to such arguably feminist riffs on LeWitt's precise, white, birdcagelike skeletal boxes as the vaguely vaginal "Accession V" (1968). Her total oeuvre, of course, strayed far from grids and boxes into hanging, coiled and semiscattered works made with such un-LeWittian and conservator's-nightmare materials as latex, cord, rubber and papier-caché. It's for these that Hesse is more well-known, and only a few examples—for instance, an untitled hanging black sculpture from 1966 that looks like a child sausage tethered to its parent—are included in "Converging Lines."

Hesse's impact on the actual look of LeWitt's art is more slight, but nevertheless persistent. When he heard about her death, LeWitt was preparing an exhibition in Paris. "I was thinking about her work and me and my work, too ... I just did a piece that sort of encompassed both of them": "Wall Drawing #46: Vertical Lines, not straight, not touching, covering the wall evenly" (1970). It was the first instance of LeWitt's departing from straight lines. That influence from Hesse can still be seen in "Wall Drawing #797" (1995), in which an initial, wavering hand-drawn horizontal line high on the wall is copied, at close intervals underneath, in alternating marker colors, until there's no more room at the bottom. (All wall drawings by LeWitt are re-created anew for each exhibition.) In terms of a more general influence, however, Hesse's memory stayed with LeWitt for almost 40 years. A good case can be made that her brief artistic life had a profound effect on him, deepening an already gentle, humanistic demeanor. Indeed, LeWitt later named one of his daughters Eva.

A word about the show's catalog: It's one of the best I've ever seen. Its size (generous, but not clumsily large), weight (hefty but not uncomfortable), fonts, paper, interior images and cover illustration (a 1968 work on paper by Hesse that gracefully sums up the show's premise) are just about perfect. The essays—by the show's curator, Veronica Roberts; art historian Kirsten Swenson; and Ms. Lippard, the veteran critic—are informative and argot-free. Though a map showing exactly where noted artists of the time lived in Lower Manhattan isn't strictly necessary, it'll probably be nice to have on hand through the years. The "Converging Lines" catalog should be a model for museum publications to come.

Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "MoMA’s Expansion and Director Draw Critics" @nytimes by Randy Kennedy

Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, overlooking the sculpture garden. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times

Glenn D. Lowry, who will soon begin his 20th year running the Museum of Modern Art, has a longstanding practice of taking time each week to visit artists’ studios. Which is why he could be found one recent morning along the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, watching the glass-blowing sculptor Josiah McElheny and assistants fashion a vessel from molten lumps, a process almost Elizabethan in its rituals.

“It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Lowry said. “It’s balletic, the way they move and work together.”

During his ambitious tenure at the museum’s helm, Mr. Lowry has choreographed a highly complex ballet of his own, one that has not always gone as smoothly. The most visible, and often most divisive, part of this dance has involved real estate, the museum’s frequent moves to carve space for itself from the dense heart of Midtown.

And its latest expansion, which begins Tuesday with the first stage of the controversial demolition of its architecturally distinctive neighbor, the former American Folk Art Museum, has brought to a boil many long-simmering complaints from art critics, artists, architects and patrons not only about the museum’s overall direction but also about its director.

As the number of visitors has more than doubled during Mr. Lowry’s tenure — to almost three million annually — there have been complaints from veteran patrons that the museum has grown too fast and lost much of its soul in courting the crowd.

Mr. Lowry is himself sometimes personally blamed for the museum’s image as a place that has become cold and corporate, that exercises its power too blithely and that is often out of touch with the sensibilities of contemporary artists. And within the museum, his forceful reshaping of a once-balkanized museum known for its powerful chief curators has resulted in complaints that the director has consolidated too much power around himself, sometimes making it difficult for curators to organize shows they think are important.

Over several hours of interviews recently, Mr. Lowry, 59, by turns resolute, reflective and cautiously defensive, sought to play down the long-term impact of the folk art building demolition on both the museum and himself. “Obviously I’m deeply empathetic to the feelings that that has elicited from a community we really care about,” he said. “On the other hand, sometimes you have to make really tough decisions if you think they’re right.” The decision has occasioned some “dark nights of the soul,” he said, but added: “If one’s tenure boils down to a construction program then something fundamental has been missed. And what I think is essential is the collection, the programs and the people.”

Many critics warn that MoMA’s second expansion in a decade — which will create an “art bay” open to West 53rd Street where “spontaneous events” could be accommodated; free admission for the entire first floor; and a new combination gallery-and-performance space — will move the museum only further in a crowd-pleasing direction, eroding the seriousness and critical distance from popular culture that built its reputation.

While the museum’s most dominant board members remain behind Mr. Lowry, other patrons strike a note of caution about its direction, worrying about MoMA’s becoming a place geared more for social interaction than thoughtful contemplation. “There are a number of us on the board who don’t want to see the museum become a mere entertainment center,” said Agnes Gund, who joined the board in 1976 and served as its president from 1991 until 2002.

Recent criticism of the museum has been remarkable for the depth of its anger. Jerry Saltz, in New York magazine, wrote that the expansion plan “irretrievably dooms MoMA to being a business-driven carnival.”

