The Cross-Dressing of Art and Couture

‘Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity,’ at the Met

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity Monet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” and a white cotton piqué day dress in this exhibition at the Met. More Photos »

By ROBERTA SMITH

In name, at least, “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity,” the thrilling, erudite show opening to the public on Tuesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sounds like a double dose of pandering. Impressionism and fashion? The pairing portends blockbuster-bundling and seems so excessive as to be unhealthy — possibly illegal — like 32-ounce sodas. Brace for “Van Gogh and Motorcycles,” “Rembrandt and Fabergé” and “Norman Rockwell and Tim Burton.”

But fear not. In reality, “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity” is neither your father’s Impressionist blockbuster nor a focus group’s. With its mixture of great paintings and lavish garments and accessories — everything 19th-century French or inspired thereby — it is certain to attract multiple demographics in great numbers. But its broad allure derives from its visual fireworks, historical clarity and pitch-perfect contextualizing. It builds webs of new information and viewpoints around some of the best-known, most beloved paintings of all time, quite a few of which don’t often travel to this country.

For starters, both of the surviving panels of Claude Monet’s colossal “Luncheon on the Grass” — cut into pieces when it wasn’t finished in time for the 1866 Salon — are being shown together in this hemisphere for the first time, lent by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where the show had its debut last fall and was thronged.

In fresh, groundbreaking ways this show details the entwined rise of modern painting, modern fashion and modern (upper middle-class) life over some two dozen years of rapid change in Paris, 1862 to 1887. The period included the rise of department stores, illustrated fashion magazines and ready-to-wear clothing, but also the couturier fashion house, most notably that of Charles Frederick Worth. Black emerged even more emphatically from the weeds of widowhood to become emblematic of urban sophistication. And men and women strolled the widened sidewalks and radiating boulevards, browsing shop windows, seeing and being seen in Baron Haussmann’s new Paris, “the capital of the 19th century,” in Walter Benjamin’s inspiring phrase.

Painters and writers intent on bringing a new reality to their work were among the first to see fashion as a vital expression of modern life. Briefly in 1874, no less than the poet Stéphane Mallarmé published a fashion magazine, La Dernière Mode, and largely wrote it, too, using bylines like Mademoiselle Satin and Marguerite de Ponty.

The show tells its tale through a dazzling surround of visual culture high and low, small and large, flat and round. I recommend not missing a thing: not a pleat, ruche or lace parasol; not a painted background, glove or slipper toe; not a photograph or magazine; not a corset, fan or black choker, whether depicted or actual. Such attention reveals frequent similarities of garments (and poses) in the magazines, photographs, paintings and costumed mannequins. A result is an intense, almost hallucinatory swirl in which art and artifact continually change places, and a basic wisdom is demonstrated: any well-selected thing can illuminate any other.

The ratio of 14 dresses to 79 paintings is just right. A little goes a long way with mid-19th-century day dresses, ball gowns or summer muslins; they are as intricate as Gothic cathedrals.

Organized by the Art Institute of Chicago (where it will be seen in June), in collaboration with the Met and the Orsay, “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity” and its excellent catalog have been overseen by Gloria Groom, a curator of European art at the institute. The curator Susan Alyson Stein was in charge of the Met’s version, which has a completely different wardrobe from that of the Orsay show, but mostly the same paintings. These include, as a bonus, Courbet’s stunning forerunner, “Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine,” from 1856-57, with its precise rendering of the dresses and petticoats of its women of the street, flopped, exhausted, on the grass.

Ms. Stein’s crisp installation is aided by labels that excerpt the observations, both astute and nearsighted, of contemporary critics, and by vivid quotations that are sprinkled across the walls. One of the first and among the most giddy: “The Parisienne is not in fashion, she is fashion,” from Arsène Houssaye, writing in the magazine L’Artiste in 1869.

With sections titled “Refashioning Figure Painting,” “En Plein Air,” “The White Dress” and “The Black Dress,” this show limns the milieu in which the Impressionists, led by Manet and Degas, came into their own as painters of modern life, determined to portray their contemporaries and their world in a way that also radicalized their medium. Velázquez and the Spaniards served as models, but so did new means of mechanical reproduction, especially the hand-colored steel engravings, called fashion plates, often set into fashion magazines. No less than Cézanne, hardly known for his attention to haberdashery, is shown to have painted a small, nearly exact copy of one in 1871, just before his thick-handed early style exploded into separate brush marks.

Berthe Morisot uses a photograph of herself in a low-cut black evening dress, with slight changes, as the basis for her 1875 painting “Figure of a Woman (Before the Theater).” The labor required for such finery is barely hinted at, primarily in Degas’s soundless depictions of milliners and their shops.

The Impressionists shared their awareness of modern dress as an increasingly prominent expression of their times with far more conservative painters, non-Impressionists — quite abundant in this show — who wanted to paint modern life, but not in such modern ways. They sought the veracity and high finish of Ingres, but were rarely up to it. Fantin-Latour’s marvelous three-quarter portrait of Manet, the impeccably top-hatted, watch-fobbed gentleman of 1867, comes closest, in the one gallery devoted to male attire. (It leaves you wanting more.) A wide miss is Albert Bartholomé’s cloying 1881 “In the Conservatory (Madame Bartholomé),” the only painting to be shown with the actual garment it portrays.

The tension between the innovative and the staid — the Impressionists using clothes as occasions to explore paint; the loyal opposition focusing on them as things in themselves — is the show’s main engine. The artists from both sides of the aisle knew, borrowed from and competed with one another, formulating together a new combination of genre painting and portraiture, catching their subjects in the moment, yet often in a full-length, slightly larger-than-life scale.

