The Gang’s All There, Talking Art in Qatar

Eyes in Doha Are on Damien Hirsts and Warhols

Natalie Naccache for The New York Times

The Qatar Museums Authority’s Al Riwaq exhibition space in Doha is decorated as a giant Damien Hirst spot painting.

                                                                                                                

Balance the buzz and the business: That seems to be the motto of the 11th Frieze London art fair. Concerned that the crowds and parties were starting to elbow out sales, organizers are aiming for a smaller, more focused event.

They have cut by 20% the number of available tickets, including those for VIPs, and reduced the number of galleries presenting their works to 152 from 175 last year. Meanwhile, some galleries that formerly brought in a range of artists are turning to one-artist booths to boost the profiles of lower-priced new or middle-market artists.

The vaunted party scene, second only to Art Basel Miami Beach on the art-fair circuit, is a double-edged sword, some galleries say. "A lot of people don't realize that dealers aren't there just to hang out. This is a huge part of our business," says Cuban-American dealer Javier Peres, who has shown at Frieze London since 2004. He sat out last year—a move prompted by uneven sales and the fact that many of the fair's 55,000 visitors were only window-shopping—but his gallery will be back on Wednesday, when the five-day fair begins.

The cutbacks are meant to "make the fair more luxurious," says Frieze London's co-founder and director Amanda Sharp.

Some things will be the same: Large galleries with stables of high-profile artists typically opt to show a sampling of fresh work at Frieze. U.S.-based Bloom & Poe will offer a $400,000 painting by Takashi Murakami, while Austrian dealer Thaddaeus Ropac is bringing a $1.8 million abstract sculpture by Georg Baselitz.

In previous years, many dealers say, visitors ended up suffering from "fair fatigue"—overwhelmed by the number of galleries and artists represented. To counter this, the New York-based Marianne Boesky gallery is focusing on just one artist: 11 works on paper and oil paintings by Russian-born artist Kon Trubkovich. His eerie, blurry images, often preoccupied with incarceration, range from $9,000 to $65,000.

Gerd Harry Lybke, whose Leipzig, Germany, gallery Eigen + Art represents Neo Rauch, says a safe bet would be bringing to Frieze the superstar painter's works, which range from about $160,000 to $950,000 on the primary market. But many Frieze visitors already know Mr. Rauch's work, and it is a better long-term strategy to introduce them to a less familiar figure, Mr. Lybke says. He says he hopes to raise the profile of Mr. Rauch's contemporary Uwe Kowski, whose works, often hovering somewhere between representation and abstraction, range from $2,700 to $80,000.

It is a risky move at a fair where an average-size booth costs around $35,000—not including thousands more for art transport and lodging. "If you go to a fair like Frieze and don't earn money, you're screwed," says Mr. Lybke. "I'm bringing two people whose sole jobs are to concern themselves with Uwe's work and explain it to you in a few sentences."

Lisson Gallery is hosting a solo booth of only one work, asking around $600,000 for an installation by Dan Graham, an American artist in his 70s.

While Frieze London cuts back, Frieze Masters is adding 30 galleries for 131 overall. The sister fair, which runs simultaneously, launched last year to show works created before 2000 and racked up strong sales figures, including Van de Weghe Fine Art's sale of an $8.5 million Pablo Picasso painting and a 1968 Joan Miró sold by Helly Nahmad for around $20 million.

Simon Dickinson is one of a handful of galleries leaving the smaller Pavilion of Art and Design, another London-based autumn fair, for Frieze Masters. Director Emma Ward says her gallery will be bringing 30 works including "Study for Discs," a 1919 oil painting by Fernand Léger priced at around $9.6 million.

Meanwhile, Acquavella Galleries is upping the ante with Picasso's 1949 "Woman Sitting," offered for around $20 million, and a 1950 Francis Bacon for around $11 million. Zurich-based David Koetser will be bringing a $6.2 million oil on copper by Jan Brueghel the Elder.

Many of the new galleries are major players who held back last autumn to see if the fair took root. "We had nothing to base the caliber of the fair on," says Sukanya Rajaratnam, a partner at Manhattan's Mnuchin Gallery and a 2012 holdout. But she was "blown away" by last year's "boutique atmosphere" and is bringing a dozen works on paper, bronzes and oil paintings by Willem de Kooning, including a 1983 painting selling for $8 million and a 1973 sculpture for $8.5 million.

Write to Mary M. Lane at mary.lane@wsj.com

Loeb. (Courtesy PMC)

Last week, Daniel Loeb’s activist hedge fund, Third Point Partners, which weighs in at a hefty $15 billion, increased to 9.3 percent its share in Sotheby’s (aka BID) stock. Another activist fund, Marcato Capital Management, owns about 6 percent of the auction house, and billionaire Nelson Peltz of Trian Fund Management owns another 3, putting about 19 percent of the company shares in “hostile” hands.

Right on cue, Mr. Loeb wrote one of his classic letters excoriating BID Chairman Bill Ruprecht for his extravagant perks and salary while demanding that he step down in favor of a new management team and a few Third Point appointed directors.