But Mr. Lowry said that for the museum to embrace art that is increasingly interactive and pop-culture infused, it had to risk such opposition. Under his leadership, he said, the museum has not only dived more energetically into contemporary art but has also broadened its overall focus to include more Latin American and non-Western art and more work by women (critics say it still has a long ways to go). It has also been more welcoming to performance-based art, though some of its forays — like the actress Tilda Swinton lying inside a big glass box — have been ridiculed as pandering or ham-handed.

“If we were being criticized for being timid, that would upset me,” Mr. Lowry said. “But if we’re being criticized because we’ve engaged spectacle or we engage popular culture in interesting ways,” then it does not worry him deeply.

When he was chosen to become the museum’s sixth director in 1995, Mr. Lowry was an unusual candidate, a Harvard-trained scholar of Islam lacking broad experience in modern or contemporary art. In five years running the Art Gallery of Ontario, he oversaw a major expansion but also the layoffs of half the museum’s staff amid steep government funding cuts.

During his time in New York, he has overseen the most fundamental transformation of the Museum of Modern Art in its history. It has almost doubled in size while increasing exhibition space, to 125,000 square feet from 85,000. Its endowment has almost quadrupled, to nearly a billion dollars. Extensive collections — in Conceptualism, Modernist photography and work from the Fluxus movement — have been acquired, as well as major pieces by artists like Cindy Sherman and Richard Serra.

Over his tenure, the full admission price has also more than tripled, to $25 from $8, and Mr. Lowry has become one of the nation’s highest-paid museum chiefs. He earned $1.8 million a year in salary and other benefits as of the most recent disclosures and lives rent-free in a museum-owned apartment with his wife, Susan, a landscape architect. (The couple have three grown children.)

Peers at other museums have described Mr. Lowry’s early years in the job as marked by sharp competitiveness and a thin-skinned sensitivity toward criticism. Recently, they say, he has grown more collegial and more sure-footed in the museum’s artistic terrain. But they add that they sense a continuing frustration in him at not being viewed the way, for example, Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate art museums, is seen in London, as a visionary curatorial molder of an institution.

Robert Storr, a former senior paintings and sculpture curator at the museum and a vocal critic of Mr. Lowry’s, contends that he has “gutted the museum in terms of its curatorial traditions and made it a very unpleasant place to work,” in part because he “simply does not understand modern and contemporary art and is rivalrous with the people who do.”

“I love the museum, and I don’t want to be seen as a MoMA basher. I am not,” said Mr. Storr, who left the museum in 2002 after 12 years and has been dean of the Yale University School of Art since 2006. “But I fear some of the damage done is nearly irreversible.”

Mr. Lowry evinces little of the frustration described by his critics. And he denies he has sought to consolidate directorial power for his own sake but only to push curators to operate more collaboratively, to make the museum more nimble.

“I hope that I’m the kind of person who leads from behind, not in front,” he said recently in his office, where a Donald Judd sculpture hangs behind his desk. He declined to address Mr. Storr’s criticisms specifically. “The fact that he’s an ardent critic of the institution is something that we all have to live with,” he said, “but it doesn’t take away from his talent.”

But Mr. Lowry said he has been deeply concerned with a perception of the museum and of himself as corporate.

“It leaves me somewhat puzzled,” he said, protesting that he does not come from a business background. But, he added, “It’s a moniker that has stuck, so it clearly has some traction.” His own passions, he said, continue to be what they have been since the day he rejected a pre-med education and dived into art as a scholar and later a curator at the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries: artists, art history and research.

Mr. Lowry’s tenure was praised by Marie-Josée Kravis, the museum’s board president; Sharon Percy Rockefeller, a trustee whose family was instrumental in the museum’s founding; and Jerry I. Speyer, the board chairman and real-estate magnate. “I think it would be a mistake for him to be influenced by a handful of people who have personal grudges,” Mr. Speyer said.

He added, “The best way to frame it is that I think Glenn could run any American company he chose to run, any foundation he chose to run, any university he chose to run.”

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But lavish as such praise is, it probably does not describe Mr. Lowry fully as he would like to be described. “Glenn, from the beginning, didn’t want to be seen as a manager,” Ms. Gund said. “I do think it has had some effect in the past on who was there and who decided to leave. But that’s in the past, and it should probably be left in the past.” She added        

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Ai Weiwei's Visions Of Jail and Mopeds"@ wsj by Mary M. Lane

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "MoMA Plans a Robert Gober Retrospective" @nytimes

An untitled installation by Robert Gober from 1992 that features a hand-painted forest mural. Credit 2014 Robert Gober, Bill Jacobson/Matthew Marks Gallery

It seems almost inconceivable that there has never been a Robert Gober retrospective in an American museum. This 59-year-old artist, who rose to prominence in the mid-1980s, is perhaps best known for his creepy sculptures of body parts — a cast wax leg or torso with individually applied hairs on them — as well as his signature sinks fashioned from plaster painted with enamel.

But for several years now, Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, has been quietly working on “The Heart Is Not a Metaphor,” a large-scale survey of Mr. Gober’s work, which will be on view there from Oct. 11 to Jan. 18, 2015. The show’s title, chosen by Mr. Gober, is taken from a sentence in “Sleepless Nights,” a 1979 novel by Elizabeth Hardwick, because, Ms. Temkin said, he often chooses enigmatic phrases for exhibitions.