The artists’ differences are announced by the face-off of paintings in the first gallery. The contrasts are especially apparent in Tissot’s zealously detailed 1866 “Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon,” a somewhat daring depiction of a lady of obvious high rank wearing a chic deep-pink dressing gown in the privacy of her well-appointed home, and Manet’s “Young Lady in 1866,” defined by the challenging gaze of an unnamed woman, clearly in the artist’s studio, whose even more chic dressing gown is also a pyramidal plane of robustly worked pale pink paint.

This gallery is presided over by a gray silk faille day dress from 1865-67, accessorized by the essential wool paisley shawl from India (which fell from fashion, once French manufacturers learned to make cheaper ones). The mannequin might have stepped out of Monet’s nearby 1868 portrait, “Madame Louis Joachim Gaudibert,” in which the train of the gown unravels in loose brushwork resembling jagged mountain ranges. It is illuminating to see what Monet was looking at and what he did with it.

Tissot, represented by 10 canvases, more than those of any other artist, appears in nearly every gallery, becoming a cautionary leitmotif about coarsening talent. His best work is his earliest: the ambiguous 1864 “Portrait of Mademoiselle L. L.,” a dark-eyed ingénue perched on a desk in a fashionable red bolero and dark soft skirt, evoking Corot as much as Ingres with a subtle eroticism that Balthus must have envied.

While sometimes a step ahead of his more adventuresome colleagues in subject matter, Tissot is soon in rapid descent, heading for the garishly tight, treacly paintings fit for chocolate-box covers found in the show’s final gallery, where a few too many other paintings tend in this direction.

As compensation there is the alluring Haussmannian vista of Gustave Caillebotte’s immense “Paris Street: Rainy Day” (1877) and two utterly astounding day dresses by Worth, their extreme architecture (bustles) echoed in paintings by Georges Seurat, Jacques-Émile Blanche and Henry Lerolle.

The best of the wall quotations comes from Degas: “Think of a treatise on ornament for women or by women, based on their manner of observing, of combining, of selecting their fashionable outfits and all things. On a daily basis they compare, more than men, a thousand visible things with one another.”

Of course “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity” is about much more than ornament, as were the women in Degas’s quotation. The show chronicles the circular flow of life and art. But its deep content may be the prominent roles women always play in culture, and it is worth noting that 10 of the 15 contributors to the catalog are women. As Elizabeth Wilson wrote in her pioneering 1985 book, “Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity,” which is curiously absent from the catalog’s extensive bibliography: “Dress is the frontier between the self and the not-self,” and fashionable dress “one of the ways in which women achieve self-expression.”

Richard Artschwager with his “Door },” from 1983-84.

By KEN JOHNSON

Published: February 10, 2013

Richard Artschwager, a painter and sculptor whose witty, contradictory mixing of artistic genres made him one of the most critically admired artists to emerge in the 1960s, died early Saturday in Albany. He was 89.

His death, at a hospital, followed a recent stroke, his wife, Ann, said.

The death also followed by less than a week the closing of a career retrospective of Mr. Artschwager’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan, his second to be mounted there. He lived in Hudson, N.Y., in Columbia County.

At a time when most artists worked in clearly determined styles, Mr. Artschwager slyly confounded the usual categories. His most famous sculpture, “Table With Pink Tablecloth,” from 1964, is something of a cross between Pop Art and a Minimalist cube by Donald Judd: a box neatly veneered with pieces of colored Formica to create the image of a wooden table with a square pink tablecloth draped on it.

Mr. Artschwager went on to produce variations on the forms of chairs, tables, doors and other domestic objects in styles ranging from severely geometric to surrealistically distorted.

In the late 1960s, he invented an abstract form he called a “blp,” a small, black, oblong shape that he would recreate in various materials and install in unexpected places to punctuate, mysteriously, gallery and museum spaces. He also placed dozens of “blps,” in the form of reliefs, stencils or decals, outside museums for viewers to go hunting for or stumble upon. Some are to be found on the elevated High Line park in Lower Manhattan near the site of the Whitney’s future home.

Mr. Artschwager’s paintings were often paradoxical. He painted black and white copies of found photographs — group portraits, pictures of buildings and other anonymous images — on textured Celotex panels, a common building material. Ostentatious frames made of painted wood, Formica or polished metal were usually part of the total piece.

He once said: “Sculpture is for the touch, painting is for the eye. I wanted to make a sculpture for the eye and a painting for the touch.”

Richard Ernst Artschwager was born on Dec. 26, 1923, in Washington. His father, a German immigrant, was a botanist, trained at Cornell University; his mother, a Ukrainian immigrant, was an artist who studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington and at the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1935, the family moved to Las Cruces, N.M., a better climate for the artist’s father, who had tuberculosis.

Like his father, Mr. Artschwager studied at Cornell, concentrating on mathematics and sciences, though he was deeply interested in art. Before completing his degree he was drafted into the Army in 1944 and saw combat in Europe, suffering a slight wound at the Battle of the Bulge. Afterward he was assigned to counterintelligence in Vienna, where he met and, in 1946, married his first wife, Elfriede Wejmelka.

Back in the United States after the war, Mr. Artschwager completed his bachelor’s degree at Cornell but soon, with his wife’s strong encouragement, decided to become an artist. He moved to New York and began attending the Studio School of the painter Amédée Ozenfant, who, along with Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris, had founded a form of late Cubism called Purism.

By then the couple had a child, and Mr. Artschwager supported his family as a bank clerk and then a furniture maker.

In the early ’50s he stopped making art and went into business building furniture until a fire destroyed his workshop in 1958. Resuming art making, he had his first exhibition — of paintings and watercolors of Southwestern landscapes — at the Art Directions Gallery in New York.

In 1960, an exhibition of assemblages by the sculptor Mark di Suvero inspired Mr. Artschwager to begin using his woodworking skills to make his own sculpture. A year later, a photograph picked up on the street prompted him to start making paintings based on black and white photographs.

A big break came when he sent, unsolicited, a note and slides to the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York’s leading showcase for new art. The gallery quickly took him on for a group show that included Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. He remained with Castelli for 30 years.

