"I Refuse to Classify": Mattia Bonetti on Blurring Boundaries in Design

 

Mattia Bonetti/© Billy Farrell/BFAnyc.com/Courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery

Cleverly installed over astroturf rugs inside Paul Kasmin GalleryMattia Bonetti’s new collection of high-design furniture is meant to transition seamlessly from living room to garden. The Swiss-born, Paris-based designer is known for his irreverent, eye-grabbing, and — often — dazzlingly shiny functional objects. Titled “Indoor/Outdoor,” the exhibition showcases Bonetti’s ecumenical rage of styles, from a spartan contemporary take on the klismos (an ancient Greek chair) to a neo-baroque cabinet tricked out with gold-plated bronze baubles. Highlights include a table made from shimmering rock crystal, a wicker dining set cast in bronze, a table with legs that imitate the undulations of a pearl necklace, and a monolithic travertine bench fit for a giant.

 

The Swiss-born designer talked to ARTINFO about how he conceived the objects in the new show.

 What inspired your foray into outdoor furniture?

 

The idea was to bring the outdoor into the indoor, and to bring the indoor into the outdoors: to blur the lines. I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to bring a garden chair into the home, or a settee outside. But I do like the idea of blending the two. I’ve been working on pieces that are originally made of wicker. They are cast bronze from a wicker model. Wicker by definition is associated with the outdoors, although in the 19th century it was very much fashionable to have wicker indoors as well.

 

Do you mix indoor and outdoor furniture in your home?

 

I do not because I live in an apartment. The only thing I can do is open the window and feel the air.

 

Was it your idea to install the AstroTurf in the gallery?

 

I wanted it that way because I think it explains the concept, because we have grass but we are indoors. Also, outdoor doesn’t mean necessarily in the middle of the forest. It can be a covered terrace or a balcony, or some sort of building in a garden, there are all of these indoor/outdoor spaces.

 

You call your works functional sculptures. Where do you see it falling between art and design?

 

To be frank and honest, all my works are to be used as furniture. On top of that, they may have an aspect that’s more sculptural than what you find on the market. Because once the function is answered, you can do whatever you want. You don’t need to be Bauhaus or minimalistic, although you can.

 

Do you have a favorite piece in the show?

 

I do like the [travertine] couch a lot because of its mass. It was carved from a block. It was very difficult to produce. Also, the little table made with rock crystal: I like it very much.

 

You like to play with organic and geometric forms. The rectilinear and modernist “Metals Coffee Table” couldn’t be further from almost-rococo curvature of “Rocky Side Table.” What interests you about refusing to adhere to a consistent style? 

 

I’m always divided between the two. Because I like both. I can’t make a decision and I don’t want to make a decision. I’m always very mixed up. Business-wise, it’s better when people systematically repeat one thing. It becomes a brand. It’s immediately recognizable. Whereas, I change very often. From one show to the next, things are very different.

 

The [Liquid Gold] cabinet combines the two [aesthetics], I would say, because it’s quite straight in line, but you have all these ripplings that are more informal. They could be called Baroque, with their guiding and the richness.

 

There are certain motifs that you do bring back, such as your table with the pearl legs or the dice motif.

 

Yes, I’ve done that before and then we decided to make it in a smaller size. I’ve done two dice pieces for a client in Hong Kong many years ago, but they were made of wood. We always liked it, so we said, why don’t we make one in metal that can go indoors or outdoors.

 

What appeals to you about the dice motif?

 

I think it’s very surrealistic. My work sometimes is also on the verge of surrealism. 

 

What designers influence you?

 

I quite like the design of the second part of the 19th century, the Aesthetic Movement. It’s very decadent but at the same time also on the verge of something very modernistic — and you can feel that. And I think it's very interesting when you have those moments of passage. Because you had people like Christopher Dresser, for example, who was so advanced. I like [Edward William] Godwin and that kind of thing.

 

Your work has been deemed “neo-baroque,” “neo-barbarian,” and “postmodern.” How would you classify yourself?

 

I don’t. I refuse to classify, but everything is ok.

 

What are you working on next?

 

I’m planning to have a show with my English gallery [London’s David Gill Gallery] in one year’s time. I’ve also been asked to do a couple of objects for Christian Dior’s shops, objects that will not be sold. They will be there to evoke. The first one is in Paris on the Avenue Montagne. They have an apartment that’s been installed as if it were Christian Dior’s original place. I think that some of the items did belong to him originally. They asked me to do a mirror, so I did a very surrealist mirror inspired by Dior imagery. I used the Dior ribbon in a new way and I made a hand that comes from the back of the mirror and goes through it — very surrealist. It’s a ladies hand, but it has spots like a leopard.

 

 

 

See a slideshow of Mattia Bonetti's "Indoor/Outdoor" at Paul Kasmin Gallery here

Jean Nouvel

Jean Nouvel, ante el proyecto del Louvre Abu Dhabi. / thomas coex (afp)


The Louvre Abu Dhabi is ready, two and a half years after its inauguration, to show the world the backbone of its permanent collection. In total, 130 objects from different places over the last four millennia in the exhibition Birth of a museum, which opens to the public on day 22 in the Saadiyat Island cultural district in Abu Dhabi. It is the first large-scale museum ambitious funds, the first with universal vocation of the Arab world and whose construction is based on a project by architect Jean Nouvel.

"The goal is to demonstrate the concept of universality making art objects dialogue of civilizations and eras," said Celine Hullo-Pouyat yesterday, director of the Louvre Abu Dhabi project during a previous visit to the exhibition. It is also, as stated during the presentation Emirati co-director, Hissa to Dhaheri, to "emphasize human values ​​that unite us."

Hence, the sample is divided by civilizations and historical periods, but according to anthropological concepts. This statement of intent is apparent from the first room, which is dedicated to the representation of the human figure, a taboo for some radical interpretations of Islam. In it, the Conservatives opposed the sculpture of a Bactrian princess from the late third millennium BC (one of the jewels of the collection) and a Cypriot prehistoric idol with an abstract painting by Yves Klein. The effect is amazing and encourages reflection of the visitor. To help her, also have been placed screens on which video can be put into context mute that works and pieces linked to other museums.

"The mediation effort is part of the museum's educational objective," says Hullo-Pouyat. Like the rest of the exhibitions organized in Saadiyat, Birth of a museum will be accompanied by lectures, discussions and workshops. In addition, the Louvre Abu Dhabi seeks to establish permanent links with schools in the country and become an instrument of educational support.

The exhibition is divided into six trans-chronological rooms although not a literal illustration of the future museum itself evoke their aesthetic and narrative. In the dedicated to the Ancient World, The speaker, a Roman toga first century marble, is presented alongside a pedestrian statue of a Buddha, a piece dated between the second and third centuries. It is interesting to compare the similarities and differences in the folds of their cloaks or expression. A map explaining what was happening in the rest of the world at that time. Entitled The Sacred In a Jewish Pentateuch shares from Yemen cabinet with a diptych Christian and a Koran.