By Friday morning, Mr. Ruprecht had dug in his heels, announcing that the company he chairs had taken a “poison pill.” This is not an uncommon defense mechanism for public companies; poison pills are intended to dilute the value of the stock by flooding the market with additional shares if a hostile buyer goes over 10 percent. But one can’t help but savor the irony, in Sotheby’s case, that a company that specializes in making or faking bidding wars for art should create obstacles for professional investors who want to bid up the company’s shares. BID is currently up to more than $50 per share, a nearly 47 percent increase over its share price at the beginning of this year, so even if this is all smoke and mirrors, the sizzle is working on the street.

If Mr. Loeb’s track record outside the art world is any indication, we may well see BID achieve $60 or even $70 per share, a market capitalization of $4.5 billion to $5 billion. Third Point has delivered outstanding results for its investors since Mr. Loeb founded the firm in 1995. Mr. Loeb has made a habit of tilting at large companies, most recently his 7 percent position in Sony and his subsequent demand that it split the entertainment business from the rest of the company: The split did not occur, but the stock did go up handsomely. In the case of Third Point’s investment in Yahoo, Mr. Loeb was successful in bringing in a new CEO and literally doubling the stock price, a big win for both shareholders and investors in his fund.

But is BID really worth it? Is the company as old-fashioned and stodgy as Mr. Loeb and his co-investors believe—in his own words, an “Old Master painting” badly in need of restoration? As Mr. Loeb pointed out in his scathing letter, BID has lagged behind its archrival, Christie’s, in both market share and the hunt for top lots to feature in major biannual evening sales. Christie’s has set more records recently for blue-chip artists like Calder, Yves Klein and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Meanwhile, Sotheby’s achieved lackluster results for a large Barnett Newman painting featured last season. Consigners have responded to Christie’s momentum by bringing valuable artworks to the block, like Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog, estimated to sell for $35 million to $55 million in a Christie’s sale next month. Sotheby’s has parried with a major Warhol disaster diptych in its corresponding November sale, but silver paintings from the ’60s don’t have the same spark.

Would that Newman painting have done better at Christie’s? There is one macro difference between the two companies, from which many other differences stem. Sotheby’s is publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and Christie’s is a private company controlled by the French art collecting luxury goods tycoon Francois Pinault. In 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis, Christie’s continued offering consignors juicy guarantees for major evening sale lots, even if it then tried to lay them off on third parties, locking in profits for the house. Mr. Ruprecht, wanting to sound more prudent, told the stock market that Sotheby’s would no longer offer guarantees, because the company had been so badly burned in evening sales of November 2008.

Mr. Ruprecht’s approach might have sounded good to myopic Wall Street types who see the art market as fraught with risk and view the art business as narrowly as any other business, but the strategy was wrong.

Art is a fashion-driven business prone to either feast or famine, and star lots and market share are critical in maintaining the appearance of success, even when fierce competition leads to side deals where house premiums sometimes get cut to the bone. Though art collecting has grown globally, and prices have risen overall, every artwork, and each artist’s individual market, tells a different story; the line between a world record sale and a flop is all too often razor-thin. In order to remain at the top of their game, the auction houses must charge after those few lots in a season that have the potential to make headlines. Having no one to report to but Mr. Pinault, Christie’s was able to be more nimble, despite an uncertain world economy.

Since the epic disaster of the painfully absurd “price fixing” scandal back in 2000, Sotheby’s and Christie’s have developed very different styles of doing business. Sotheby’s acts like a European academic institution where department heads are virtually tenured and there is limited incentive or leeway for underlings to go hunting for deals. This feeling is palpable as one walks into the building; behind the information desk are tight-suited staffers who insist on asking where you are going before they let you up the elevator. There is a British, clubby feeling of privilege and stuffy pedigree; it’s a place where you, the nouveau riche, have come to ogle the dusty treasures of the refined Old World while the natty experts stand aloof as if you have interrupted their rereading of Proust.

Christie’s is considerably warmer. Until recently, a genial, mustachioed doorman, Gil Perez, welcomed you. (Sadly he retired last year.) You walk into a labyrinth of art for sale. Sometimes, large pieces are plopped awkwardly in front of the building. One is never really sure which of the experts is the department head, but they are always in a rush, as if you are talking to them in an airport and they have just a few minutes between flights.

Fine art has traditionally been marketed in the buttoned-up, European manner, and Christie’s lack of hierarchy and more democratic approach has made some new buyers feel less like they are trying to get into a club where they know they are not welcome. I happen to favor the snottier style—as Groucho said, I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member—but times have changed, and the social dynamic of collecting is more powerful than ever. Sales are not just about the quality of the works or an elegant, sophisticated presentation. Aggressive marketing, over-the-top parties and elaborate catalogs have raised the stakes of this expensive battle.