So often, organizing an exhibition of a living artist’s work can be a tug-of-war between curator and artist. But what few realize is that, in addition to being a celebrated artist, Mr. Gober is also an active curator. He has organized exhibitions, like the paintings of Charles Burchfield at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Whitney Museum of American Art; he also put together a room of works by the painter Forrest Bess at the Whitney’s 2012 Biennial. “Robert is totally involved and approaching himself as if he were one of his subjects,” Ms. Temkin said.

Over the years, he has been particularly influential among a generation of artists too young to have seen his only previous retrospective, which took place in 2007 at the Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland, or the meticulously carved doll’s house that he made when he was just 24 and struggling to get by, which was included in the 2013 Venice Biennale (organized by Cindy Sherman).

The show at MoMA will include about 130 works in all mediums. There will be many well-known objects but also some rare sculptures and new works made just for the retrospective.

Because some of his sculptural installations involve plumbing — like sinks and bathtubs with running water — and others, like a room-size, hand-painted mural depicting a New England forest in summer, need space, the show will take place in the contemporary art galleries on the second floor, rather than the museum’s special exhibition galleries on the sixth.

ART AS MAGAZINE INSERT

In January 2013, to celebrate its 100th anniversary, the magazine Art in America lined up a year’s worth of artists to design its monthly covers. Big names like Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Urs Fischer and Louise Lawler have all been contributors. “We’ve loved doing it so much we’ve just continued,” said Lindsay Pollock, the editor in chief.

Now, the magazine is going one better. Tucked inside the May issue, on newsstands April 29, will be a specially commissioned print by Jasper Johns on perforated paper that can be carefully torn out and framed. A black-and-white lithograph on translucent vellum, it depicts many of Mr. Johns’s signature motifs: numbers, a map of the United States and sign language.

“Amid all the recent consternation about the art world’s fixation on money and glitz, Jasper Johns and Art in America are going against the grain by offering a substantial, free piece of art by a legendary artist,” Ms. Pollock said.

The print is a co-publication with the independent curator and print expert Sharon Hurowitz and has been produced by Bill Goldston, the print publisher, at Universal Limited Art Editions. It is only the second time Mr. Johns has collaborated with a magazine on a project. In 1973, he produced a print called “Cups 2 Picasso,” for XXieme Siècle, a French publication.

BURIED IN THE SUBURBS

A pair of 14-foot-tall salvaged box trucks, their cabs submerged in the ground and set amid the impeccably manicured polo fields that surround the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Conn., may seem like a messy intrusion. They are meant to. But the installation, which the New York artist Dan Colen has titled “At Least They Died Together (After Dash),” will be the first thing visitors see.

“It’s about bringing the city to some other place,” Mr. Colen said. “I wanted to bring a bit of the city with me. From a distance they will just look like minimal cubes.”

Mr. Colen found the trucks on Craigslist. “At first I was looking for trucks with graffiti on them, but then I changed my mind because graffiti seemed too redundant,” he said.

The title refers to a collage that his friend, the artist Dash Snow, gave him before his death in 2009. It is a prelude to “Help!” a comprehensive show of his work on view there from May 11 through Sept. 7. Included in the show are more than 45 paintings, 15 sculptures, drawings and one video.

“Dan’s one of the better painters around,” said Peter Brant, the collector and founder of the foundation, who coincidentally owns Art in America. “I’ve been collecting his work for six or seven years now.”

SPONSOR REOPENS WALLET

Since opening its elegantly pleated, stainless-steel building designed by Zaha Hadid in 2012, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University in East Lansing has presented 32 exhibitions and attracted more than 125,000 people, which is boosting the local economy there by about $5 million a year, according to museum officials.

To mark Michael Rush’s second year as director, Mr. Broad, the Los Angeles financier who founded the institution with his wife, has given $5 million to increase its exhibition endowment and to provide annual funds for shows over the next five years. The Broads provided the initial $28 million gift for the design and construction of the museum and for its endowment, which now totals $33 million.

George Lindemann Journal by Goerge Lindemann - "A Provocateur’s Medium: Outrage" @nytimes by Roberta Smith

The 2012 survey of the courageous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei seen at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington has finally arrived in New York, and is much improved. The show, “Ai Weiwei: According to What?,” which opens Friday at the Brooklyn Museum, has been beefed up throughout, but most notably by two installation pieces completed in 2013. One, “S.A.C.R.E.D.,” is perhaps the best work of art Mr. Ai has yet made.

As a result, this show is far clearer and more gripping than its original incarnation and something of a triumph. It brings many of Mr. Ai’s past efforts into focus as the juvenilia they often were, while making a persuasive case for his ability periodically to reconcile art and ideals and life — which in his case is usually, unavoidably, political — into a memorable balance.

The show originated at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, organized by Mami Kataoka, its chief curator. The Brooklyn presentation has been expertly overseen by Ms. Kataoka and Sharon Matt Atkins, the museum’s managing curator of exhibitions.

           

Mr. Ai is a complex, troublesome figure: an artistic provocateur who works in several mediums, an activist and thorn in the side of the Chinese powers that be and an impresario able to marshal scores of variously adept Chinese artisans to make ambitious pieces that he barely touches. He’s also a designer and part-time architect who collaborated with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on the emblematic “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. And he was the darling of the Chinese power structure, until he began jumping in where he wasn’t invited.