Later, the eastern Image contrasts with the western look, showing a score of paintings by some of the great European artists ranging from Murillo or Jordaens to Gauguin and Picasso. The presence in these works of Venus and nymphs in the bathroom, Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, whose protagonists are scantily clad, forced ago asking if conservatives found with red lines or warnings to local cultural sensitivity.

"No," he replies without hesitation Hullo-Pouyat. "We worked on a universal concept in the context of cultural and scientific program of the museum". Neither she nor the other makers reveal the total number of pieces in the collection or its value. And also refer to this program as a reference framework for the purchase of works by the Government of Abu Dhabi, the owner of both the museum and its contents. Having decided on the target must be aware of the parts that go on sale.

"This is the challenge facing all new museums because they can only access what is available in the market against centuries collections" admits Olivier Gabet, deputy conservation French Museums Agency, whose collaboration is the result of a bilateral agreement between Paris and Abu Dhabi. Gabet highlights the "exclusivity" not only of the works presented but how to present them.

For now, when it opens in late 2015, the museum also displays the permanent collection, funds borrowed from French museums. "As you increase the collection, loans will be reduced," explains the director. The organizers will be very attentive to how local audiences reacted to this exhibition, since the ultimate goal is that the museum will attract local and regional audiences, and that they get to call their own.

The announcement that the Emirate of Abu Dhabi signed an agreement with the Louvre to help him to develop his own art gallery and planned to build the largest Guggenheim in the world was met with skepticism when it was announced in early 2007. Three years after the financial crisis forced the makers to curb its ambitions. Only recently, work has resumed. Under the new timetable announced this year, the Louvre will open in two years, the National Museum signing Foster & Partners will be ready in 2016 and the Guggenheim, designed as one would expect by Frank Gehry opened in 2017. It also plans to build an auditorium designed by architect Zaha Hadid and a maritime museum by Tadao Ando draft.

Neil MacGregor (Glasgow, 1946), director of the British Museum - The George Lindemann Journal

Neil MacGregor (Glasgow, 1946), director of the British Museum, popularizer radio and one of the most admired intellectual authorities in the UK, came to Madrid to celebrate more than the loan exhibition of drawings The Spanish stroke in the British Museum. Renaissance Drawings Goya. "This year marks half a century of the first time I visited the Prado. I remember it well, went with my parents, and I refused to go out to eat ... Wanted to continue seeing more rooms ". Then, MacGregor was a Scottish guy just a curious idea of ​​artistic taste: "I grew up in Glasgow, next to the home of refined Stirling Maxwell, who was one of the largest collections of Spanish art. And when he was eight, the city bought Christ of Saint John of the Cross, Dali. So at such a tender age thought that Spanish art collectors and collected them when cities bought, also were favored by their country. "

That boy became museum director, first in the National Gallery and from 2002 of the British institution that aspires to contain the world from antiquity to the present day. She also made radio history a BBC program (which became a book, published by Debate) in which two million years of humanity were explained in 100 objects. On the challenges that lie ahead for museums chatted with the country in the modern, sunny and peaceful cloister extending the Prado, a metaphor for how much they have changed in this half century galleries. "They've changed, yes, but the tables, not".

It is important not to be dependent on the private or the public

Show the past in the future. "They are still the places to understand the world in retrospect. In the Prado you realize that the history of Europe is a single, culturally and politically. We struggle lately for building a single European history when a story we've been building for centuries. The museums will allow us to understand the world. Obviously, the British is different, because it brings together objects of all civilizations. But it throws the same message: the world has always been connected. "

Free tickets for all?? "The tradition in Britain is that the museums are free, because that was the mandate of Parliament that created in the eighteenth century. They settled at no cost to British and foreign citizens. If you want people to understand the world you must make accessible and free entry. A museum is a public space of the mind and spirit that all citizens have the right to live ".

Surviving the cuts. "As in Spain, the institutions of Britain suffer cuts in public allocation. We fought using private money, making use of the store sales and sponsors, whether businesses or individual citizens. And then share our collection with the rest of the world, as I think you are doing with much discretion the Prado. On every continent right now you can see pictures of the gallery in Madrid. That, plus reaffirm that these treasures belong to the world, it also means that recipients of these collections support the museum's finances. "

"To achieve the perfect balance no formula. The British tradition has always been a mix between public and private. Half and half. I think that's a good percentage. The State guarantees the continuity and security of the collection and businesses, individuals and foreign museums help in other ways. The formula is difficult, but clear: lots of hard work. It can be a complex issue, but remember to museums who your audience is and how they should be addressed to him. It is important not to be totally dependent on the private or the public, you need to have independence when telling a story academically true ".

The pieces that were legally acquired there is no need to return them

Who does cultural diplomacy? "Depends what you mean by that concept. I do not believe in museums as a weapon of the state. Because the pieces do not belong. Now, when you travel to the works create a dialogue, a debate with people. Lately we are paying much more to China and India. They have never had the opportunity to see the pieces of ancient Egypt, for example. With them, we allow these countries to enter and interact with the story of our time, which is a global history. It is a form of communication, but should not be a subterfuge to employ Velázquez in the interest of a country or of another. "

Spoliation or property? Legitimate? "Do not believe in the return of the parts if they were properly acquired. And we know it was not always that way: there was a lot of looting in World War II. Things have not improved much in the last 30 or 40 years. But if the objects were obtained legally, as with the Parthenon, do not understand why would they return them. The same is true Flemish Paintings of the Prado, why should they be returned? Here are accessible to everyone. The great challenge is to fight against illegal excavations and be able to share these treasures with the world. These jewels do not belong to Paris, Berlin or Madrid, but that these cities should share. Religions divide, museums are world citizens ".

Challenges. "The danger for the future of museums is nationalism. The very existence of art collections is a denial of nationalism, because they provide a vision of humanity as a whole. Perhaps more important today than ever, when we see the dangers of division worldwide. These collections teach us to share. "

Is there a limit to the number of visitors? "It's a great dilemma. We have six million. There is a limit, undoubtedly. We must be able to accommodate that demand our buildings. And then we return to the idea of ​​the museum traveler, if visitors can not come here, we can send them the pieces. We must also work to make the collections accessible to all, on the web and on smartphones. And what the mobile is to make the collection accessible to all uses. "

"Daniel Reich, 39, Resourceful Art Dealer, Dies" @nytimes @randykennedy - The George Lindemann Journal

Daniel Reich, 39, Resourceful Art Dealer, Dies

Nancy Siesel/The New York Times

Daniel Reich in his gallery on 23rd Street in Chelsea. He previously held exhibitions in his tiny studio apartment.