Still, Sotheby’s is the premier name in art. It has been around since 1744. I would guess that the name alone is worth at least $1 billion, or about $14 per share. For the value of Sotheby’s to be maximized—and for it to exist on a level playing field with Christie’s—it would likely have to go private or be merged into a larger entity. Look at eBay, which has a market cap of $72 billion; sources tell me it is looking to expand its presence in art. It could easily swallow up Sotheby’s and instantly change the value and global reach of the company. Far-fetched? I don’t think so. EBay certainly knows how to build efficient online selling platforms. Then there’s the more natural and obvious fit with Bernard Arnault’s LVMH luxury conglomerate, which sports a market cap of $72.66 billion. Here’s a company that knows how to maximize brands globally and is not afraid to take on fixer-uppers with great brand strength and identity. Mr. Arnault gave auction house ownership a go when LVMH financed Phillips from 1999 to 2002—maybe he has learned from that lesson and is ready for another round. And perhaps Mr. Arnault would enjoy challenging Christie’s and the Pinault family, his archrivals in luxury retail.

Every system benefits from being challenged, and I believe the present firefight will benefit Sotheby’s and in fact already has. But don’t expect it to last long: The art world is a lot smaller than outsiders believe. Don’t be surprised if New Canaan’s own Mr. Ruprecht and the Upper West Side’s influential Mr. Loeb kiss and make up. Yesterday’s archenemies can be tomorrow’s BFFs when there is money to be made.

Art, From Conception to Birth in Qatar

Damien Hirst’s Anatomical Sculptures Have Their Debut

By Natalia V. Osipova

Damien Hirst Sculptures Unveiled: On Monday, the British artist Damien Hirst unveiled 14 monumental bronze sculptures in Doha, Qatar. The installation is considered a particularly bold move by the Qatar Museums Authority.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: October 7, 2013

DOHA, Qatar — For weeks, 14 giant balloons had been mysteriously parked in front of the Sidra Medical and Research Center, a hulking steel, glass and white ceramic building devoted to women’s and children’s health that is to open on the outskirts of this city in 2015.

At 7 on Monday evening, to the amplified sound of a beating heart, members of Qatar’s royal family, government officials and local artists watched as each balloon, bathed in purple light, opened like a giant flower to reveal an unusually provocative public artwork. Called “The Miraculous Journey,” it consists of 14 monumental bronze sculptures, by the British artist Damien Hirst, chronicling the gestation of a fetus inside a uterus, from conception to birth, ending with a statue of a 46-foot-tall anatomically correct baby boy.

Even for a Persian Gulf country that is aggressively buying its way into modernity, this installation takes official acceptance of Western art to a new level. Local women still adhere to centuries-old Islamic traditions, wearing the abaya, a long cloak, and niqab, or face covering; images of women are routinely censored in books and magazines. Even the representation of the human form is unusual.

To commission such an audacious work of art is considered a particularly bold move for Sheikha al Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, 30, chairwoman of the Qatar Museums Authority and a sister to the new emir of this oil- and gas-rich state. The sculptures are reported to have cost $20 million.

“To have something like this is less daring than having a lot of nudity,” said the sheikha, interviewed on Monday morning in her office at the Museum of Islamic Art, a modern, sun-filled space with sweeping views of the gulf. “There is a verse in the Koran about the miracle of birth,” she said. “It is not against our culture or our religion.”

Rather, she sees the sculptures as an extension of her mission to create a platform for contemporary artists from around the world, transforming this city of gleaming skyscrapers and sandy beaches into a center for arts and culture. Whether the public likes it or not, she believes, “it’s important to have an ongoing conversation.”

The museums authority has also organized a giant retrospective of Mr. Hirst’s work, “Relics,” which opens on Thursday.

Known as one of the most powerful forces in the international art world today, with exceptional buying power and forward thinking, Sheikha al Mayassa is a vocal advocate of contemporary art and arts education. She has been criticized by some as brazen or for embracing only celebrated artists, yet is praised by others for her commitment to the art of the new.

“She’s brave to introduce new visuals and new thoughts, especially in Doha, which is more conservative than other Middle Eastern cities,” said Nada Shabout, a professor of art history at the University of North Texas who works with the Arab Museum of Modern Art here. “Most of the Arab world has not seen public nudity. Sex is not taboo here, it’s just a very private affair. I have no idea how the public will react to these sculptures.”

Generally, the public does not take to the streets to voice disapproval and is considered unlikely to deface any public artwork. Instead, residents seize on social media platforms, like Twitter or blogs. After a 16-foot-tall bronze sculpture depicting one soccer player head-butting another was installed last week on the Corniche, a popular waterfront promenade here, some residents called online for its removal on the grounds that the sculpture, by the Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed, offended religious sensibilities. The sheikha shrugs off the criticism, saying that contemporary art is vital to the city’s landscape.

Purposely provocative, Mr. Hirst, 48, was long controversial in his own country, known for startling works that have included rotting cows positioned to simulate copulation; sharks and sheep preserved in formaldehyde; maggots attacking a cow’s head; and medicine cabinets full of hundreds of different kinds of drugs. Yet, in recent years, exposure to his work has been oversaturated in the United States and Europe.