It was at the Castelli gallery, in 1965, that Mr. Artschwager had the first show of work that was recognizably his own. During the ensuing decades he participated in many important international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale and Documenta, in Kassel, Germany.

The Whitney produced its first Artschwager retrospective in 1988-89. It later traveled to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Madrid, Paris and Düsseldorf. His last solo exhibition with Gagosian Gallery was last fall at its branch in Rome featuring sculptures of pianos.

“Early and late, his work stood out for its blunt, mute weirdness,” Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times in reviewing the recent Artschwager retrospective at the Whitney. A 1963 sculpture, “Portrait II,” for example, resembles a bedroom dresser with no drawers and a sheet of Formica where a mirror might be. The table in “Table Prepared in the Presence of Enemies” (1993) “looks like a low-rise guillotine,” Mr. Cotter wrote.

He added: “Violence is implicit in a lot of Mr. Artschwager’s art, which may be the most intriguing thing about it, the element that gives bite to what would otherwise pass for Magrittean whimsy.”

Mr. Artschwager’s political views were less apparent. In 2003, he painted three identically framed portraits, of a blank President George W. Bush, a smiling Osama bin Laden and a grim-looking one of himself. “Each painting looks cracked, creviced and soiled, as if just dug up from rubble,” Mr. Cotter observed.

Mr. Artschwager was married four times, the first three marriages ending in divorce. In addition to his wife, the former Ann Sebring, he is survived by his daughters Eva Artschwager and Clara Persis Artschwager; a son, Augustus Theodore Artschwager; a sister, Margarita Kay, and a grandson.

David Nolan, whose Manhattan gallery has shown drawings by Mr. Artschwager, said the artist had recently exhibited new paintings and works on paper that he created on a return to New Mexico, inspired in part by the colors of the landscape there he had known so well as a boy.

Longtime art collectors Debra and Dennis Scholl have donated about 300 artworks to the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

By Hannah Sampson

hsampson@MiamiHerald.com

For museums and other institutions confronted with the sometimes onerous restrictions that donors place on major gifts, forever can be a very long time.

In Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum still keeps most of its galleries illuminated at the equivalent of candlelight because that’s how Mrs. Gardner wanted it when she died in 1924.

In Tennessee, Fisk University, facing possible closing, needed court permission to sell a stake in an art collection that the artist Georgia O’Keeffe had donated with the proviso that it never be sold.

And now the Brooklyn Museum is asking a judge to bypass the wishes of Col. Michael Friedsam, who ordered before he died in 1931 that his collection be kept together. Conservators there discovered that a quarter of his 926 works were not of museum quality, were misattributed or, in a few cases, were fakes. So now the museum is trying to unload those unwanted gifts as if they were a Christmas fruitcake.

Handling what is known in the philanthropic world as donor intent is vexing for many institutions. How do you adhere to a donor’s wishes when they seem to interfere with the best interests of the institution?

“A respect for donor intent is essential for philanthropic integrity,” said Adam Meyerson, president of the Philanthropy Roundtable, an association dedicated to protecting benefactors’ interests. However, he added, “You’re not serving donor intent if you go bankrupt.”

The tension between contributors and institutions is hardly new, but it has gained a higher profile in recent years. The weak economy has shrunk museum budgets, while technology or evolving tastes have led curators to reassess once venerable works. Institutions, which need money or space as artworks fill their basements, often look to sell items donated with the stipulation that they never be relinquished.

When it came to the Clyfford Still Museum, the City of Denver in effect argued that it had to violate the Stills’ wishes in order to fulfill them. Still’s wife, Patricia, gave Denver 2,400 of her husband’s works after his death with the understanding that the city would build a museum dedicated solely to his work and never sell or lend any of the art. But in 2011, six years after Ms. Still died, when fund-raising for the museum slowed, Denver received court permission to auction four of the paintings.

Amid cases like these, consultants and nonprofit organizations have stepped up efforts to help benefactors generate donations and wills that better ensure that their wishes are honored long after their deaths.

“I’m certainly getting more phone calls” about donor intent, said Jeffrey J. Cain, in 2008 a founder of the consulting firm American Philanthropic. Mr. Cain, who wrote a free guidebook in 2011 titled “Securing Your Legacy: What Every Philanthropist Needs to Know About Preserving Donor Intent,” said the issue had “really captured the attention of conservative-minded donors, especially those giving gifts to the academy who worry about how those gifts would be managed over time.”

Philanthropy experts say that donors across the political spectrum are concerned about preserving their vision. But examples of foundations that have leaned left after being created by die-hard capitalists, like the carmaker Henry Ford and the oil magnate J. Howard Pew, have prompted several conservatives to speak out more loudly about the importance of donor intent.

“The Pews would spin in their graves,” states one of several case studies featured in the Philanthropy Roundtable’s library, which details the liberal organizations and causes, from radical environmentalists to campaign finance reform, that are financed by the bequests of conservative capitalists. “It hurts the growth of philanthropy if the foundations that donors set up proceed to ignore or violate the most cherished principles of their founders,” Mr. Meyerson of the Roundtable said.

Some philanthropy veterans said the interest in creating foundations with a limited life span could stem from growing concerns about donor intent. “Any perpetual foundation is going to be liable to drift,” said James Piereson, president of the William E. Simon Foundation.

Mr. Piereson was once executive director of the conservative John M. Olin Foundation, which was devised to spend all of its assets within a generation of Mr. Olin’s death in order to prevent mission drift.

“Donor intent cannot realistically be guaranteed beyond a generation,” Mr. Piereson said.

Museum administrators say they do their best, but that violating a donor’s wishes is sometimes unavoidable.

In perhaps the most famous of these cases, the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania convinced a judge a few years ago that its very survival depended on breaking the terms of its founder’s trust so it could move his magnificent art collection from suburban Merion to downtown Philadelphia.