 

By RANDY KENNEDY

 

Daniel Reich, a scrappy and innovative New York art dealer who held exhibitions for two years in his tiny studio apartment and, even after renting a traditional gallery, continued to show art nomadically in places like the Chelsea Hotel and a former delicatessen in Midtown, died on Dec. 25 at his parents’ home in Larchmont, N.Y., his sister confirmed this week. He was 39.

 

His sister, Elizabeth Reich, said Mr. Reich had killed himself. His death became public only in the last week, after friends and artists who had known Mr. Reich began to inquire about his whereabouts.

Mr. Reich was among a group of young dealers who brought new energy into contemporary art in New York in the early 2000s, tacking against the trend toward a more button-down, sleek, big-money business.

He first showed emerging artists and collectives in his 200-square-foot ground-floor studio apartment on West 21st Street, where visitors had to ring the bell for No. 2A to see the shows. Mr. Reich stowed his inflatable air mattress in the tub during business hours.

“His bathroom ended up being the art storage, and there was some incident when the shower got turned on and damaged something,” said the artist Scott Reeder, whose work was in Mr. Reich’s first exhibition in the apartment, a free-form group show called “Miss World 1972,” in December 2001.

That show included many young artists who were then little known but who went on to have significant careers. Among them were Roe Ethridge, Virgil Marti, Mr. Reeder and his brother Tyson, and Eli Sudbrack, known as Assume Vivid Astro Focus. Holland Cotter of The New York Times praised the show, saying that Mr. Reich had “figured out a way to be in Chelsea without necessarily being of Chelsea.”

The gallery moved to a modest commercial space on West 23rd Street in late 2003 and made its name with shows emphasizing small-scale works that projected an intimate, sometimes melancholic, hand-wrought quality. Newcomers like Christian Holstad and Hernan Bas, along with established artists like Jack Pierson, often explored gay sexuality and gender in unexpected ways.

Mr. Reich also focused on painters, like Paul P. and Henry Taylor, who in a 2005 exhibition included a portrait of Mr. Reich “in all his bemused, bespectacled, bright-eyed intensity,” as Roberta Smith described it in The Times.

Alfred Daniel Reich was born on Dec. 8, 1973, in New York City and raised in Brooklyn Heights and Larchmont. In addition to his sister, he is survived by his parents, James and Barbara Reich.

Mr. Reich studied art history at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. After graduating in 1996, he went to work for Pat Hearn, a pioneering gallery owner in the East Village and later Chelsea; she made Mr. Reich her director.

When Ms. Hearn died at 45 in 2000, Mr. Reich struck out on his own, with so little money that his mother had to help him pay the rent on his apartment. “The bottom line,” he said in an interview, “was that I really wanted to have a gallery, and sometimes you just have to start doing something with whatever you have at your disposal.”

Despite critical success, he struggled to make the gallery work as a business, and in 2011 he closed his commercial space. In a posting on his Web site announcing the closing, he sounded more hopeful than dejected.

“In the original spirit of the gallery, which began out of my apartment in the winter after 9/11, I feel that this moment has a specificity ripe for change,” he wrote. “One of my favorite things about my gallery is that it exists close to the earth and is a gallery of its time.”

"12-Year-Old Building at MoMA Is Doomed" @nytimes - George Lindemann

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

MoMA expects to have the building demolished by the end of this year.

 

By ROBIN POGREBIN

 

When a new home for the American Folk Art Museum opened on West 53d Street in Manhattan in 2001 it was hailed as a harbinger of hope for the city after the Sept. 11 attacks and praised for its bold architecture.

 

 

The former home of the American Folk Art Museum, acclaimed when it opened 12 years ago, is going to be demolished.

“Its heart is in the right time as well as the right place,” Herbert Muschamp wrote in his architecture review in The New York Times, calling the museum’s sculptural bronze facade “already a Midtown icon.”

Now, a mere 12 years later, the building is going to be demolished.

In its place the adjacent Museum of Modern Art, which bought the building in 2011, will put up an expansion, which will connect to a new tower with floors for the Modern on the other side of the former museum. And the folk museum building, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, will take a dubious place in history as having had one of the shortest lives of an architecturally ambitious project in Manhattan.

“It’s very rare that a building that recent comes down, especially a building that was such a major design and that got so much publicity when it opened for its design — mostly very positive,” said Andrew S. Dolkart, the director of Columbia University’s historic preservation program. “The building is so solid looking on the street, and then it becomes a disposable artifact. It’s unusual and it’s tragic because it’s a notable work of 21st century architecture by noteworthy architects who haven’t done that much work in the city, and it’s a beautiful work with the look of a handcrafted facade.”

MoMA officials said the building’s design did not fit their plans because the opaque facade is not in keeping with the glass aesthetic of the rest of the museum. The former folk museum is also set back farther than MoMA’s other properties, and the floors would not line up.

“It’s not a comment on the quality of the building or Tod and Billie’s architecture,” Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s director said.

Mr. Lowry personally went to the architects’ offices to inform them of the museum’s decision, a gesture that Ms. Tsien said she appreciated.

“We feel really disappointed,” she said in an interview. “There are of course the personal feelings — your buildings are like your children, and this is a particular, for us, beloved small child. But there is also the feeling that it’s a kind of loss for architecture, because it’s a special building, a kind of small building that’s crafted, that’s particular and thoughtful at a time when so many buildings are about bigness.”

The folk art museum, which had once envisioned the building as a stimulus for its growth, ended up selling the property, at 45 West 53d Street, to pay off the $32 million it had borrowed to finance an expansion. It now operates at a smaller site on Lincoln Square, at West 66th Street.

Mr. Lowry said the expansion would complete the MoMA campus, which will ultimately consist of five buildings, four of them on West 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas.

Still to be built is an 82-story tower just west of the folk museum that is being developed by Hines, a Houston company, and was designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel. It will include apartments as well as exhibition space for the museum.

When the projects are finished the museum will gain about 10,000 square feet of gallery space at the former folk art site and about 40,000 in the Nouvel building, officials said. The Modern’s second, fourth and fifth floors will line up with those in both buildings. (The second-floor galleries are double height.)

“We’ll have a completely integrated west end to the museum,” Mr. Lowry said. “Floor plates will extend seamlessly.”

Precisely what will be displayed in the new galleries has yet to be determined, but Mr. Lowry said they would include work from the Modern’s “midcentury collections, early Modern collections and temporary exhibitions.”

The cost for the project has not been announced, he said, and fund-raising has yet to begin.

MoMA’s 2004 renovation, designed by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, increased the museum’s gallery space to 125,000 square feet, from 85,000 (and the overall size to 630,000 square feet, from 378,000). But the museum still needs more room for exhibitions.

“We have a lot of art that we own that we would like to show,” said Jerry I. Speyer, the real estate developer who is the museum’s chairman. “When we built what exists today we didn’t get as much exhibition space as we really need.”

Ms. Tsien said she and Mr. Williams, her husband, wished the Modern had found a way to reuse what they designed and to realize its value.