Initially, he made his presence felt on his outspoken blog, complaining about the destruction of the old alleyway neighborhoods of Beijing to make way for the Olympics (his involvement with the Bird’s Nest notwithstanding) — until the blog was shut down by the government in 2009. That year he was beaten by the police when, in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, he began to agitate for more information about the shoddily built schools that collapsed, killing thousands of children. Then he was held incommunicado for 81 days in 2011, and, since his release, he has been prohibited from traveling beyond Beijing.

That restriction has not stopped him from making artworks and spiriting them out of China, or from sending assistants to oversee his exhibitions.

Some Westerners may wonder why Mr. Ai doesn’t find a way to leave China (ignoring that his every move is carefully watched). But Mr. Ai is not like, say, a Russian ballet star, who can usually perform as well in London or New York as in Moscow.

Mr. Ai would be nothing without China. His country, its history, its artistic and material culture, its totalitarian government and the travails of its people drive his art. Conversely his art at its best bears witness to the often perverse machinations of the state. His recurrent theme, that of an individual wrestling with all this, is sometimes superficially touched upon in his earlier pieces and is usually detailed in wall labels. More recently, it is profoundly and frighteningly invoked.

This is the case with “S.A.C.R.E.D.,” which was exhibited at the Venice Biennale last year and is now in the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum, where people see it as they enter and again as they leave. It brackets the rest of the show.

On first sight, its six imposing iron boxes resemble a work by Richard Serra. But each box has a firmly shut door and step-size iron boxes upon which visitors stand to peer down through an opening in the top. Inside is a roughly half-scale diorama of the tiny, sparsely furnished cell in which Mr. Ai spent his 81 days of detention. Each includes a painted fiberglass sculpture of Mr. Ai performing one of his daily activities — sleeping, eating, showering, using the toilet — always accompanied by two uniformed guards who seem deliberately to crowd him.

With each successive box, we follow Mr. Ai from chair, to bed, to table, watching a government trying to break an individual without touching him. Because it is enacted in almost real space, the piece gives this tactic a visceral immediacy greater than writing, photography or perhaps even film. This makes sense: Confinement is spatial limitation. The slightly reduced size enables you take in these scenes all at once, to get the picture and empathize, but also to conduct your own surveillance.

“S.A.C.R.E.D.” sets a high standard, a level to which the other works don’t always rise. That’s certainly true of “Stacked,” the newest and largest installation, which is also in the lobby. Consisting of his signature Chinese bicycle frames, but this time copies made from stainless steel, it is the latest, extravagant expression of his continuing involvement with Duchamp’s principle of the ready-made.

The ready-made that serves Mr. Ai best is life itself. As “S.A.C.R.E.D” implies, his strength is as a kind of imaginative documentarian who figures out ways to bring reality close, sometimes unbearably so. This gift has long been evident in his photographs, which are well represented here in gritty black and white, recording his life as a young artist in both New York (where he lived from 1983 to 1993) and Beijing; and in color images papering the walls that show the building of the gigantic Bird’s Nest as well as the destruction that cleared space for the Olympic build-out.

Further color images flutter past on a dozen monitors in “258 Fake,” an ebullient document of his life centered on a studio populated by friends, assistants and cats. (Mr. Ai calls his studio Fake, and 258 is its actual street number.) The documentary impulse is also evident in the show’s increasingly searing videos, one of which follows the plight of a woman infected as a child with H.I.V. from a blood transfusion in a Chinese hospital, part of a medical system that only grudgingly acknowledges her disease.

More traditional notions of the ready-made operate in the first gallery, which concentrates on Mr. Ai’s early work of the last decade. The space is dominated by sculptures made from lustrous wood and antique furniture salvaged from houses and temples doomed by the Olympics. Especially good are his reconfigured Qing dynasty tables, their legs planted on both the floor and the wall as if under great strain. Even better is “Kippe,” an exquisite wood-pile-like mass of scraps that suggest a funeral pyre.

Otherwise, the sadness of the stories is provided by the labels, though the pieces themselves are primarily familiar forms of international Conceptual sculpture translated into local materials. You glimpse Mr. Ai’s implicit rebelliousness in his repainted Han dynasty vases and photographic triptychs showing him dropping the irreplaceable objects, shocking gestures that gain resonance from his recent work.

Two other high points are room-size installations. One is an enlarged version of “Straight,” which consists of 73 tons of rebar (nearly double the tonnage at the Hirshhorn show) salvaged from the collapsed schools of the Sichuan earthquake, painstakingly straightened so that nothing appears to have been amiss and stacked in a thick undulating carpet that visitors walk around. It suggests both a landscape and the orderliness of a morgue. Its stark density balances its tragic back story. (But a large snake made of children’s backpacks coiled on the ceiling is an earthquake commemoration whose lightheartedness is almost insensitive.)

The other work is “Ye Haiyan’s Belongings,” named for a Chinese women’s rights advocate. The government has responded to her activism with repeated evictions, the last time dumping her and her daughter on the side of a highway. Mr. Ai responded first with financial aid and then turned Ms. Ye’s hastily packed household goods into a fairly successful artwork.