Mr. Meyerson said the Barnes case illustrated how some restrictions could sabotage a donor’s desires. He pointed to a requirement that the Barnes invest in only Treasury bonds, which hamstrung the foundation’s finances. Even now, several months after the new Barnes opened its doors, the case remains a rallying point among an assortment of advocates in the philanthropy, legal and arts worlds who have campaigned for tighter compliance with donors’ wishes.

For the Brooklyn Museum, the issue is also financial. Colonel Friedsam’s will stipulated that his collection of paintings, porcelains, historical weapons and costumes never be split up. But although the inferior objects will not be displayed, museum administrators say they will, nonetheless, cost tens of thousands of dollars to store because the museum is running out of space.

In most states the attorney general is responsible for monitoring donations to charitable organizations, and in New York the attorney general has entered the case in support of the museum. The court has said that if the museum wants to split the collection, it must first try to find out whether any of Colonel Friedsam’s alternate heirs are still alive.

Since donations are often a museum’s lifeblood, most go to great lengths to fulfill a donor’s desires faithfully. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example, had to part with two beloved van Gogh drawings in 1998 because the donor, one of the museum’s founders, directed that they be sold after 50 years, on the assumption that they would no longer be sufficiently modern.

And visitors to the Gardner Museum in Boston, where nothing in the darkly lighted galleries ever changes position, can see the frames and the ragged edges of 13 paintings that were cut out and taken during a brazen 1990 theft. Because Mrs. Gardner’s trust ordered that nothing be moved, curators have chosen to leave the frames rather than empty space on the wall. Many museum administrators agree that Mrs. Gardner’s carefully detailed instructions have created an unusual gem of a museum.

Nonetheless, most would no doubt prefer that donors leave the decision-making to them, emulating the stance of John D. MacArthur, who once told a trustee of his foundation: “I figured out how to make the money. You fellows will have to figure out how to spend it.”

By PATRICIA COHEN

Posted By George Lindemann - The George Lindemann Journal

New York’s highest court has decided to review a recent ruling that could force the state’s auction industry to end its longstanding practice of keeping sellers’ names anonymous.

Most sellers in the New York auction market remain anonymous, and auction catalogs typically reveal little more than that a work is from a “private collection.” The court did not rule that auction houses had to publicize widely the name of a seller, only that buyers are entitled to know it. Buyers — themselves often people who anonymously sell items at auction — have seldom complained about the practice, while sellers have come to expect their identities to be shielded.

But in October, in a dispute over the sale of a 19th-century silver-and-enamel Russian box, a four-judge appellate-court panel unanimously ruled that state law has long required that buyers be given the names of sellers in postauction paperwork for the deal to become binding.

Many art-law experts say the decision, if upheld, could significantly change the way the auction business is conducted in New York State.

“As of now you can back out of any transaction where the name of the seller is not provided,” said Peter R. Stern of McLaughlin & Stern, a Manhattan lawyer who represents dealers, collectors and auction houses and was an outside counsel to Sotheby’s.

The lawyer for the auctioneer in the case said Christie’s had inquired about submitting a brief when the New York Court of Appeals, which last month announced its intention to review the case, takes it up this spring. The auction house declined to comment.

Jonathan A. Olsoff, director of worldwide litigation for Sotheby’s, said that auction house viewed the decision as “narrow and technical” and that others were overstating its impact. Although fine-arts sales are the highest-profile auctions in the state, the ruling would also affect the sale of other items, like heirlooms, vehicles and livestock, which are also typically auctioned anonymously by hundreds of companies every week.

Anonymity is often prized because it protects personal privacy and allows institutions quietly to sell items from their collections that they no longer need. In some cases it can also cloak the embarrassment of debt or help sellers avoid setting off family conflicts over the disposition of inherited assets.

“Anonymity should not be seen as an abuse of the law,” said Christine Steiner of Sheppard Mullin, a Los Angeles law firm. She is a former Maryland prosecutor who has represented sellers from all income levels.

The ruling came in a case involving an auctioneer in Chester, N.Y., William J. Jenack, who sold a Russian antique in 2008 for $460,000. The piece, a czarist box made by I. P. Khlebnikov, a Fabergé contemporary, depicted aristocrats feasting on a roasted swan. Mr. Jenack said the top bidder, Albert Rabizadeh of Long Island, refused to pay after “grumbling about the price.”

Mr. Jenack sued for payment and won, but the decision was overturned by the appellate court when Mr. Rabizadeh challenged the transaction because the seller had not been identified in the postsale documentation.

In arguments last year before the appellate court lawyers for the auctioneer said that revealing the seller would overturn centuries of commercial practice and badly burden the industry. But the appellate panel, citing New York’s anti-fraud statutes, was unmoved.

“While it may be true that auction houses commonly withhold the names of consignors,” Justice Peter B. Skelos of the appellate division said in his ruling, “this court is governed not by the practice in the trade, but by the relevant statute.” He said the law “clearly and unambiguously requires that the name of the person” selling the item be included in documents provided to the buyer.

If the ruling stands, some experts say, a buyer denied a seller’s name would have the right to walk away from any purchase, as happened in Mr. Jenack’s case.

Through his lawyer, Daniel R. Wotman of Great Neck, N.Y., Mr. Rabizadeh declined to comment, but Mr. Wotman said, “Auction houses and consignors need to comply with the law.”

Benjamin Ostrer of Chester, the lawyer for Mr. Jenack, said the ruling represented “a wholesale invitation to have people renege.”

Mr. Olsoff of Sotheby’s disagreed however. “The decision,” he said, “deals only with the evidence that is required if an auction purchaser defaults in paying and is sued by the auction house.”

Several lawyers said auctioneers could try to resolve issues by having buyers agree to anonymity in writing before bidding. But Leila A. Amineddoleh, an expert on art law at Lombard & Geliebter, said she would discourage buyers from signing such a waiver, especially because the seller’s identity can aid with provenance questions and enhance the future value of an item.