He is fascinating to many, nonetheless, in a city like Doha. Sheikha al Mayassa recalled visiting Mr. Hirst’s studio in Gloucestershire, England, around 2009 and asking him to consider creating an outdoor sculpture.

Mr. Hirst showed her some drawings of prenatal and natal development he had made in 2005, from sperm to fetus to newborn. “I had always envisioned them to be monumental sculptures, and the sheikha had the idea of putting them in front of a woman’s hospital,” he said. (The installation’s full title is “The Miraculous Journey (2005 to 2013).”

It was a commission fraught with secrecy. “The first meeting I had with the architects, I was not allowed to tell them what the sculptures were because they wanted it to be a surprise,” he recalled. Most of the work, which took three years, was carried out in his studio in England.

There is nothing secret about them now: he positioned the sculptures so they can be seen both from the motorway and the desert. Together they weigh a total of 216 tons.

Wearing scruffy blue jeans and a white T-shirt, Mr. Hirst was watching workers put the finishing touches on his retrospective at Al Riwaq, a nondescript building — now covered in his signature dots — that is next to the Museum of Islamic Art, which was designed by I. M. Pei and opened in 2008.

Mr. Hirst said he became fascinated with childbirth after having children of his own. “Everyone talks about our life’s journey, but we have a whole journey before you’re born,” he explained.

Both Ms. Shabout and Zainab Bahrani, a professor of Near Eastern art and archaeology at Columbia University, pointed out that depictions of naked women bathing have been common throughout the history of Islamic art — for example, in ancient illuminated manuscripts. Such images are not, however, readily available to the population here.

“People are not aware here that it has a long tradition,” Ms. Shabout said.

Ms. Bahrani said: “I am sympathetic to the fact that art makes us feel uncomfortable, can challenge. On the other hand, you don’t want to shock. So it’s a fine line.”

But to Sheikha al Mayassa, it is one more step in the process of introducing art to Doha. Already she is planning two more museums here: the National Museum of Qatar, designed by Jean Nouvel, and the Orientalist Museum, designed by the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron.

Although the sheikha declined to confirm or deny the reported cost of Mr. Hirst’s sculptures, she said the outlay was “not a crazy number.”

“For us, it’s about the bigger picture,” she said. With an impish grin, she added: “Although he denies it, I think the baby is really Damien. It looks like him.”

When winds kicked up the other day, the balloon shrouding the baby boy accidentally blew off. Mr. Hirst, who was in London at the time, received an e-mail from Sheikha al Mayassa that read:

“Your baby appears to want to come early.”

By Hannah Sampson

hsampson@MiamiHerald.com

Janet Cardiff’’s sound installation “The Forty Part Motet,’’ 40 loudspeakers in an oval in the Fuentidueña Chapel at the Cloisters in Upper Manhattan.

By JIM DWYER

Published: September 19, 2013

Wobbling, blissed out, a few in tears, people emerged every 12 minutes or so from the remnant of a 12th-century Spanish chapel tucked into the Cloisters museum.

Something had happened there, up on a hill at the northern end of Manhattan.

“It’s too soon to talk,” Margaret Cardenas said as she left the chapel.

“Too raw,” said another young woman, Alyssa.

Inside the ancient chapel was the first presentation of contemporary art ever at the Cloisters: “The Forty Part Motet,” an 11-minute immersion in a tapestry of voice, each thread as vivid as the whole fabric. A sacred composition of Renaissance England is rendered by the multimedia artist Janet Cardiff through 40 speakers — one for each voice in the Salisbury Cathedral Choir, which performed the piece in 2000. What started as one microphone per singer is now a choir of black high-fidelity speakers arrayed in an oval, eight groupings of soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass.

In the intimate space of the museum’s Fuentidueña Chapel, the sound, from invisible people, as if from ghosts, feels like charged, living sculpture. Through Dec. 8, it plays in a loop all day.

Ms. Cardenas, 24, had stayed in the chapel through four full cycles, walking along the ranks of speakers, then sitting on a bench in the center.

“I’m kind of out of it — I can’t articulate it,” she said. “Each speaker is a different person. It’s not something you think about: you feel it.”

In a moment, she found the word.

“Transcendent,” she said.

Ms. Cardenas was visiting the East Coast from Oregon for a wedding, and came to New York this week specifically to see a monumental installation by James Turrell in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. Then she heard about the Forty Part Motet and trekked uptown. “This is cooler, honestly, than Turrell,” Ms. Cardenas said. “I was super fortunate to get to see both.”

Others stumbled onto the “Forty Part Motet” while doing a lap around the city museum circuit. No one who sets foot inside the Cloisters can miss the sounds; although they are at their most powerful within the jeweled acoustic space of the chapel, they soar through the building.

“We had no idea it was here, and then we heard it all along as we went around the exhibits,” said Bengt Ehlim, who was visiting the city from Sweden with his wife, Susanne. She seemed to be stepping out of a trance.

“I am so really moved,” Ms. Ehlim said.