Four walls of the gallery are papered floor to ceiling with images of neatly arranged possessions of Ms. Ye and her daughter: clothes, CDs, teapots, rice bowls. This rather cheerful surround contrasts with the dusty and desolate array of the items themselves, packed in shabby cardboard boxes and suitcases on the floor, along with appliances, a motorbike and a bicycle.

In these last two works and in “S.A.C.R.E.D.,” we feel the crushing vortexes that the Chinese government creates for its citizens, sometimes in groups, sometimes individually. It is not clear how often Mr. Ai will find ways to enter these maelstroms and make them hauntingly, even beautifully, visible. But for as long as he can we will be lucky.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Found Everything, Tried Everything, All His Own Way" @nytimes by HOLLAND COTTER

Get confused is the first and last message of “Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010” at the Museum of Modern Art. And if you think, as I do, that some degree of continuing bafflement is a healthy reaction to art, this disorienting contact high of a show is for you.

Polke, who died in 2010 at 69, is usually mentioned in the same breath with two German near-contemporaries, Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter, as one of the great European male artists of the postwar years. Of the three, though, he was the most resistant to branding, and is still the hardest to get a handle on.

In media, he was all over the map: painting (abstract and figurative), drawing, photography, collage, sculpture, film, installation, performance, sound art; he did them all, often messy, counterintuitive combinations. Stylistically, he brushed up against Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism, only to lift their moves and mock them.

He had a thing about making art from weird materials: tawdry fabrics, radioactive pigments, liquid detergent, soot. He put the discipline in interdisciplinary under stress. His work can be daintily detailed and virtuosic, but it can also look polish-aversive and incomplete. Sometimes he seems to start a painting or a drawing, then stop, as if to say: You get the idea.

For a long time, museums and galleries didn’t know how to deal with him; that is, with all of him. The standard procedure was to isolate a slice of work that had some visual and thematic coherence: pictures sharing a color, say, or ones with lots of the hand-applied, Benday-style dots that the market pushed as a Polke signature. The prospect of a survey that brought the full range of his multifarious output together under one roof must have seemed daunting even to Polke himself. But that’s what MoMA has done in a show that fills all of its second-floor contemporary galleries, including the atrium, and then some.

The arrangement is mostly by date, though because Polke was an accumulator, a recycler and a mix-master of styles, that doesn’t give viewers a visual narrative line to follow. Nor have the curators — Kathy Halbreich and Lanka Tattersall of MoMA, and Mark Godfrey of the Tate Modern — provided object labels. Instead, and this an excellent idea, they’ve designed a free, gallery-by-gallery, work-by-work checklist, a kind of Baedeker for the perplexed that incorporates some useful commentary. (Ms. Halbreich’s catalog essay, by the way, is superb.)

Even with that, the show throws you right in at the deep end. The opening installation, in the atrium and first gallery, spans 40 years of Polke’s career, looks like a multiartist group show, and just says: Deal with it. And so, without a compass, you do, taking in at one sweep 1960s drawings of flying saucers and swastikas; jumpy films shot in Zurich and Papua New Guinea; a big, fluffy 2003 fabric collage titled “Season’s Hottest Trend”; a giant digital print tracing the routes of United States Predator drones after Sept. 11.

From this array, you learn that Polke’s art was sometimes antagonistically political, though its politics could be hard to decipher outside a very specific cultural context. A Pop-ish-looking 1960s painting of neatly folded dress shirts refers to the “economic miracle” that was restoring a defeated Germany to bourgeois prosperity. A companion picture in the same style — “Capitalist Realism,” Polke called it — of a minute figure sucking in sausages nails the new consumerism as a form of binge-eating-till-you-black-out, designed to induce amnesia about the wartime past.

That past was Polke’s past. He was born in 1941 into a German bourgeois family that was forced to move from German Silesia (now part of Poland) to Soviet-occupied East Germany before escaping to West Germany in 1953. As a teenager, he apprenticed in a stained-glass factory, then from 1961 to 1967 studied at the Arts Academy in Düsseldorf. There he befriended Mr. Richter, who, like many other students, was under the spell of Joseph Beuys. At once attracted by, and skeptical of, Beuys’s charisma, Polke pulled back and went his own way, which became the pattern of his life.

“Fathers are depressing,” Gertrude Stein said. Polke seemed to agree. So did the antiauthoritarian era during which he came into his own as an artist, and in which he immersed himself, living and working communally, engaging in love fests and drug fests, traveling, cameras always in hand, through the Middle East, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. He remained, in certain ways, an unreconstructed 1960s person to the end of his life, fascinated with esoteric philosophies, paranormal phenomena, alchemy and psychochemical exploration. These elements contributed to his outsider identity within the international art world and shaped his art.

A couple of galleries into the show, you come upon a kind of cosmopolitan hippie encampment. Films Polke shot in Pakistan and Brazil are playing. Hazy pictures he took of men on the Bowery line a wall. And there are some fantastic paintings and drawings that layer 19th-century engravings; fabrics printed with Gauguin’s South Seas beauties; references to “higher beings” (Blake, Goya, Dürer); and images of mushrooms and skulls.