“It’s a building that kids study in architecture school,” she said. “They study it as a kind of precedent to understand how buildings are made and to understand the kind of space it is because it is a complex and interesting building in a very small site.”

But, she added, “it doesn’t seem to make sense to second-guess how they might have used it.”

The Modern will interview architects to design the new addition, Mr. Lowry said, and hopes to select one by the end of this year. It expects to have the building demolished by then.

Construction of the Nouvel project is expected to start in 2014, with both new buildings being completed simultaneously in 2017 or 2018, Mr. Lowry said.

The museum has been aggressive about expansion. In 1996 it bought the Dorset Hotel, a 1920s building on West 54th Street, and two adjacent brownstones, using much of the sites for its extensive renovation in 2004.

In 2007 the museum sold its last vacant parcel of land for $125 million to Hines, which decided to develop the Nouvel building and include space for the museum.

Mr. Nouvel originally designed the tower, at 53 West 53d Street, with a spire rising 1,250 feet — matching the top floor of the Empire State Building — and Nicolai Ouroussoff predicted in The Times that it would be “the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation.”

But residents protested the height and the Department of City Planning demanded that Mr. Nouvel cut 200 feet from the top. He did so, and in 2009 the City Council approved plans for a tower that is to rise 1,050 feet.

The museum is deciding what to put at ground level at the former folk art building site — perhaps additional retail or another restaurant, Mr. Lowry said. (Its upscale restaurant, the Dining Room at the Modern, received three stars from Pete Wells in The Times last month.)

“We bought the site,” Mr. Lowry said, “and our responsibility is to use the site intelligently.”

Ms. Tsien said she could not recall another example of such a high-profile architectural project being demolished so soon after it was built. “Museums have opened and closed and buildings have shifted,” she said, “but I don’t know about being torn down.”

"A Billion-Dollar Gift Gives the Met a New Perspective (Cubist)" @nytimes

 

In one of the most significant gifts in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the philanthropist and cosmetics tycoon Leonard A. Lauder has promised the institution his collection of 78 Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures.

The trove of signature works, which includes 33 Picassos, 17 Braques, 14 Légers and 14 works by Gris, is valued at more than $1 billion. It puts Mr. Lauder, who for years has been one of the city’s most influential art patrons, in a class with cornerstone contributors to the museum like Michael C. Rockefeller, Walter Annenberg, Henry Osborne Havemeyer and Robert Lehman.

The gift was approved by the Met’s board at a meeting Tuesday afternoon.

Scholars say the collection is among the world’s greatest, as good as, if not better than, the renowned Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures in institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the Pompidou Center in Paris. Together they tell the story of a movement that revolutionized Modern art and fill a glaring gap in the Met’s collection, which has been notably weak in early-20th-century art.

“In one fell swoop this puts the Met at the forefront of early-20th-century art,” Thomas P. Campbell, the Met’s director, said. “It is an unreproducible collection, something museum directors only dream about.”

And many did. Discussions between Mr. Lauder and the Met went on for years, first with Philippe de Montebello, its longtime director who retired in 2008, and more recently with Mr. Campbell. While Mr. Lauder declined to say who else courted his collection, officials in the museum world have said the National Gallery of Art in Washington was among them. But as a New Yorker aware that his art could radically transform one of the city’s most historic institutions, he saw the Met as a perfect fit.

“Whenever I’ve given something to a museum, I’ve wanted it to be transformative,” Mr. Lauder explained. “This wasn’t a bidding war. I went knocking, and the door opened easily.”

In the New York art scene, which is heavily populated with big-time collectors, Mr. Lauder is a singular figure. While many of his peers have made splashy acquisitions, seduced by the latest trends, he has quietly and steadily built a museum-worthy collection with a single focus, on Cubism.

His gift comes without restrictions so it can be displayed as curators see fit. The Met is already beginning to receive the art, according to officials there, for an exhibition scheduled to open in the fall of 2014.

Mr. Lauder, 80, has also spearheaded the creation of a research center for Modern art at the Met, supported by a $22 million endowment that he has helped finance along with museum trustees and supporters.

The collection, which Mr. Lauder began building more than 40 years ago, is a product of taste and timing.

“I liked the aesthetic,” he said on a recent afternoon in his Manhattan apartment. He was in the living room, staring at a still life by Picasso richly punctuated with bits of newspaper and sand. “Back then,” he said, “a lot was still available, because nobody really wanted it.”

It was also relatively inexpensive because the fashion was for Impressionism and post-Impressionism.

Mr. Lauder and his younger brother, Ronald S. Lauder, a founder of the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side, are among the most influential collectors and supporters of art in New York. But while others buy widely, often in multiple periods and styles, Leonard Lauder stands out for his single-minded focus.

“You can’t put together a good collection unless you are focused, disciplined, tenacious and willing to pay more than you can possibly afford,” Mr. Lauder said. “Early on I decided this should be formed as a museum collection,” and “whenever I considered buying anything, I would step back and ask myself, does this make the cut?”

As a result, much of his art comes from some of the world’s most celebrated collections, including those of Gertrude Stein, the Swiss banker Raoul La Roche and the British art historian Douglas Cooper.

The term Cubism first appeared in a review of a 1908 exhibition at Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s Paris gallery, which featured early Cubist works. What began as a collaboration between Picasso and Braque, Cubism became a pioneering movement that redefined concepts of space and time, high and low. Those artists, along with Fernand Léger and Juan Gris, took shapes that were familiar and turned them upside down, dismantling the traditional perspective.

Challenging the romantic view of painting, Cubist artists also began incorporating things like cardboard, sand, sawdust, rope, wood, wallpaper, stencils and bits of newspaper into their paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures. Their work paved the way for abstraction, which dominated Western art for the next 50 years.

Often, Mr. Lauder said, it took him years to find something he wanted to buy. “I’ve made more trips to Switzerland than I’d like to count,” he said with a chuckle. With the help of Emily Braun, an art historian who has worked as Mr. Lauder’s curator for 26 years, he was able to pick and choose the finest works that came on the market.

As a result, most of the works in Mr. Lauder’s collection have a particular historical significance. Two landscapes are from the groundbreaking 1908 Kahnweiler exhibition: Braque’s “Terrace at the Hotel Mistral,” from 1907, and his “Trees at L’Estaque,” from 1908.

“ ‘The Trees at L’Estaque’ is considered one of the very first Cubist pictures,” Ms. Braun said. “It created a new form of pictorial space that Braque arrived at from his close study of Cézanne’s landscapes.”

Rebecca Rabinow, a curator in the Metropolitan Museum’s department of Modern and contemporary art, noted other milestones included in the gift. “There are so many firsts in this collection,” she said.