The core of Ms. Cardiff’s installation is a motet, “Spem in Alium,” a Latin fragment of the phrase “In No Other Is My Hope,” composed by Thomas Tallis sometime in the 16th century. Its transformation into the “Forty Part Motet” has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the museum’s space in Long Island City, Queens.

“I’d seen it at MoMA, and the gallery was very neutral,” Jeff Gray, 33, a computer programmer and musician, said outside the chapel. “But there’s nothing like this kind of space, the resonance of brick with wood roof. The kind of ghost qualities are a lot more apparent here. Everything bounces a lot more: you hear a voice over here, and you kind of feel it float around you.”

He was accompanied by Etta Yuki, who works in independent film. The sensations, she guessed, were what the director of an orchestra would feel. “And seeing it in a place like this puts it in a spiritual context,” Ms. Yuki, 36, said.

Sampled from the familiar, the sum of the ancient sound and space arrives in modern ears and eyes like nothing else: not like hearing a church choir, not like listening to music on a superb sound system.

“I’ve sung in English church choirs, and I know what it’s like to be in a space with 40 people and singing something like this,” Norman Yamada, 50, a composer and high baritone, said. This was a different, slightly unsettling experience, he said; acoustically “dry” sound was reconstituted. “By close-mikeing each singer, you’ve got it very dry,” he said. “Then you put it back in this space, and it takes the coloring of the space.”

The space, of course, takes its coloring from history. The Fuentidueña Chapel was part of a castle-fortress complex in Segovia during the hundreds of years of war between Muslims and Christians in Spain. Ms. Ehlim, the Swedish visitor, had made the journey from her accommodations in the hectic East Village to the Cloisters looking for the opposite of war. “My sister told me this is a lovely place to go if you want to have some peace in New York,” Ms. Ehlim said.

A new color.

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Escaping the Heat in Art’s Fortress

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Chanel Baldwin, exploring the Brooklyn Museum after learning that admission fees were “suggested.”

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Published: August 22, 2013

CHANEL BALDWIN’S eyes sipped on that painting and only that painting, because it was what was available to her on this side of the money line.

On steaming afternoons for much of the season, Ms. Baldwin, who turned 16 on Thursday, parked herself after summer school at the Brooklyn Museum, a refugee seeking the asylum of air-conditioning.

Because she could not afford the $8 suggested student admission — one that she, like so many others, understood to be required — she never got further than the lobby. She helped herself to the bathroom and water fountain, though, and spent a lot of time gazing at the painting called “Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps,” by Kehinde Wiley. On Mondays and Tuesdays, when the museum was closed, she sometimes stood outside the glass doors that whispered puffs of cool air through their divide.

In a perfectly air-conditioned world, Ms. Baldwin’s art consumption might never have been. It was a boiling city that drove her into the frosty museum, and she’s not alone. In a city where culture is supposed to be king, New Yorkers in the summertime sometimes pop into a museum mostly to escape the heat. They come for the air but can grow to love the art, too.

Ms. Baldwin’s confinement to the lobby has made her something of an expert on that Napoleon painting — one of the few works hanging before the place where you pay. First she saw the obvious: A black man with Timberland boots had supplanted Napoleon in a riff on the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David. Then Ms. Baldwin saw the Starter brand wristband. Then she noticed the sperm cells swimming over the canvas. It made her wonder what the artist was trying to say about men of her race.

Ms. Baldwin could have remained at the school for chill air, but who wants to stay there a minute longer than you must? She could have gone home to her mother’s, not far away in Flatbush, but the miserly bedroom air-conditioners breathe too little into the living quarters. Here in the museum the air was different, almost lush. “It’s like when you’re getting into a pool, and they make you shower,” she said.

In the season now passing, museums in New York actively pursued people like Ms. Baldwin — potential visitors for whom liquid-cool air might have been a gateway drug to the art. On Twitter, where so many institutions speak more authentically than elsewhere, there were lures like “Beat the summer heat!” from @MuseumMileNYC, representing several institutions on Fifth Avenue. “Looking to beat the #NYC heat?” the Park Avenue Armory asked. “Beat the heat with our Store’s new Marilyn Minter water bottle & Jasper Johns beach towel,” the Guggenheim offered.

At the Museum of the Moving Image, in Queens, the chill seekers were easily detected: the ones with the soaking shirt backs, and those who sprinted in and asked the receptionist some variation of, “So what kind of museum you got here exactly?” During the heat wave, searing temperatures had driven most people from the surrounding streets, save for a crew of fluorescent-vested construction workers, belt deep in the chopped-up road, singing.

Over at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the next day, Nauman Shah, 25, was leaving French salon paintings on his way to Cypriot sculpture. For this Pakistani-born engineer, who works below earth on the Second Avenue subway project, the air-conditioning was especially important. He was observing Ramadan, the holy month of fasting for Muslims. He woke before dawn and gobbled breakfast, chased by four or five glasses of water — and then the fast. He had to conserve his hydration until 8:23 p.m. Ordinarily, he would have returned to bed, waking only for dinner. But a friend had persuaded him to go out, and they agreed on the Met over other activities, he said, in part because its cool air was almost as effective as sleep at forestalling thirst. It was aiding his monthlong quest, he said, to achieve “control over your soul and desires.”