In a show that has the variety and novelty of a souk, hierarchies of “value” evaporate. High versus low, modern versus traditional, art versus craft, genuine versus inauthentic: None of these, Polke suggests, are really opposites. And even art he derides he takes seriously. He lampoons the pretensions of painterly abstraction — its egocentricity, its political escapism — but he also sticks up for it. How could you not defend an art that the Third Reich condemned as “degenerate”?

Abstraction also gave Polke a pretext to go wild with the alchemic outré: Arsenic, meteorite dust, coffee and soap were precious work materials. And even in his abstraction, politics was never far away. A series of auralike photographs made by placing radioactive uranium on photographic plates had to have a loaded meaning for someone raised in the shadow of the Cold War. Semiabstract depictions of wooden watchtowers, traditional German hunting perches, take on inescapable associations with death camp architecture.

Yet even in these ominous pictures, he fools around, delights in deviance, frustrates interpretive closure. One watchtower is painted on garishly cheery floral fabric; another is done on Bubble Wrap. A third has been washed with a light-sensitive silver oxide solution that will darken to black over time, obliterating the image.

Accident, serendipitous or engineered, became the foundation for much of Polke’s late work: paintings based on commercial printing errors or on images the artist dragged across screens of copying machines. And in 2006, he went back to his beginnings with a commission for stained-glass window design from the Grossmünster cathedral in Zurich, home church to Huldrych Zwingli, an iconoclastic force in the Protestant Reformation.

Seven of Polke’s windows are devoted to the theme of the Creation, and he turned them into the equivalent of a 1960s light show: abstract compositions made from clusters of thin-sliced, odd-shaped, color-dyed agates that suggest cellular forms. You see them in a video at the end of the show, images of primal slime with a sunlit, mescaline glow.

Unlike Mr. Richter and Mr. Kiefer, Polke remains something of a puzzle when taken piece by piece. There are powerful things at MoMA, but also scraps, doodles, studies, toss-offs that can make you think, “Why am I looking at this?” It’s easy to envision a more tightly edited take on this artist, one that would make him look more ordinarily Great. But it turns out that his career is more interesting and unusual when seen episodically, mixed up, en masse. He has this, and other things, in common with Mike Kelley (1954-2012), whose survey at MoMA PS 1 last fall feels, in retrospect, like a bookend to the Polke show.

Both artists are perplexing in similar ways. Their art is both protean and of a piece, riddled with weaknesses — fussbudgety viewers can have a field day with Polke; they did with Kelley — that add up to a strength. Museums want masterpieces, but Polke, though he produced some, was into process, not perfection. Art history wants wrap-ups, final accounts. The Polke retrospective is such an account, written with commas, colons, semicolons, dashes, ellipses, parentheses, but no periods, no full stops.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Two Miami-Dade museums win Kellogg Foundation grants" @miamiherald by Hannah Sampson

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Mapplethorpe: A Sculptural Perspective" @nytimes by MARA HOBERMAN

PARIS — In an interview published in 1988, Robert Mapplethorpe mused, “If I had been born 100 or 200 years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make sculpture.” This spring, 25 years after his death, two Paris museums are working in tandem to showcase the importance of sculpture to the American photographer’s oeuvre.

The largest-ever retrospective of the artist’s work is now on view at the Grand Palais here until July 13 and, across the Seine, the Musée Rodin is holding an exhibition that juxtaposes Mapplethorpe’s photographs with Rodin’s bronze, plaster and marble works through Sept. 21. The complementary shows — which were conceived in conjunction with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and share some of the same curators — try to link the photographer’s carefully composed black-and-white nudes and still lifes to sculpture. They hope to offer a fresh perspective on an artist whose classical aesthetic is often overshadowed by the sexual themes of his work and his role in America’s culture wars of the late 1980s.

“Mapplethorpe always said that his goal was to achieve perfection in form, which is of course an ideal that links him to Michelangelo,” said Jérôme Neutres, the head curator of the Grand Palais retrospective. By approaching the photographer within the context of European sculpture, the organizers of “Robert Mapplethorpe” hope to provide a new way for viewers to connect to a well-known artist’s body of work.

Michelangelo’s “Dying Slave,” a highlight of the Louvre’s sculpture collection, was one of Mapplethorpe’s earliest subjects. His 1974 Polaroid of a book reproduction of the Renaissance masterpiece is not included in Mr. Neutres’s exhibition, but it appears in the catalog. Among the more than 250 Mapplethorpe photographs at the Grand Palais, lesser-known still lifes of Neoclassical bronze and marble sculptures are shown next to some of his most famous nudes, including his 1981 “Ajitto” series featuring a black man posing on a pedestal.

“Mapplethorpe-Rodin,” meanwhile, tries to tie Mapplethorpe to one of the most important French artists of the 19th century whose iconic sculpture, The Thinker, has become a symbol of French culture. More than a hundred Mapplethorpe photographs, all loans from the Mapplethorpe foundation in New York, are mounted on glass walls in front of 50 Rodin sculptures in thematic subgroups like “Eroticism and Damnation” and “Movement and Tension.” The curators of the two exhibitions, who worked together for more than two years, have collectively brought 350 diverse Mapplethorpe works to the French capital, many from the foundation but also from institutions and private collections.