Picasso’s “Oil Mill,” from 1909, was the first Cubist painting seen in Italy, which influenced the Italian Futurists. Another of his works, “The Fan (L’Independent),” from 1911, is one of the first works in which Picasso experimented with typography, in this case the gothic type masthead from a local French newspaper. Braque’s “Fruit Dish and Glass,” from 1912, is the first Cubist paper collage ever created.

Some of the paintings and sculptures in Mr. Lauder’s collection were particularly radical for their time, like Picasso’s “Woman in an Armchair (Eva),” the artist’s 1913-14 image of his mistress Eva Gouel, in which he translated the female body into his own Cubist language. Picasso’s sculpture “Head of a Woman,” from 1909, is thought to be the first Cubist sculpture.

That many of the works look both forward and back is of particular value to the Met’s curators. Picasso’s embrace of African tribal art, for instance, was crucial to his depiction of nontraditional forms.

“Cubism inspired not just Western artists, but it had a huge global impact,” Ms. Rabinow said. “We can tell so many different stories that we could never tell before.”

Up to now Cubism has been only sparsely represented at the Met. In fact it only received its first Cubist paintings in 1996. In a 2010 review of an exhibition of the Met’s Picasso collection, Holland Cotter noted in The New York Times, “When the Museum of Modern Art was wolfing down audacious helpings of Cubism, the Met was content with a tasting menu of Blue Period, Rose Period and neo-Classical fare.”

This isn’t the first transformative gift Mr. Lauder has made to a museum. As the longtime chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art (he is now its chairman emeritus), he donated millions in art and money, most recently in 2008 when he gave the museum $131 million to shore up its endowment.

While it is the largest gift in the Whitney’s history, it came with strings. Concerned about the future of its landmark Marcel Breuer building, which Mr. Lauder considers the Whitney’s spiritual home, he placed a stipulation on his gift that the building could not be sold for the foreseeable future. At the same time, he quietly masterminded plans for the Met to take over the Breuer building for at least eight years, after the Whitney decamps to its new home in the meatpacking district of Manhattan in 2015.

When the Met gets Mr. Lauder’s collection, Mr. Campbell said, it will take “pride of place” in the museum’s soon to be renovated Modern and contemporary galleries, in its main building. Before then the collection will be exhibited as a whole for the first time at the Met in 2014 in a show organized by Ms. Rabinow and Ms. Braun.

Realizing how his collection could help tell so many different stories when seen in the context of the Met’s encyclopedic holdings, Mr. Lauder did not put restrictions on his gift.

And he stressed that his donation doesn’t mean the end of his collecting. As recently as last month he bought a collage by Gris, which is part of the gift.

“I’ll continue to buy and add to the Met’s collection,” he said, then paused, smiled and added, “But only if the right things come along.”

"Family Seeks Return of a Matisse Seized by the Nazis" @NYtimes

The heirs of a French art dealer are demanding that a Norwegian museum return one of its featured paintings, a Matisse that was confiscated by the Nazis in 1941 in Paris.

 

The family of Paul Rosenberg, a prominent Parisian gallery owner, has documents showing that the painting, known as “Woman in Blue in Front of Fireplace,” or “Blue Dress in a Yellow Armchair,” was among those in the possession of the Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering in 1942. The documents include a long list, stamped with Goering’s initials, itemizing artworks taken from Mr. Rosenberg’s vault

 

But the museum, the Henie Onstad Arts Center, founded in 1968 by the Olympic skating champion Sonja Henie and her husband, the shipping magnate Niels Onstad, says Mr. Onstad bought the painting in good faith more than 60 years ago, giving the center ownership rights to the work under Norwegian law. The law requires a minimum of 10 years’ possession.

The museum, outside Oslo, said it did not know the painting had once been Nazi plunder, but it does not contest that, in light of the evidence. It says that it is continuing to negotiate with the heirs and to study the work’s provenance, and that it will discuss the family’s request at a board meeting next month.

“We need to investigate this matter properly,” said the museum’s director, Tone Hansen. “It is too early to draw any conclusions. We are in dialogue with the family and will continue to be so.”

She added, “This case has other aspects than pure legal aspects that have to be taken into consideration.”

The Rosenberg family became aware of the Matisse’s location last summer, when the Art Loss Register, an art-recovery company that had put the painting on its list of missing artworks, noticed that it was on loan to the Pompidou Center in Paris. The museum and the Rosenbergs have been negotiating quietly since.

Museum officials met twice with family representatives, first in Norway and then in New York. Marianne Rosenberg, a New York lawyer who is a granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg and took part in the second meeting, said a museum official offered to help resolve the matter by placing a plaque next to the Matisse, acknowledging that Paul Rosenberg had owned it. The family rejected the offer, she said.

A museum spokeswoman said she could not comment on the talks.

The Matisse was painted in 1937, the year Mr. Rosenberg bought it. According to documents gathered from Nazi files, as well as records kept by Mr. Rosenberg and his heirs, it was one of about 160 works that German soldiers were sent to seize from the Rosenberg Gallery’s vaults as part of a widespread confiscation of art owned by Jews.

“This is the most well-documented claim I have ever seen,” said Christopher A. Marinello, a lawyer and the director of the Art Loss Register.

By 1942, the painting was in the hands of a Paris collector, Paul Pétridès. In 1949, museum records show, it was in the possession of Galerie Bénézit of Paris, from which, museum officials said, Mr. Onstad bought it in either 1949 or 1950. Mr. Marinello said that a lawyer for the museum, Kyrre Eggen, informed the Rosenbergs that the museum was researching whether it was possible that Mr. Rosenberg, who returned to Europe after the war in an effort to recover his property, took part in a transaction involving the painting before its purchase by Mr. Onstad.

Marianne Rosenberg called the museum’s theory “complete and utter fiction.”

“Our family was deeply affected by the war,” she said, “and we do not make frivolous claims, and that assertion is frankly insulting.”

The museum said it had never tried to hide its ownership of the painting, which it has lent to several European museums.

Ms. Rosenberg said it was not surprising that her family had not discovered the Matisse earlier, given that it has been busy for decades trying to recover more than 400 items looted by the Nazis and scattered around the world.

“The onus is not on the claimant to have to go scooting around looking in every catalog and small museums hunting for their stolen art,” she said.

The Matisse is among the prized possessions of the arts center, which has two Picassos, two Matisses and works by Miró, Klee and several dozen other prominent Modernists that it refers to as its “core collection.”

The museum’s initial collection was largely the artwork given it by Henie and Mr. Onstad. Henie, who won gold medals in Olympics figure skating in 1928, 1932 and 1936 before becoming a Hollywood star, died in 1969. Mr. Onstad died in 1978.

 

http://http//www.nytimes.com/2013/04/06/arts/design/rosenberg-family-asks-norwegian-museum-to-return-a-matisse.html?ref=arts&_r=0

"The New High-Tech Patrons" @wsj - George Lindemann

Tech entrepreneurs are starting to peer out from their hoodies and explore the art world, and dealers and museum boards couldn't be more thrilled. WSJ's Ellen Gamerman joins Lunch Break with a look at the new players, and the culture clash it's setting up with Wall Street's elite. Photo: Getty Images.