Around this time, but in another wing, a bird, perhaps also fleeing the heat, fluttered overhead through Rooms 229 and 230. It jolted a teenage boy with a Germanic accent. He asked aloud, “Was that really a bird?”

Back at the Brooklyn Museum, Ms. Baldwin was hanging with Akeem Reuben, 16, her second cousin and another summer-school air-conditioning refugee. Ms. Baldwin was on her usual bench, where she perched because of her belief that it cost money to roam further. But the fee was only “suggested,” I told them. The cousins said no one had explained that before.

Next thing, the three of us were in line. When our turn came, I uttered the museum equivalent of “open sesame”: “No donation today, thank you.”

The gates parted. We received green tags to prove our bona fides. Ms. Baldwin and Mr. Reuben looked stunned: such a formidable barrier, so easily breached. Ms. Baldwin realized they had given her an extra admission tag. She made sure to return it.

Now what did the cousins want to see? “Statues,” Ms. Baldwin replied.

But she never made it there, because the first room set her alight and held her rapt until she had to leave. There was no label too tedious to read, no piece undeserving of her scrutiny. She couldn’t help touching some of the works.

“Look at the detail on it,” she said of a Fred Wilson mirror, gasping. Then over to a grid of shelves with dozens of jugs from around the world. Each column of jugs had a Rolodex-like set of descriptions. She and Mr. Reuben stood there and went through every last jug — reading the card, then looking up at the corresponding piece, then the next and the next. They had time.

A piece called “Avarice,” by Fernando Mastrangelo, gripped Ms. Baldwin. It appeared from afar like a classic Aztec sun stone. But she got up close. Traced her fingers over it. Went to one side, looked at it; went to the other side, considered it that way. She noticed that the piece was made of corn, and then detected a toothpaste tube, soda bottles and cowboy hats lurking on the surface, all crackling with meaning.

Watching her, I realized how the inadvertent exclusion from these rooms must have trained her eyes. Instead of cruising across many floors, she had stared at the Napoleon painting and a nearby sculpture until they had little to give. Having only them to consider had taught her how to see. Now her sight could be marshaled against anything.

But she was irritated with the museum. New York is run on the kinds of understandings that kept the cousins in the lobby, with so many places formally open to anyone but protected in their exclusivity by invisible psychic gates.

Ms. Baldwin suggested a more honest approach, since people tend to think you have to pay: “They should just put a sign out telling us that it’s somewhat free.” Either way, she pledged to inform all her friends.

As the cousins left the museum for the oven of the outdoors, two schoolmates crossed their path, heading inside. “What’s going on here?” one asked. It was the cousins’ first occasion to share their discovery.

Art Basel in Miami is one of many international art fairs. Olafur Eliasson’s “Your Shared Planet” at a booth there in 2012.

By GRAHAM BOWLEY

Theft Charges Reverberate in Connecticut Art World

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Jasper Johns in his studio in northwestern Connecticut in 1999. Unlike some artists, who employ many assistants, Mr. Johns is said to work with a small staff.

By PETER APPLEBOME and GRAHAM BOWLEY

Published: August 18, 2013

For 16 years, William Morrison has watched the passing parade at his airy, contemporary Morrison Gallery in Kent, in northwestern Connecticut, where luminaries like Meryl Streep, Sam Waterston, Kevin Bacon and Kate Winslet, and far-flung artists great and small live the understated good life of the Litchfield Hills.

Last week he was pondering something less genteel — federal charges that James Meyer, a familiar local artist and longtime assistant to the modern master Jasper Johns, had stolen 22 works from Mr. Johns and had sold them through an unidentified New York gallery for $6.5 million.

“I never would have imagined this,” Mr. Morrison said. “He was always very nice to me, and I thought he was loyal to Jasper. If it’s true, I’m shocked about it and disgusted. It’s crazy. Isn’t being Jasper Johns’s assistant enough?”

Mr. Meyer’s arrest last week rocked the New England reserve of the area, where Mr. Johns is a revered but largely invisible presence and Mr. Meyer a midlevel figure in the local art scene whose stature was elevated by his relationship with a celebrated master. And it highlighted a dynamic as old as fame itself, the often-fraught relationship between an established star and a younger hopeful working on his behalf.

While an artist like Jeff Koons is famous for hiring dozens of assistants to help produce his paintings and sculptures, Mr. Johns, who did not respond to requests for an interview, works with only a small number of assistants at his compound; they are said to be loyal and tight-lipped, even after leaving his employ, which made the news even more surprising.

Chris Mao, founder and director of Chambers Fine Art, a Chelsea gallery, who said he had known Mr. Johns well for several years, had the impression that his assistants were few in number. “It is mostly him,” Mr. Mao said. “He is working hard even at this stage.”

One person who worked for years as an assistant to an internationally known artist — who spoke anonymously because he did not want this instance to reflect on his experience and who had no knowledge of the Johns-Meyer relationship — noted that most artists’ assistants are artists on their own who can risk losing their own artistic identities and identifying to a dangerous degree with someone else’s success.