She predicted that if the ruling is upheld, some auctioneers would lobby in Albany for legislation to exempt them from disclosing the seller.

Nicholas M. O’Donnell, a lawyer with Sullivan & Worcester in Boston who writes that firm’s Art Law Report, said the ruling also allowed winning bidders to sue auction houses for sellers’ names. “Once the gavel falls there is a binding agreement that cuts both ways,” he said. “The implications are very far-reaching.”

Mr. Jenack said fellow auctioneers worry that their clients would sell in other states where privacy is protected.

Lawyers said they had not heard of court rulings in other states that appeared to restrict the granting of anonymity to sellers at auction.

One person with a strong interest in the case is the box’s seller, Jonathan A. Thompson, 70, of Greenwich, Conn. He said anonymity was the last thing he cared about when he put the family heirloom up for sale in 2008.

He ended up with $50,000, he said, when the box was resold at auction in 2010, not the money he once stood to make, but far more than the $5,000 value first put on the box when Mr. Jenack originally advertised it.

“I didn’t ask to be anonymous,” he said. “I didn’t think at all about it.”

Wendell Castle’s installation “A New Environment” is on view at Friedman Benda in Chelsea.The cantilevered staircase at right leads to a treehouse-like pod.

The American designer Wendell Castle is known for his idiosyncratic, organic and slightly surreal furniture, which he has been producing in laminated wood, plastic and other materials since the 1960s, and which is highly collectible. Castle, who turned 80 in 2012, showed his work at Design Miami last month, and today his exhibition “A New Environment” opens at Friedman Benda in Chelsea. (Another Castle show, “Volumes and Voids,” is on view just upstairs from Friedman Benda at the Barry Friedman Gallery through Jan. 26.)

The exhibition’s centerpiece is a massive, arresting environment of stack-laminated, carved wood that is rasp-finished and stained black. It comprises a modular platform, three sculptural chairs, a totemlike structure studded with LEDs and a cantilevered spiral stair that leads to a podlike chamber, lined in flokati carpet, which offers snug lounge seating for one, complete with reading light, shelf and several openings to let in light and air. It’s kind of a treehouse for grown-ups — rich ones, that is. At this writing, the price of the environment had not been set, but Castle said that it would likely be in the vicinity of a $1 million.

This is Castle’s largest work to date. It is a follow-up of sorts to his 1969 piece “Environment for Contemplation,” which also featured a pod but which was set on the floor. “I wanted to put something in the air,” he said. A steel structure reinforces the central column and stair treads; as the designer explains, this is necessary to support the pod, which weighs about 1,000 pounds.

From left: the pod, which is lined in flokati carpet, has built-in lounge seating for one; three additional pieces in the exhibition include “The Light of Darkness,” which combines a cantilevered chair, a table and a light.

On the fringes of the environment are three other pieces — a settee, a desk and a chair with its own table and light — with the same biomorphic forms or, as Castle calls them, “ellipsoids, kind of mushed together.” He cites the artists Henry Moore, Joan Miro, Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi as early influences, but it’s clear that they’ve stayed with him. “I loved the idea of a ‘soft’ vocabulary, and still do,” he said. Castle enjoys chewing over ideas that have provoked him for years, but now he’s doing it with the aid of a robot, which he said will help to “carve some crazy-shaped voids,” since it can work in smaller spaces than traditional woodworking tools.

Next on the horizon is an exhibition in the fall at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Paris. There will be at least one bronze piece in the show, and Castle is experimenting with even rougher textures. For now, however, he was busy putting the finishing touches on the environment before the opening party. And when told that the piece’s outsized scale really called for its own, specially designed space, Castle replied, “I’ve thought about how to do that room.”

“A New Environment” is on view at Friedman Benda, 515 West 26th Street, through Feb. 9.

CHINA’S leaders have tried honoring Ai Weiwei and bribing him with the offer of high positions. They have tried jailing him, fining him and clubbing him so brutally that he needed emergency brain surgery. In desperation, they have even begged him to behave — and nothing works.

What is the Politburo to do with a superstar artist with a vast global audience like Ai (whose name is pronounced EYE Way-way), who makes a video of himself dancing “Gangnam style” with handcuffs — parodying the Chinese state — that quickly ends up with more than one million views on YouTube?

How should the Central Committee of the Communist Party react when Ai releases a nude self-portrait with a stuffed animal as a fig leaf? The caption was “grass-mud-horse in the center” — a homonym in Chinese for a vulgar curse against the Communist Party’s central leadership. Or, more precisely, against its mother.

One thing the party detests even more than being denounced is being mocked, and humor is the signature element of Ai’s assaults. Other dissidents, like the great writer Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize winner now in prison, write eloquently of democracy but gain little traction among ordinary Chinese: Ai’s artistic work also seems incomprehensible to many people, but obscene jokes about grass-mud-horses can get more traction — and be difficult to quash.

“I think they don’t know how to handle someone like me,” Ai said in an interview. “They kind of give up managing me.”

One challenge for the Communist Party is that Ai, 55, is one of the world’s great artists. He also comes from a family with close ties to the Communist revolution, and his mother and father were friendly with the parents of China’s new top leader, Xi Jinping.

Ai’s emergence as an icon of resistance represents progress in China, a reflection of an unofficial pluralism that is gaining ground. China increasingly reminds me of South Korea or Taiwan in the early 1980s, when an educated middle class was nibbling away at dictatorship.

There is real improvement in China, Ai acknowledges, and he says that he expects democracy to reach China by 2020 — but he laments that it is already overdue. “They have wasted a whole generation of young people,” he said.

Ai’s irreverence seems shaped by the dozen years he spent in New York City burnishing his artistic reputation. He returned to China in 1993, at the age of 36, and initially behaved himself politically and played a role in designing the magnificent Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

One factor that changed him was the terrible earthquake of 2008 in Sichuan Province in the southwest, when schools collapsed and the government clamped down on parents protesting shoddy construction. Ai backed the parents and began to demand more openness from the government.