Next week, San Francisco will unveil a major public art installation using 25,000 energy-efficient lights to illuminate the city's Bay Bridge in countless abstract combinations.

The Bay Lights, set to run every night for the next two years, will also spotlight a new role for the area's tech entrepreneurs: patrons of the arts.

Winni Wintermeyer for The Wall Street Journal

BETA TESTING Leo Villareal, a tech-world favorite, with his computer-assisted light sculpture that will illuminate San Francisco's Bay Bridge in abstract patterns every night for the next two years.

Created by artist Leo Villareal, the $8 million computer-assisted light sculpture has been financed by some high-profile tech donors including Yahoo YHOO +2.86%CEO Marissa Mayer and Internet power couple Mark and Alison Pincus. Mr. Villareal, who designed the bridge's light patterns using software he created, is also emblematic of a new breed of artist that is especially attractive to wealthy technology executives. A former researcher at Microsoft MSFT +0.61%co-founder Paul Allen's think tank in the early 1990s, Mr. Villareal weaves that tech background into his work.

"This was a whole I.T. job, which you wouldn't associate with a monumental piece of public art," Mr. Villareal said one chilly evening on a San Francisco pier as he tested the work with his laptop. Every time he stabbed at the keyboard through a hole in his glove, the lights rearranged across the bridge.

Around San Francisco, tech entrepreneurs who spent years building businesses and accumulating wealth are starting to peer out from under their hoodies and explore the art world. As the Internet industry matures, the people who helped make it happen are having children, buying houses and taking tentative steps into philanthropy—and now the art world. It's a lucrative emerging market that is gaining the attention of museums, dealers, consultants and other art-world heavyweights.

"Art comes between buying the Ferrari and getting the kids into college," said New York mega-dealer Larry Gagosian, who added that he sees "tremendous potential" from tech entrepreneurs as they grow older.

As they have with risky and fast-growing startups, the new tech players are putting a distinctive spin on the art scene—both in the type of work they collect and the low-profile way they acquire it. Many tech collectors exploring the market, for instance, are seduced by works with a digital twist.

"An engineer will look at a photograph or video art in a way a banker couldn't—we think in ones and zeros, we think in terms of screens," said Trevor Traina, a 44-year-old collector of photography who sold his first tech company to Microsoft for more than $100 million.

Unlike on Wall Street, where a trophy canvas can work as a passport to highflying social circles, flaunting isn't part of the tech culture. "If you saw these people, you'd never guess that they have money—it's all about just being cool," said San Francisco dealer Chris Perez, who works with about 20 tech clients.image

Simon Upton/The Interior Archive

Trevor Traina, who sold his first company to Microsoft for more than $100 million, is amassing a major photo collection.

Two years ago, as a service largely to its growing base of tech clients, Christie's began shipping artworks to San Francisco ahead of the major modern and contemporary art sales, said Ellanor Notides, who runs the Christie's San Francisco office. She said tech clients are chasing pieces by market darlings like Gerhard Richter, whose work sold for more than $34 million at Sotheby's last year.

Lately, some art insiders have been buzzing that the wife of Google co-founder Larry Page, Lucinda Southworth, is starting to buy art. (A Google spokeswoman said the company doesn't comment on executives' personal endeavors.) Tech entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen collects—including works by Robert Rauschenberg—as do tech venture capitalists Matt Cohler, who favors contemporary photography, and Jim Breyer, who owns pieces by emerging artists in China and Brazil.

Mr. Breyer, a board member of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, finds parallels between art and startups. He loves taking a chance on lesser-known talent and often visits galleries while traveling abroad on business. He particularly admires artists like Picasso who show the capacity to reinvent themselves. "It's a personal characteristic not only of the artists I gravitate to but the entrepreneurs," he said. (Mr. Breyer sits on the board of News Corp NWSA +1.04%., which publishes The Wall Street Journal.)

The new collectors' interests sometimes contrast with the more traditional tastes of tech pioneers before them: Oracle ORCL +1.18%CEO Larry Ellison buys centuries-old Japanese art. Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang hunts for leading examples of Chinese calligraphy. Microsoft's Mr. Allen collects masterpieces by blue-chip artists like van Gogh and Mark Rothko.

Now San Francisco museums are stepping up their pursuit of the tech industry, particularly as companies like Twitter, Pinterest and Dropbox settle in new offices in the city rather than Silicon Valley.

Mr. Traina, the Internet entrepreneur, loaned his impressive photography collection for a show at the city's de Young Museum last year. Dave Morin, an early Facebook FB +2.68%employee who is now CEO and co-founder of the private social network Path, just joined the board of SFMOMA.

Since 2010, SFMOMA has brought on 12 new trustees—at least half from the tech community, according to museum deputy director of external affairs Robert Lasher. He added that in addition to donating money and loaning artworks, tech contributors are helping retool the institution's digital strategy and guide the museum to a more global role in a nearly $555 million expansion.

Next week, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's annual Mid-Winter Gala is expected to be populated by a number of tech-world all-stars. Yahoo's Ms. Mayer bought a table while Apple lead designer Jonathan Ive is expected to come as well. Organizers are hoping for the return of past attendees like Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman.

 

image
Ligorano/Reese/Catharine Clark Gallery/Nora Ligorano (photo)

Tech collectors chase works like Ligorano/Reese's fiber optic tapestry.

From her glass-walled office at Web retailer One Kings Lane, co-founder Alison Pincus has been working her contacts for San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum, which recruited her for its board last year. At her company's headquarters, which sits in the same San Francisco building as Twitter and Yammer, the Givenchy-and-Balenciaga-clad Ms. Pincus described going to last year's TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., with a mission: to convince friend and fellow art collector David Krane, a general partner at Google Ventures, GOOG +0.60%to join the museum's board.

She succeeded.

Ms. Pincus, whose husband, Mark, is founder and CEO of the social-gaming company Zynga, ZNGA +1.63%also lends the museum her expertise. The 38-year-old mother of two is helping revamp the museum store, where the home page now showcases little more than a small mezuza. The shop needs "bespoke products," a sleeker website and items not limited to Jewish themes, she said.

As art and tech circles overlap more frequently, a cottage industry of dealers and specialized consultants has sprung up to offer advice. San Francisco art adviser Sabrina Buell is a Stanford graduate and former New York gallery director who helps tech honchos—some of them old college pals—begin collecting art.

The 36-year-old San Francisco native meets clients in her downtown office, with its high ceilings and exposed ductwork, first asking them broad questions about their tastes—abstract or figurative? color or muted? Then she goes analog, loading them up with resource books and catalogs. "I like people to look at a thousand things before they buy one," said Ms. Buell.