He said: “I’m sure that many, many years ago, there were a few guys running around the Sistine Chapel trying to pick up girls or impress a potential patron by saying things like: This thing would be a mess if it weren’t for me. You see the way those hands are almost touching? Mike wanted them further apart.”

The relationship between Mr. Johns and Mr. Meyer was long-lived and extraordinarily important for Mr. Meyer, whose Web site says he was “born of Mexican heritage and adopted in Lynwood, California, in 1962,” grew up on Long Island, attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and became the studio assistant for Mr. Johns in 1985.

The indictment charges that Mr. Meyer, 51, carried out the thefts from September 2006 to February 2012. He was arrested on Wednesday and appeared in court in Hartford, where he was released on an unsecured $250,000 bond. The indictment accuses Mr. Meyer of having falsely told an unidentified New York gallery that Mr. Johns, who is 83, had given him the pieces as gifts. According to a federal official, Mr. Johns’s lawyer was the one who contacted the authorities. Mr. Meyer has pleaded not guilty. Neither Mr. Meyer nor his lawyer, Donna Recant, responded to requests for comment.

Around the end of the period cited in the indictment, some friends of Mr. Meyer were surprised to learn he was no longer employed by Mr. Johns. Soon stories began to circulate in Connecticut and New York that the split involved allegations of theft. There were other signs that not all was normal. On March 5, 2012, less than a month after the split, Mr. Meyer transferred ownership of the house he and his wife, Amy Jenkins, had owned together to her name alone.

In an interview from the 1990s with Matthew Rose, an artist and writer, Mr. Meyer described himself as a total naïf who barely knew Mr. Johns’s work or how art studios functioned when he was looking for a job and was given a list of some of the most important artists in New York. He stumbled into a position with Mr. Johns that lasted 27 years. During that time, he also tried to make his own name as an artist with works whose influences included suburbia and Dostoyevsky filtered through the techniques and sensibilities of Mr. Johns.

“While 1960s suburban American remains my primary source of inspiration,” Mr. Meyer wrote on his Web site, “rethinking the linkage of image, shadow and subsequent images, sets off a conceptual clock of instantly recognizable pieces to a more complex puzzle. It’s my way of generating psychological power.”

During the last three decades Mr. Johns rose to almost unimaginable heights in the art world and marketplace. His painting “Flag” from the collection of the best-selling author Michael Crichton, who died in 2008, sold for $28.6 million at a New York City auction in 2010. Koji Inoue, a Christie’s specialist and contemporary art expert, said Mr. Johns’s works can change hands in private sales for significantly higher prices — sometimes above $100 million.

Mr. Meyer has regularly exhibited his art, including at galleries in New York like the Gering & López on Fifth Avenue, where he had a show this spring. According to Mr. Meyer’s Web site, his work has been acquired by some prestigious collectors and institutions including the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

But he appears to have had only modest success at public auction. Artnet, which tracks auction sales, lists only five instances when his works were put up for auction. Four times his works were “bought in,” or failed to sell, including a 1995 watercolor with an estimate of $2,500 to $3,000. In 2011, however, a mixed media collage sold at auction in Stockholm for $788.

The indictment alleges that Mr. Meyer deposited $3.4 million of the $6.5 million in illegal sales in a Connecticut bank. Records show that Mr. Meyer owns four cars: a 2005 Subaru, 1971 Volkswagen bus, 2008 Mini Cooper and 2006 Toyota pickup; two motorcycles, including a 2007 BMW; and three trailers. In recent years, he has owned several boats including a 42-foot fiberglass sailboat that is now registered in his wife’s name.

But the house, now in his wife’s name, is a modest one in Lakeville, Conn., and was purchased in 1996 for $185,000, records show. Over the years, he took out six mortgages on the property, which is now assessed at $361,428. Mr. Meyer lists as his residence a slightly frayed house in Salisbury about 15 minutes on two-lane country roads from Mr. Johns’s 102-acre gated estate in Sharon.

A few people in Mr. Meyer’s circle were familiar with the allegations, but more common was concern for Mr. Meyer and Ms. Jenkins, an admired art teacher and artist, and their two children, who attended local schools.

Mr. Meyer is lauded by friends as a public spirited part of the community who helped found the popular artgarage in Falls Village, Conn., an after-school art studio at a local high school. Others describe him as overbearing and too quick to traffic on his association with Mr. Johns.

“Everyone is shocked, because they know him to be someone of integrity,” said one friend, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the situation. He added: “It’s got to be a complicated psychological thing, working with an artist for so long. Who knows, maybe Jim felt entitled.”

Ruth Asawa, an artist who learned to draw in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II and later earned renown weaving wire into intricate, flowing, fanciful abstract sculptures, died on Aug. 6 at her home in San Francisco, where many of her works now dot the cityscape. She was 87.

Her daughter Aiko Cuneo confirmed the death.