Angered by his antagonism, the authorities had Ai beaten up and then destroyed his studio in Shanghai. Then last year the government detained him for nearly three months.

The authorities still block him from traveling abroad, so he is not able to attend a major exhibition of his work now under way at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington.

The pressure left Ai feeling more strongly than ever that one of China’s biggest problems is autocratic government. He became more outspoken, not less.

“At every step, they pushed me into it,” he said. “I told them, ‘You create people like me.’ ”

After briefly lying low after his imprisonment, Ai has resumed his political pranks. Mocking the authorities for installing 15 cameras to monitor his movements, he broadcast a public “weiweicam” on the Internet with a feed from his bedroom so the government could keep an even closer eye on him.

“They almost begged me to turn it off,” he said with a grin.

At the end of a long conversation, I asked Ai if he had anything else to say.

“China still needs help from the U.S.,” he said. “To insist on certain values, that is the role of the U.S. That is the most important product of American culture. When Hillary Clinton talks about Internet freedom, I think that’s really beautiful.”

There’s a message there for Americans. We have a powerful military, yes, but the “hard power” of missiles is often exceeded by our “soft power” of ideas. Speaking up for our values around the world invariably raises questions of hypocrisy and inconsistency, but it’s better to be an inconsistent advocate of democracy and human rights than to be a consistent advocate of nothing.

I hope the White House listens to how Ai responded when I asked if President Obama was doing enough to raise human rights concerns.

“I don’t know what they’re doing under the table,” Ai said. “But on the surface, they’re not doing enough.”

The artist Chuck Close giving a private tour of his show to students from Bridgeport, Conn.

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: December 18, 2012

Stationed in front of one of his large self-portraits, the artist Chuck Close raised his customized wheelchair to balance on two wheels, seeming to defy the laws of gravity.

The chair’s unlikely gymnastics underlined the points that Mr. Close was making to his audience, 40 seventh and eighth graders from Bridgeport, Conn.: Break the rules and use limitations to your advantage.

The message had particular resonance for these students, and a few educators and parents, who had come by bus on Monday from Roosevelt School to the Pace Gallery in Chelsea for a private tour of Mr. Close’s show. Roosevelt, located in a community with high unemployment and crushing poverty, recently had one of the worst records of any school in the state, with 80 percent of its seventh graders testing below grade level in reading and math.

Saved from closure by a committed band of parents, the school was one of eight around the country chosen last year to participate in Turnaround Arts, a new federally sponsored public-and-private experiment that puts the arts at the center of the curriculum. Arranging for extra funds for supplies and instruments, teacher training, partnerships with cultural organizations and high-profile mentors like Mr. Close, Turnaround is trying to use the arts to raise academic performance across the board. “Art saved my life,” Mr. Close told the children. And he believes it can save the lives of others, too.

So now he was giving a pizza party and answering a question about why he started to paint.

“I wanted people to notice me, not that I couldn’t remember their faces or add or subtract,” he said, referring to the learning and neurological disabilities that set him apart from his classmates when he was growing up in Monroe, Wash.

A terrible writer and test-taker, Mr. Close used art to make it through school. Instead of handing in a paper, he told the children, “I made a 20-foot-long mural of the Lewis and Clark trail.”

Starting in Pace’s large central gallery, where his giant portraits of other artists like Philip Glass, Paul Simon and Laurie Anderson looked on, Mr. Close told the group that “everything about my work is driven by my learning disabilities.”

Born with prosopagnosia, a condition that prevents him from recognizing faces, Mr. Close explained that the only way he can remember a face is by breaking it down into small “bite-sized” pieces, like the tiny squares or circles of color that make up his paintings and prints.

“I figured out what I had left and I tried to make it work for me,” he said. “Limitations are important.”

With Mr. Close were a few other members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, which helped develop the Turnaround program. One of them, Damian Woetzel, a former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet who is a mentor to two other Turnaround schools, picked up on his theme.

“In dance we limit ourselves, as well,” he said. “There are five positions and everything comes from that,” he added, quickly demonstrating the basic ballet poses.

Filling out the cultural spectrum were the Broadway producer Margo Lion, a chairwoman of the committee, and the musicians Cristina Pato, Shane Shanahan and Kojiro Umezaki, all members of the Silk Road Ensemble, an international collaboration founded by the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who is also a committee member and a mentor. One by one, they entered from different doors, startling the students with an impromptu concert featuring a tambourine, a gaita (a Spanish bagpipe) and a Chinese flute.

Clapping and stamping in time to the music, Mr. Woetzel soon turned the gallery’s open space into a dance floor. A couple of students whipped out phones to record the proceedings, while others raced across the room to avoid getting pulled in as participants. One reluctant dancer, captured by Rachel Goslins, a filmmaker and the executive director of the president’s committee, rolled his eyes and mouthed “Oh my God” as she circled him around the floor. Other students joined hands and began dancing as Ms. Lion and the school principal, Tania Kelley, her head flung back, swung each other around.

Mr. Close swerved through the crowd in his wheelchair.

“I never danced before,” Carolyn Smith, 13, said excitedly when the music stopped. “Usually I sing.” Carolyn was the lead in the school’s production of “The Wiz” last year. A brain tumor had caused her to miss so much school that her literacy teacher initially wanted her to turn down the part and focus on catching up, Ms. Goslins said. But being in the play — and reading and memorizing the script — helped her reading skills so much, Ms. Goslins said, that the literacy coach later told her, “I’m a believer.”

The afternoon offered a series of firsts for many of the students. Most had never seen such instruments, heard of Mr. Simon or Mr. Glass, or even visited Manhattan.

“It’s pretty cool to be in New York,” said David Morales, 14, who later asked Mr. Close about his technique, explaining, “I like how he makes it, how it comes all together.”