Her clients tend to avoid status symbols. "If you're young and you walk into someone's house and see a Picasso, it would be like, 'Whoa'—just because you have the capacity, you don't have to buy the most expensive things," she said. Still, her clients often get blue-ribbon treatment, with galleries and auction houses sending art directly to their homes so they can see the art up close while mulling a purchase.

Ms. Buell, whose great uncle is Napa vintner Robert Mondavi, bought her first work of art when she was 15, a Michael Kenna photograph she had written about for an English class. Today she fills the loft she shares with her partner, industrial designer Yves Behar, with edgy contemporary works. Ms. Buell and her colleague, Mary Zlot, trade in discretion: Zlot Buell + Associates doesn't even have a website.

Despite the stepped-up activity, some art dealers still bemoan what they call the indifference of the tech world and write off tech billionaires as glorified engineering nerds who skipped art history to play with their computers.

Others see a shift happening, thanks in part to the booming art market. "It once was a very culturally vapid community, but it's become incredibly rich lately," said Adam Sheffer, a partner at the New York gallery Cheim & Read. "I think people are coming to realize fine art has come to be worth something."

Dealers who work with tech clients are protective of them, wary of a culture clash with snooty art climbers. When a tech entrepreneur who favors Patagonia jackets and sneakers told San Francisco dealer Claudia Altman-Siegel he was headed to the Swiss art fair Art Basel, she had some advice: "I was like, 'No one's going to be nice to you if you're not dressed up,'" she said.

Then again, relative anonymity can be a plus. San Francisco tech investor Art Berliner, managing director of Walden Venture Capital, said when he walks into certain New York galleries he rarely gets the hard sell—or any sell at all—because most people don't know who he is.

Mr. Berliner, whose eclectic collection includes work by Israeli artist Michal Rovner, keeps some of his pieces in his office. He said his artwork helps set a creative tone and soothe nerves when entrepreneurs come to pitch their businesses: "Having art around does make the scene less intimidating."

Apple senior director Jeffrey Dauber owns a $50,000 video work by artist Lincoln Schatz that features layered video images of Mr. Dauber engaging in his morning ritual—including a shot of him pulling down his pants. The voyeurism resonates with a man whose industry helped redefine the idea of privacy.

"The thing about being in tech is, I have no illusions—I know we're being watched," said Mr. Dauber, who keeps his extensive art collection in its own house in San Francisco.

Dick Kramlich, an early pioneer in the tech venture capital scene, plans next year to open a private museum of new media art—which includes video, film and computer-assisted installations—in a Napa Valley building designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the architecture firm behind Beijing's Bird's Nest and the Tate Modern in London. The 77-year-old chairman and co-founder of New Enterprise Associates said the collection's tech orientation was his wife's idea: "She said, 'Look, you're going down to Silicon Valley every day, I think if I did something in this area it might be of interest to you,'" he said.

Internet entrepreneur Mr. Traina, who recently launched a new startup called IfOnly.com, now has 300 master works of photography on the six floors of his mansion in San Francisco's Pacific Heights. During a recent tour, walking by a room wallpapered in peacock feathers, he pointed out classics by Diane Arbus (Mr. Traina bought one of her iconic photographs of identical twins for just under $500,000 at Sotheby's in 2004) and contemporary works like a Doug Rickard photograph of a computer screen showing a Google Street View of a depressed city neighborhood.

Raised in a moneyed family among art lovers—his father had a world-class collection of Fabergé cigarette cases—Mr. Traina promotes the art world to his tech buddies. He organized the Mid-Winter Gala for the Fine Arts Museums in part to lure a "farm team" of young donors and future board members. Trustees now include Zachary Bogue, a tech investor married to Yahoo's Ms. Mayer, an SFMOMA board member.

The institution returns the favor by opening up singular experiences to Mr. Traina, who recalls a trip to the Netherlands he once took with fellow board members. Early one morning, he was allowed to visit an Amsterdam museum while it was still closed. "This very nice woman left me alone in a room with five Vermeers," he said. "I realized the power great art can have."

Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com

"A Collaboration of Bees and Man" - @wsj

[image]The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C./Lee Stalsworth

Wolfgang Laib's 'Wax Room,' opening Saturday at the Phillips Collection.

This internationally known and respected boutique institution, the first modern art museum in America, is about to unveil its first permanent installation in more than 50 years. And the pervasive feeling in-house is that the new arrival—a beeswax chamber designed by conceptual artist Wolfgang Laib, opening Saturday—couldn't be more true to the vision of Duncan Phillips (1886-1966) when he opened his private collection to the public in 1921.

"Duncan wanted the museum to be an intimate experience and have a spirit of experimentation," says Dorothy Kosinski, director of the Phillips. "A wax chamber by Wolfgang would be the biggest, most powerful expression of that spirit."

The German-born Mr. Laib has been creating beeswax chambers—small spaces lined with beeswax, gently lighted by a single hanging bulb—for more than 25 years. He uses hundreds of pounds of pure melted beeswax much like plaster, smoothly coating walls and ceilings until they almost resemble yellow marble—except with a warm glow.

The spaces offer room for perhaps two people comfortably but are said to be best visited alone. (The room at the Phillips, a former storage closet, is 6 feet wide by 7 feet deep and 10 feet high.) "There's a feeling you get inside the space that can't really described," says Mr. Laib, a diminutive, almost fragile-looking man with a voice barely above a whisper. "But it moves you."

The aroma of the beeswax is "totally seductive," Ms. Kosinski says, employing the kind of sensual language most often used to describe Mr. Laib's chambers. The intense color of the wax and its close proximity to your own skin in an austere space have also been cited as evoking a curiously visceral experience that is also meditative and spiritual. "It's really a new way of entering the artist's world," says Susan Behrends Frank, associate curator of research for the museum.

Mr. Laib's installations—involving other natural substances, such as pollen and rice, as well as beeswax—have been displayed at prominent museums and galleries around the world, including New York's Museum of Modern Art. Ms. Kosinski fully expects that visitors may not know what to make of the chamber when they see it. "But people being slightly perplexed is maybe not a bad thing," she adds.

Duncan Phillips might well agree. Though initially his collection consisted largely of Impressionist paintings, hardly controversial by the time he acquired them, he soon became known for bucking mainstream taste. He was one of the earliest patrons of the American modernists John Marin and Arthur Dove, and he bought the late work of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) in depth after World War II, a period when it was dismissed as emptily decorative. And Phillips's admiration for Abstract Expressionism, when that was still a suspect style, is evident in pieces by Richard Diebenkorn and Willem de Kooning, among others.

In 1960, six years before his death, Phillips added a permanent exhibit of four Mark Rothko oils to be housed in a dedicated room. No other artist had received such an honor there. While Phillips designed the Rothko Room, as it came to be known, the artist was directly involved with deciding which walls the color-field paintings should hang on, the kind of lighting and even furniture that should be in the room. "I think it's the only exhibit Rothko himself installed," Ms. Kosinski says.

