The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

LONDON – At Christie’s post-war and contemporary art auction here on Wednesday evening – an event aptly described by the super dealer Larry Gagosian as “Masterpiece Theatre’’ – collectors from around the world dropped millions of dollars on works by many of the major names of the 20th century, and record prices were set for two of them: Yves Klein and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Hoping to capture the attention of both established collectors and new-rich ones from places like the Middle East, Russia and Asia, Christie’s had marshaled its international connections, pulling in exceptionally strong artworks for an evening auction like few others London has seen. The sale totaled $207.3 million, against an estimate of $160.1 million to $216.9 million, the highest total of any auction in the category that Christie’s has held in Europe.

Unlike Sotheby’s, whose auction on Tuesday evening made $108 million with more works of lower value, Christie’s reached for the stars.

Three bidders wanted Klein’s “Le Rose du Bleu (RE 22),’’ an organic landscape of pink sponges and pebbles that was bought by a telephone bidder for $36.7 million, a record price for the artist at auction and well above its high estimate of $31.2 million. (Final prices include the buyer’s commission to Christie’s: 25 percent of the first $50,000; 20 percent of the next $50,000 to $1 million and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.) The painting, which was being sold by an anonymous collector, was one of the earliest of just 12 such sponge reliefs that the artist produced in pink rather than his trademark ultramarine blue.

The other record was achieved for a 1981 Basquiat canvas of a primitive figure with clenched teeth, his oversized hands held high in the air. It had been estimated to bring $15.6 million to $23.4 million, but was purchased by a telephone bidder for $20.1 million. (The painting had last been up for sale at Sotheby’s in New York in 2007, when it brought $14.6 million.) Brett Gorvy, chairman of Christie’s post-war and contemporary art worldwide, who took the winning bid, described the buyer as “a seasoned European collector who had been looking for the right Basquiat for years.”

“There was strong American buying tonight,’’ Mr. Gorvy said after the sale. “But Europeans were even stronger.’’ (Surprisingly, he added, there was little action from either Asian or Russian buyers, in contrast to many recent sales.)

Another hefty price was paid for Francis Bacon’s “Study for Self-Portrait,’’ a 1964 full length painting of the artistperched on a bed, which was expected to sell for between $23.4 million and $31.2 million. After it failed to sell at auction at Christie’s in New York in 2008 it was the subject of a law suit, in which the owner, a family trust led by the Connecticut collector George A. Weiss, claimed that Christie’s had reneged on a $40 million guarantee (a sum promised the seller regardless of a sale’s outcome). That suit was settled in July of last year, with Christie’s agreeing to pay the trust an undisclosed.

On Wednesday night William Acquavella, the Manhattan dealer, bid for the work by phone in what became a protracted battle against Christopher van der Weghe, another Manhattan dealer. Mr. van der Weghe won, paying $33.6 million. “We knew we would have to fight for it,’’ Mr. van der Weghe said after the sale, describing the client he had bid for only as an international collector. “Quality is more important these days than ever.’’

Gerhard Richter has been a consistent winner over the past few years and on Wednesday night “Strutur (2),’’ a richly painted 1989 canvas of alabaster whites and gunmetal grays, sold to a telephone bidder for $19.8 million. It had been estimated to bring $14 million to $18 million.
Lucian Freud, who died a year ago, has a loyal following too, especially after the recent exhibitions here and in New York. Two works by him both brought strong prices. “Naked Portrait II,’’ a 1974 painting of the artist’s lover Jacquetta Eliot curled up asleep, had been expected to sell for $5.8 million to $6.8 million; it made $6.7 million. And “Head of a Greek Man,’’ a 1946 portrait, fetched $5.3 million, well above its estimate of $2.3 million to $3 million. Both paintings were purchased by telephone bidders.

Not everything sold high. Jeff Koons’s monumental stainless steel sculpture “Baroque Egg with Bow (Blue/Turquoise),’’ from 1994-2008, was snapped up by Ivor Braka, a London dealer, for $4 million, just under its low estimate. “Koons is one of the truly ground-breaking artists of the 20th and 21st centuries,’’ Mr. Braka said after the sale, “and to buy something like this at this level, especially given the elevated prices for other artists, was great. Some days you just get lucky.’’

The Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, designed by Foster + Partners, at the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas.