Having shown in private galleries in Paris as early as 1978, Mapplethorpe is well known in France. Daniel Templon, who exhibited Mapplethorpe at his Paris gallery in 1985, recalled ample attention for the “legendary New York artist, almost on the level of Andy Warhol.” Somewhat curiously, however, France has not organized a solo museum show since the artist’s death in 1989. Sean Kelly, whose New York gallery has represented the Mapplethorpe Estate in the United States for a decade, said: “It should be applauded that after a bit of a drought Paris has really stepped up with these two shows that present Mapplethorpe in such a profound, informed and substantial way.”

The French curators play up the early appreciation for Mapplethorpe in Paris (not to mention his interest in the writings of Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet), but the photographer had a distinctly New York pedigree. Born in Queens in 1946, he studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn before moving to Manhattan in 1969, where he mingled with Warhol’s entourage at the nightclub Max’s Kansas City and lived with the poet and singer Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel.

Immersing himself in two of the city’s underground scenes — avant-garde art and S-and-M — Mapplethorpe gained recognition in the 1970s with his photographs of both crowds. In the late 1980s, he made national headlines when the Corcoran Gallery in Washington canceled his exhibition, which included homoerotic and sadomasochistic content, amidst a political uproar over public financing for the arts.

The exhibitions here keep the focus on form and away from politics. “Europeans have a more direct involvement with Mapplethorpe’s work that is not filtered through the censorship controversy, which was entirely an American affair,” said Jonathan Nelson, a professor of art history at Syracuse University in Florence who organized an exhibition of Mapplethorpe photographs alongside Michelangelo sculptures at Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia in 2009. “These shows in Paris allow us to evaluate and appreciate Mapplethorpe as an artist.”

At the Grand Palais, photographs of sculptures appear next to sculptural portraits, including those of the female body builder Lisa Lyon and various muscular men striking athletic poses, from Mapplethorpe’s 1980s “Black Males” series. Similarities abound between what Mr. Neutres describes in the exhibition catalog as Mapplethorpe’s “bodies of bronze and sculptures of flesh.”

In a photograph of Dennis Speight from 1983, for example, the model’s bare dark chest and chiseled biceps appear as hard and polished as a bronze “Spartacus” that Mapplethorpe photographed in 1988. In a 1981 nude portrait of Ms. Lyon, Mapplethorpe has posed her in front of a drop cloth and cropped out her arms, neck and head. The image hangs next to his 1978 photograph of a marble female torso, whose head, arms and lower legs are missing.

“Whether shooting a portrait or a statue, he had the same concerns: lighting, composition and angles,” said Dimitri Levas, who worked as Mapplethorpe’s art director and sourced many of the elements that appeared in his still-life photographs. Mr. Levas, who now sits on the Mapplethorpe foundation’s board of directors, described the artist as having “a classical eye; form was always very important to him.”

The Grand Palais also showcases Mapplethorpe’s own sculptures, a less well-known aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. Among the handful of three-dimensional works on view are a 1968 Joseph Cornell-inspired assemblage, a 1983 Catholic cross made of white carpet, and a folding screen made in 1986 whose panels feature photographs of nudes and flowers.

At the Musée Rodin, Hélène Pinet, the show’s co-curator (and an associate curator of the Grand Palais exhibition), said, “It’s possible that Mapplethorpe saw Rodin’s sculptures when he was in Paris, and certainly he could have seen them in New York at The Met. But with this exhibition we are creating a discourse that didn’t actually exist.”

This is not the first time the two artist’s works have been brought together. In 1992, the Italian curator and art historian Germano Celant organized an exhibition titled “Mapplethorpe versus Rodin” at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.

Ms. Pinet said she and her co-curators, Hélène Marraud and the art critic Judith Benhamou-Huet (also credited as an associate curator of the Grand Palais show), “began with Mapplethorpe, first choosing photographs from his oeuvre and then putting these together with works by Rodin according to seven themes.” She added: “We were surprised just how many relationships between these two artists we found and how rich the aesthetic comparisons are.”

Illustrating the artists’ common appreciation for the human form and attraction to contrasting textures, Mapplethorpe’s 1980 portrait of Ms. Lyon (a favorite model because of her self-sculpted physique) reclining on a rocky cliff is paired with a circa 1910 Rodin marble where two polished female nudes emerge from a roughly hewn base. Parallels are also drawn between Rodin’s plaster sculptures of disembodied hands and feet and Mapplethorpe’s tight crops of the same body parts. And photographs of Patti Smith draped in white gauze echo a Rodin study for his famous sculpture of Balzac, in which he shrouded the writer’s sculpted body with fabric dipped in wet plaster.

“When Mapplethorpe photographed sculptures he made them come alive,” Ms. Pinet said. “And when he photographed people he turned them into sculptures. This is really an astonishing thing.”

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Warhol and Basquiat at New York Auctions in May" @wsj by Kelly Crow

Andy Warhol's 'Six Self-Portraits' © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, NY/Sotheby's

Want to bet on a painting? Be ready to hang onto it for a long time. That's a lesson to be gleaned from a group of artworks headed to auction next month in New York.