Now, for only the second time in its history, the Phillips Collection is dedicating another space for permanent residence, and Rothko has a lot to do with it. Two years ago, while participating in the museum's "Conversations With Artists" series, Mr. Laib stepped into the Rothko Room for the first time and was transported by "a very emotional, deep feeling," he says. "Like being in another world." Not unlike the effect Mr. Laib seeks in beeswax chambers.

Until then, Mr. Laib had concentrated on pieces that could easily tour. But he says he had begun to think it was "important that some things should stay, be permanent." He thought a permanent wax chamber in the Phillips would be ideal for intertwining reasons: The compatibility he felt between the color-fields and his wax chambers, and the chance to dispel what Mr. Laib has long considered a facile comparison some have made between his work and Rothko's. Mr. Laib's pollen pieces consist of the brightly colorful substance, which he gathers from near his home in southern Germany and then feathers on a dark platform, prompting a reaction he says he has heard too often—"Rothko on the floor." (Mr. Laib's "Pollen From Hazelnut" installation is on display at MoMA through March 11.)

"I have a deeper, more complex relationship with Rothko," Mr. Laib says, "and a permanent room would demonstrate that." His room is in the center of the original Phillips mansion; the Rothko room is at the far end of the Sant Building, an extension added in 2006.

"My immediate reaction," says Ms. Kosinski, recalling when she learned of Mr. Laib's desire to install a permanent beeswax chamber in the Phillips, "was that he's right. It would make total sense to have it here."

The Phillips had been exhibiting contemporary art, but Ms. Kosinski saw an opportunity for "the perfect expression of the desire to experiment, to let viewers have encounters with art on their own terms," she says, thus reinvigorating a key component of the museum's original mission.

"Duncan Phillips started off as a kind of timid collector," Ms. Behrends Frank says. "But toward the end of his life he made a really bold move by creating the Rothko Room. And now the beeswax chamber is really bold."

"Besides," adds Ms. Kosinski, "it's just cool."

Mr. Triplett is a writer in Washington

"At the Bass on Miami Beach, the Renaissance lives on" @miamiherald - George Lindemann

Special to the Miami Herald

The Endless Renaissance, now at the Bass Museum, is an ambitious exhibit. It combines masterpieces from the permanent collection with contemporary video, sculpture and painting from six international artists, who incorporate ideas, concepts or imagery first forged in the Renaissance into their 21st century creations. This means there are some direct references, such as religious iconography in the work, and more highly conceptual and abstract connections that still attempt to thread a history of art throughout.

The most fascinating and enjoyable pieces in the exhibit are on the first floor, from Thailand’s Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. They include large photographs and a delightful video, where the artist plays with co-mingling Western art and Eastern culture. She took paintings so well-known to a Western audience, such as a Rembrandt and a Van Gogh, and put large prints of them in front of Thai villagers, both men and women. The juxtaposition posed within the photos is simply beautiful. In one we see only the backs of the farmers, sitting on the ground in a lush green bamboo forest, staring at Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass encased in a baroque frame.

She has rightly named the work Two Planets. It’s incongruous to see this painting positioned in the open in tropical Southeast Asia — not how most Westerners view our classic art, usually in museums. What are these villagers to make of the French Impressionist’s depiction of fully dressed men and a naked woman? The settings are both pastoral — but worlds apart.

We get to hear what the villagers have to say in the darkened video room. While looking at a Van Gogh, they question and exclaim things such as “their ox carts look different from ours.” Or, “what, no bamboo. How do they do it?” “Is that a beard, is that a man?” And then they try to figure out how the French farmers are “thrashing the rice” when they are hauling hay. In this case, the 19th century farmer in Europe and in today’s Thailand do not appear too distant from each other; they would have similar concerns, and humorous observations, about everyday rural life.

On the ramp leading to the second floor we are fed examples of the real deal from over the last 500 years. From the Bass collection, there are paintings from the Flemish, Austrian and Florentine schools, each with their own tell-tale marks and coloring. Hanging here are a Rubens, El Greco, a Botticelli, and a huge tapestry covering one wall, from the 1500s. Most of these paintings depict scenes from the Christian Bible, with the ubiquitous inclusion of the Virgin Mary and various saints.

That easy familiarity with famous works dissipates as you walk onto the second floor. Barry X Ball’s portrait busts draw directly from a Renaissance heritage, but these are disturbing sculptures, ones not likely found in a Tuscan villa. The California native uses an amazing array of materials to make these busts, which can seem to be in frightening pain as they sit on their pedestals or hang from the ceiling. Crafted from unusual stone and steel, they appear to be melting or disintegrating.

Some of the portraits are based on famous sculptures that you’ll recognize; others are based on contemporary art-world figures such as Matthew Barney. There are some very lovely moments in Ball’s room too: The first duel grouping of busts that hang from the ceiling as you enter the room throws off incredible shadows. A shiny black figure of Belgian black marble reclines in the corner, looking so sensuous to the touch. The figure has breasts and a penis, and is called The Sleeping Hermaphrodite.

Figurative form altogether disappears in the next space, and so too does the clear connection to a Renaissance art history. But London-born Walead Beshty’s abstract, conceptually complex pieces are a highlight. There is a lot about process here. For instance, his copper panel sculptures are installed without gloves, leaving smudge marks all over them. The white “paintings” have a similar quality and look dirty from a distance, but the more you study them, the more interesting they become. His FedEx boxes also record a process, a journey, that has not changed much since the time of Michelangelo: artwork has always been shipped, bought, resold, ending up in a time and a place far removed from its origin.

Han-Peter Feldman and Ged Quinn’s paintings are a complete departure that can be difficult to digest. Liverpool native Quinn’s surreal allegorical paintings are in vogue across Europe. Scenes set in Romantic-era forests might include a bubble house, historical figures, a bleeding martyr or a crucified cat. The link to art history is overt here, intentionally over-the-top, but they aren’t to everyone’s taste.

You’ll need to take some time to figure out all that is going on in three large video screens that make up The Annunciation, from Finland’s Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Like the video on the ground floor, this is special for its simplicity of its everyday “characters.” Of course, the annunciation is one of the most depicted scenes in art since the dawn of Christianity, the gospel of how the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that her child will be the son of God. Here on screen it is reenacted in a studio by some friends (not actors). They too look at classic paintings and discuss them — how much did the angel really scare Mary? — along with talk of why donkeys are wondering around Finland (“don’t they belong in warm countries?” one asks).

The Bass came up with a nice mix of styles and forms for this exhibit, from some important artists on the world stage today. It might be hard for the viewer to keep up with the Endless Renaissance thread; each room feels like its own show, and, in fact, they are described as six solo projects. That’s OK. In fact, when exhibits try and force a theme, lead an audience down one path, it often doesn’t work. These speak for themselves, individually, and out of the broad scope of the artists’ work, you can take away what you want.