David, like the other Roosevelt students, had studied Mr. Close’s work in class and met him when he visited the school last month. So Mr. Close patiently answered questions.

“Is it easy to make these pictures?” (Well, it can take a while, Mr. Close replied.)

“How do you know what colors to use?” (Trial and error.)

“Can you draw? (Yes.)

“There is no artist who enjoys what he does every day more than I do,” Mr. Close told the group, setting off applause from the students. Repeating advice he often gives to young artists, he said: “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up for work.”

When the bus arrived for the return trip, Ms. Pato and Mr. Shanahan again took up their instruments, this time to lead a parade of clapping students and teachers out the door.

Carolyn Smith, a pink rose in her hair, paused at the doorway and turned to Mr. Close. “I had a blast,” she called out. “Bye, Chuck. See you later.”

Zwirner and Koons. (PMC)

Bogie knew, “you must remember this …” Here are a few art world surprises to remember, and some we’d rather forget.

The Chelsea Flood: Who could ever have imagined that a silly old hurricane would sink the entire Chelsea art district and parts of Red Hook? Sandy not only inundated basement storages; first-floor galleries had their key November exhibitions floating in six feet of dirty seawater. I walked through the tragic scene the morning after, and saw trashed galleries with dirty art dripping and salty. It’s amazing how fast many of Chelsea’s galleries reopened, some acting as if nothing had happened. What’s next, a tsunami?

A Big Top on Randall’s Island: Who needs another art fair … Rio? Istanbul? Phnom Penh? Anywhere but New York, right? How could a city that is filled with galleries and that already hosts the Armory Show (which just sold to the eccentric art magazine publisher Louise Blouin) and the ADAA Art Show possibly handle another fair? Turned out it could—and then some. In May, London’s successful Frieze franchise opened a game-changing new fair housed in a big top tent on Randall’s Island with over 170 international galleries, and thousands of shoppers flocked in. It seems like most buyers today can’t be bothered to take in a gallery show; they want their art product sliced, diced and hung side-by-side in tidy cubicles, so they got what they were looking for. It was a huge success, and confirmed that the fairs—art’s shopping malls—are where it’s at. They’re like the World Series and the Super Bowl of art combined. All that’s missing is stadium vendors selling peanuts and Cracker Jack, and one that yells: “Bee-ah Heeyah!”

Schimmel-Gate in Los Angeles: Nearly three years ago, one of New York’s most beloved impresarios, the inimitable Jeffrey Deitch, gave up his gallery when tapped by his friends on the board of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) to run their troubled museum. Mr. Deitch was known for discovering new talent and putting on art spectacles that attracted a large and youthful downtown following. When he arrived in L.A., rumors spread that veteran MoCA curator Paul Schimmel was not pleased. Under Mr. Deitch’s direction, a worthy Jack Goldstein retrospective was canceled in favor of a timely Dennis Hopper retrospective. This was only the beginning of bitter infighting between curator and director, infighting that this past summer led to Mr. Schimmel’s departure and prompted all the artists to resign from the museum board, including hometown heroes John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha. The L.A. press was all over it, as were several in the New York art community who had once lauded Mr. Deitch; in lockstep, they all turned on him. Will he remain in L.A. after the museum’s Urs Fischer retrospective this spring? In hindsight, mistakes were made all around; let’s hope the museum and everyone involved looks at the bigger picture.

Christie’s Record-Breaking Contemporary Art Sale: In November, Christie’s Contemporary Art Auction tallied a sale of historic proportions, totaling a whopping $412.2 million. This type of result creates a myopic view that, despite the bad economy, art is selling like hotcakes. Though big numbers were achieved for blue-chip names like Franz Kline and Mark Rothko, the theater of it all helps keep all the smaller boats afloat—and disguises the reality that, outside the tippy-toppy-type “trophy” auction results, the rest of the art market has slowed down.

Red Hot Richter: German artist Gerhard Richter’s greatest contributions to painting are his photography-based figurative works, especially those relating to Germany’s Nazi past. But his color abstraction paintings, of which he has made many over the years, have recently hypnotized the art market. A large one sold for $21 million a year ago, and soon after that, this past October, came an inexplicable price of $34 million for a particularly luscious picture. Only a month later, a painting of a similar size hammered for only $17.5 million. Go figure. Sure, each one is different, but the prices for pictures of equal size and comparable quality are bouncing between $15 million and $35 million like a dented Ping-Pong ball. It just goes to show how irrational today’s art market can be. As my grandfather always used to say, it’s “Easy come, easy go!”

Koons Flies the Coop: All over Miami earlier this month, rumors were flying that mega-star Jeff Koons was leaving his roost at Gagosian Gallery to have his next show hosted at the new Chelsea digs of the David Zwirner Gallery. Many felt this just couldn’t happen, and then it did. At the highest level, star artists have more power than they seem to realize—perhaps now they’ll start to use it. Fast on the heels of the Koons news came the announcement that Damien Hirst would split from Gagosian. But Mr. Hirst, who had been showing with Gagosian for 17 years, was never really “represented” by any gallery, since he’s always done as he’s seen fit, even when that meant putting his own work up for auction and thereby trashing his market and the collectors who supported it. Then the mysteriously mad Yayoi Kusama, as if she were psychically tuned in to Messrs. Koons and Hirst, announced that she too will leave the Gagosian Gallery. Through “loyalty,” lethargy, apathy or fear, the biggest-name artists have been willingly shackled to their heritage galleries—now that may be changing. I don’t believe this trend is specific to Gagosian. The very foundations of the “artist representation” model are crumbling. Maybe all the top-selling artists will fire their galleries and form one big collective, then they can just set prices and cut out the dealers. I’d prefer it if they charged one price at the door and then a bingo machine randomly chose which artwork you got; that would make it fun again.