In late 1981, Maryland collector Anita Reiner stepped into the New York basement of dealer Annina Nosei's gallery and watched a 21-year-old street artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, paint his self-portrait in the guise of a warrior king standing against a sunset-colored sky. Ms. Reiner bought it on the spot. On May 13, Ms. Reiner's heirs plan to resell the untitled work at Christie's for at least $20 million. Christie's specialist Brett Gorvy said the painting ranks among the artist's largest canvases, and it hasn't been seen publicly until now.

                                  

Untitled work by Jean-Michel Basquiat The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris/ARS, NY/Christie's Images Ltd.

The Reiner Family Collection is also selling off six other pieces by artists like Robert Gober, Paul McCarthy and Urs Fischer, Mr. Gorvy added.

Over at Sotheby's, London stockbroker Barry Townsley is offering up Andy Warhol's "Six Self-Portraits," that the artist assembled for his last London gallery show in 1986. These so-called "fright wig" silkscreens show the artist wearing his signature wig and staring piercingly at the viewer. Four years ago, designer Tom Ford sold a wall-size, purple "fright wig" Warhol for $32.5 million at Sotheby's. On May 14, the house will ask at least $25 million for Mr. Townsley's group of 22-inch versions, which are silkscreened in differing candy colors.

Mr. Townsley declined to comment, but dealers say he has often told friends about the good-luck day he walked into Anthony D'Offay's gallery on the eve of Warhol's show and paid $57,500 for the six artworks. Sotheby's expert Oliver Barker confirmed the price but said he could not discuss the seller.

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

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Architects Mourn Former Folk Art Museum Building" @nytimes by ROBIN POGREBIN

Scaffolding on the former Folk Art Museum building on West 53rd Street. Credit Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

As scaffolding went up around the former Folk Art Museum building on Tuesday, one of its two architects broke his silence to say how devastated he and his partner are about the Museum of Modern Art’s decision to tear down “one of our most important buildings to date.”

“Yes, all buildings one day will turn to dust, but this building could have been reused,” Tod Williams said in his first interview since the Modern announced the demolition of this West 53rd Street building, completed in 2001. “Unfortunately, the imagination and the will were not there.”

Until now, Mr. Williams and his partner, Billie Tsien, have declined to be interviewed about MoMA’s hotly debated decision. Instead, since January, when MoMA confirmed its conclusion that the neighboring Folk Art Museum building could not be salvaged, this husband-and-wife architectural team had let a prepared statement speak for them.

Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien issued another such statement on Tuesday, in response to the appearance of scaffolding around the building, which MoMA bought in 2011 when the folk museum vacated it because of financial troubles.

“A building admired, visited and studied by so many will now be reduced to memory,” the statement said. “We understand the facade will be put in storage, but we worry it will never be seen again.”

MoMA declined to comment. It has defended the demolition as necessary for its expansion. The museum plans to extend galleries through the Folk Art Museum site and into new exhibition space that will be part of a tower to the west, designed by Jean Novel for the Houston developer Hines.

In response to protests, though, MoMA agreed to preserve the Folk Art Museum’s 82-foot-high facade, which is being removed ahead of the rest of the building; its future is unclear. For now, it will be transported to one of the museum’s storage sites. An ensemble of 63 copper-bronze panels, it was the most celebrated architectural feature of the building.

Some new homes for the facade have been floated, Mr. Williams said, including MoMA/P.S. 1 in Long Island City, Queens. This idea was proposed by Nina Libeskind — chief operating officer of the architectural practice of her husband, Daniel Libeskind — and Fredric M. Bell, executive director of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

“I believe strongly that the facade of that building was an integral part of the New York cityscape and that it should have, and could have, been incorporated into MoMA’s plans,” Ms. Libeskind said in an interview. “It’s a valuable piece of architecture that should be kept.”

Ms. Libeskind said she and Mr. Bell are scheduled to meet with MoMA about their proposal next week. “Whether or not they accept that, I have no idea,” she said. “I think it is a reasonable, very intelligent alternative.”

Asked why he and Ms. Tsien had not addressed the facade’s future earlier, Mr. Williams said, “We held out hope, even when we knew there was very little hope, that the complete building could be saved.” He added, “We were focused on saving the building so we did not think of the facade as a separate piece.”

Mr. Williams said he appreciated recent proposals to reuse the most publicly recognizable portion of the building, though he and Ms. Tsien have always maintained that the facade and the building were

That said, Mr. Williams explained that during the construction process, the facade was attached to the building as a separate element — “as an architectural mask.” Though fragments of buildings have been preserved at places like the Cloisters and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. Williams said, “the idea of installing a few panels somewhere doesn’t interest me.”

When asked whether MoMA had contacted him and Ms. Tsien, Mr. Williams said, “Only when we were notified that the building would be torn down.”

He declined to address the personal issues involved; the situation has been particularly thorny because the Modern’s expansion plan involves another pair of architects with whom he and Ms. Tsien were friends: Elizabeth Diller and Ric Scofidio. That husband-and-wife team are part of Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the firm hired by MoMA to evaluate whether the existing folk art building could be integrated into the Modern’s expansion plans. Ms. Diller declined to comment.      

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/arts/design/architects-mourn-former-folk-art-museum-building.html?ref=arts&_r=0&assetType=nyt_now