Ms. Asawa had been shunted from one detention camp to another as a child before blossoming under the tutelage of the artists Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Franz Kline and Josef Albers. Gaining notice in the art world while still a student, she soon began building a wider following with abstract wire sculptures that expressed both the craftsmanship she had learned from Mexican basket makers as well as her ambition to extend line drawings into a third dimension. Many of these were hanging mobiles.

In 1968 she startled her admirers by creating her first representational work, a fountain in Ghirardelli Square on San Francisco’s waterfront. It had two mermaids — one nursing a “merbaby” — frogs, turtles, splashing water and a recording of frogs croaking.

Lawrence Halprin, the distinguished landscape architect who designed the waterfront space, had planned to install an abstract fountain. But after a long, unexplained delay, the developer chose Ms. Asawa for the job. Her creation set off a freewheeling debate about aesthetics, feminism and public art. Mr. Halprin, who had been a fan of Ms. Asawa’s abstractions, complained that the mermaids looked like a suburban lawn ornament.

Ms. Asawa countered with old-fashioned sentiment. “For the old, it would bring back the fantasy of their childhood,” she said, “and for the young, it would give them something to remember when they grow old.”

By and large, San Franciscans loved it. Ms. Asawa went on to design other public fountains and became known in San Francisco as the “fountain lady.” For a work in a plaza near Union Square, she mobilized 200 schoolchildren to mold hundreds of images of the city in dough, which were then cast in iron.

The work became the locus of a dispute this summer with Apple Inc., which wanted to remove the sculpture to make way for a plaza adjacent to a store it is building. After a public outcry, the company and the city promised to protect the sculpture, but the final disposition of the piece remains unresolved.

Ms. Asawa’s wire sculptures are in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In May, one of her pieces sold at auction at Christie’s for $1.4 million, four times its appraised value.

After the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco opened a new building in 2005, it installed 15 of Ms. Asawa’s most significant hanging wire sculptures at the base of its tower. As they drift with air currents, her large organic forms have been said to resemble a giant, eerie kelp forest.

Her work is inextricably linked to her life. “Glimpses of my childhood” inspired her, she once said. One memory, of sunlight pouring through a dragonfly’s translucent wing, was transmuted into the crocheted wire sculptures for which she first became known. In 1958, The New York Times wrote of their “gossamer lightness” and the way “the circular and oval shapes seem like magic lanterns, one within the other.”

Ms. Asawa said another influence came from riding on the back of horse-drawn farm equipment on the fruit and vegetable farms where her Japanese-American parents worked in California. She made patterns with her feet as they dragged on the ground.

“We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within forms in my crocheted wire sculptures,” she said in an interview with The Contra Costa Times in 2006.

A third influence — one she insisted was positive — was being held in internment camps with her family during the war, a fate that befell 120,000 Japanese-Americans, rounded up by the federal government for fear that they might aid the enemy. Her family spent the first five months of detention in stables at the Santa Anita Park racetrack. It was there that three animators from the Walt Disney Studios taught her to draw.

“I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one,” she said in 1994. “Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am.”

Ruth Aiko Asawa was born on Jan. 24, 1926, in Norwalk, a Southern California farming town. Her third-grade teacher encouraged her artwork, and in 1939, her drawing of the Statue of Liberty took first prize in a school competition to represent what it means to be an American.

In 1942 F.B.I. agents seized her father and sent him to an internment camp in New Mexico. Ms. Asawa did not see him for six years. Two months later, she, her mother and her five siblings were taken to the racetrack. After five months, they were taken to a camp in Arkansas, where Ms. Asawa graduated from high school.

In 1943, a Quaker organization arranged for her to attend Milwaukee State Teachers College, now the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to prepare to be an art teacher. She completed three years but was unable to earn her degree after being barred from a required student-teacher program because of her ethnicity.

Ms. Asawa then spent three years at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a magnet for budding artists and renowned teachers. There she befriended the choreographer Merce Cunningham and studied painting with Albers, whose theories on color were immensely influential. While still a student of his, in 1948, she caught the attention of a reviewer for The Times, who observed that her work “transformed Albers’ color-shape experiments into personal fantasy.”

Ms. Asawa had started exploring wire as an artistic medium after a trip to Mexico in 1947, when she noticed looped wire baskets being used in the markets to sell eggs and produce.

“I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out,” she explained. “It’s still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.”

Ms. Asawa wore bandages to protect her hands when working with wire, but still suffered constant cuts. When young, her children were usually at her side while she worked.

Her husband of 59 years, Albert Lanier, an architect she met at Black Mountain, died in 2008. Their son Adam died in 2003. In addition to her daughter, Ms. Cuneo, she is survived by her sons, Xavier, Hudson and Paul Lanier; her daughter Addie Lanier; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Ms. Asawa supported arts education in San Francisco public schools, and in 2011, the one to which she was most devoted was renamed for her. For years Ms. Asawa maintained the grounds herself.

Her own educational experience came full circle in 1998, when the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which had prevented her from graduating a half-century earlier when it was a teachers college, sought to present her with an honorary doctorate. Ms. Asawa asked that she be awarded the bachelor’s degree instead.