Tate Talent to the Met: By hiring Tate Modern’s dynamic curator Sheena Wagstaff, Tom Campbell, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s youthful director, is reinvigorating the Met’s stodgy contemporary program; he’s got the space, too, having rented out the Marcel Breuer building, which the Whitney Museum will soon move out of.

Dishonorable Mention: Venus Over Manhattan, my uptown gallery, opened in May with a theme show titled “À Rebours,” inspired by the story of the Duc Jean des Esseintes, the debauched 19th-century art collector. One day, a thief walked into the gallery and plucked a fine Dalí off the wall, right under the nose of a gallery guard and smack in the crosshairs of a well-focused security camera. After the heist generated over 500 news stories around the world, the culprit shockingly mailed the piece back to the gallery in a poster tube. Was it a take from the old Thomas Crown Affair or some dangerous and delinquent art performance? No doubt it was a wacky prank—don’t get me wrong, we love when people enjoy the show, but kleptomaniacs are no longer welcome.

Barry X Ball’s Matthew Barney/BXB Dual-Dual Portrait Ensemble (2012) During this year’s Basel week, few artists made as much impact as Iván Navarro, whose fluorescent light sculptures sparked a crackling buzz in the big fair’s Art Kabinett sector and at its Art Public outdoor sculpture garden.

The Chilean-born talent’s “Impenetrables” project showcased five pieces made of neon ladders and mirrors that appeared to rise from an abyss beneath the convention center’s floor. The works, which continued Navarro’s exploration of the relationship between viewers and their architectural surroundings, were among the few must-see exhibits that cut through the white noise of Miami’s busiest cultural week.

But if you missed that show, don’t panic. You can still catch Navarro’s solo exhibit at the Frost Art Museum, where his sprawling show will remain on view long after the cacophony of Basel week has departed. His exhibit is one of several stellar museum shows, in fact, that will stay on display well into the new year.

“This exhibition offers our visitors the opportunity to fully understand the context of work that may, at first, appear as fragile constructions made of ordinary manmade objects,” says Carol Damian, the Frost’s director and chief curator.

Some might remember Navarro’s work from a group show called “Artificial Light,” organized by North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art at its Wynwood satellite space for ABMB’s 2006 edition. Back then, Navarro exhibited a pair of beautiful purple neon chairs so beguiling that a female spectator sat on them and crushed the neon-gas-and-glass creations.

This year, the electrifying talent is the subject of the Frost’s “Ivan Navarro: Fluorescent Light Sculptures,” featuring three floor sculptures, 14 wall sculptures, and three videos that illuminate his multilayered practice over the past ten years.

The exhibit includes Navarro’s The Nowhere Man series, making its debut in a U.S. museum. Inspired by the iconic pictograms created by Otl Aicher for the 1972 Olympics in Munich, its all-white, genderless stick figures appear to be running, jumping, and swimming. (Through January 27 at the Frost Art Museum at FIU, 10975 SW 17th St., Miami; 305-348-2890; thefrost.fiu.edu.)

Perhaps no other museum show drew a larger audience for its Basel opening than the Bass Museum of Art, where “The Endless Renaissance: Six Solo Artists Projects” brought together an impressive cast of talent from the United States, Finland, Germany, Thailand, and the United Kingdom to explore how historical works and concepts transform across time and morph through the eyes of diverse audiences.

“‘The Endless Renaissance’ links art from the past and the present, each artist in his or her own way, directly or indirectly,” says Silvia Karman Cubiñá, the Bass’s executive director and chief curator.

Take Barry X Ball’s sculptures, which twist classically inspired busts by using bleeding-edge computer technology to carve unusual materials. To create his whiplash-inducing Matthew Barney/BXB Dual-Dual Portrait Ensemble, Ball started with Mexican onyx, stainless steel, and various other materials. Then he employed an arsenal of equipment, including 3-D digital scanning, virtual modeling, and computer-controlled milling, to create a hyper-detailed face. Ball finishes the pieces by hand-carving and polishing the uncanny visages.

Another virtuoso work is his Sleeping Hermaphrodite, which features an eerily smooth figure lying nude on a mattress while tangled in a bed sheet. Ball’s brilliant handling of flesh and drapery boggles the mind and brings to mind the timeless symmetry and perfection of classical Greek sculpture.

Another notable artist at the Bass is Germany’s Hans-Peter Feldmann, who collects, orders, and re-presents amateur print photographic reproductions, toys, and trivial works of art. His painting of what appears to be a 19th-century aristocrat wearing a red clown nose is full of humor while smacking the starch out of tired notions of traditional portraiture.

Thailand’s Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, meanwhile, considers art through an outsider’s eye with her Two Planets series, in which she presents classic European paintings to villagers in remote Thai towns and then films them discussing the works. Her enchanting digital print Two Planets: Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass and the Thai Villagers, 2012, upends traditional Western notions of viewing and interpreting artwork and helps viewers see these famous paintings anew. (Through March 17 at the Bass Museum of Art, 2100 Collins Ave., Miami Beach; 305-673-7530; bassmuseum.org.)

At the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Bill Viola’s powerful video installations deliver a poignant commentary of how art can uplift the spirit. “Bill Viola: Liber Insularum” is the video pioneer’s first American museum survey since 2003.

“Many of these are among his most powerful works to date,” says Bonnie Clearwater, the museum’s chief curator and director. “These are emotional and spiritual works that speak to the human condition.”

Viola’s sensory-engulfing opuses typically delve into the concepts of birth and death, with a nod to both Eastern and Western art, as well as mystical, spiritual traditions.

MOCA’s exhibit was inspired by 15th-century Florentine cleric Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s tome The Book of the Islands of Archipelago, which records six years he spent wandering the Aegean Sea. Viola departs from that compass point to explore universal notions of being and nothingness, using the tale as an allegory of our lives wandering a transforming global landscape. (Through March 3 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 770 NE 125th St., North Miami; 305-893-6211; mocanomi.org.)