 

Keeping up with the Joneses.

It happens in many settings, from the classroom to the country club, and, perhaps not surprisingly, among cultural organizations, according to a new study that finds that many institutions recently expanded their buildings in part because everyone else had.

Other reasons that organizations will build too much are overambitious trustees, self-interested architects and unrealistic financial projections, according to the study by the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago that is to be released Thursday.

The study, “Set in Stone,” examined the cultural building boom between 1994 and 2008, when museums, performing arts centers and theaters in the United States got swept up in new construction or major renovations.

More than $16 billion was spent by cultural organizations on building projects during that period, some inspired by the hope that construction initiatives could do what a Frank Gehry-designed museum building did for Bilbao, Spain: transform a small city into a major cultural destination.

“This issue between confusing a want with a need is enormous in the sector,” said Carroll Joynes, a founder and senior fellow at the policy center. “There are clear ways to avoid this. You can learn from what other people went through.”

A number of the lessons, the study suggests, could be drawn from its case studies of expansions like that of the Art Institute of Chicago over the past decade.

At first glance the project seemed daunting: a $300 million venture that would boost yearly operating costs by an estimated $4 million and would necessitate another $87 million in fund-raising to expand the endowment.

But with the Italian architect Renzo Piano engaged and several key trustees and the museum’s director gung ho, the expansion gained a kind of inexorable momentum.

Attendance did spike initially when the new wing opened in March 2009, but then it dropped back to normal levels. A precipitous decline in endowment income led to pay cuts, furloughs, a salary freeze and two rounds of layoffs.

“Instead of expanding its budget as expected, the Art Institute was forced to contract instead,” the study said.

The study examines not only what arts organizations got wrong but also what they got right and offers guidance for arts executives, civic leaders, donors and government officials about how to avoid pitfalls and how to grow intelligently and responsibly — or maybe not at all.

“It’s lessons from the front lines,” said Adrian Ellis, an arts consultant who helped conceptualize the study. “The stories aren’t told that often.”

The study was based on interviews with people in more than 500 arts organizations and drew data from more than 700 construction projects that ranged in cost from $4 million to $335 million. The New York region led the country in cultural building ($1.6 billion) after Los Angeles ($950 million) and the Chicago area ($870 million).

In many cases the researchers found that organizations failed to realistically assess the demand for their projects and their capacities to complete them: Do we really need this? Can we afford to build it? Can we support a larger operation going forward?

“All of the work fundamentally says, ‘Don’t build what you can’t sustain,’ ” said Duncan M. Webb, an arts management consultant, who was an adviser on the study.

Architects can also run away with a project, the study reports. “They say the building is for you, but the building is for them,” Mr. Joynes said. “It’s for the pictures and for their careers. From their point of view it’s a real success if it gets built.”

The study found that the most successful projects were driven by a clear artistic mission and demonstrable need; had authoritative and consistent leadership throughout the process; controlled expenses during construction; and generated income after completion.

The report’s other case studies were the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Va.; the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas.; and the Long Center for the Performing Arts in Austin, Tex. — all of which encountered financial hurdles after expansion.

“The Modern Wing was not an impulsive project,” Douglas Druick, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, said. “It was 10 years in the making, and it puts the Art Institute on a solid footing for the future. We expect it to be here for decades, just as we still open the doors of our original 1893 building every morning.”

Additional examples outside the study abound, Mr. Joynes said, like the recent travails of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, which had to close its new flagship building in Midtown and move to its smaller Upper West Side location after almost going out of business. “The Folk Art Museum should not have happened,” Mr. Joynes said. “It was a wonderful museum and they self-destructed. Our whole purpose in this is to say, ‘There are ways to do this that can protect your organization and help you fulfill your mission that won’t cripple you or take you down.’”

The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, Mr. Ellis said, is an example of an organization that failed to build the necessary consensus among public officials and others before embarking on its $265 million complex, which opened in 2001.

“They thought, ‘If we can just get this thing up, everything will fall into place,’ and that simply isn’t the case,” Mr. Ellis said of the Kimmel. “If you haven’t thought about how to operate it, it will come back and bite you.”

Anne C. Ewers, Kimmel’s president and chief executive, acknowledged that she inherited a $30 million building deficit when she came on board in 2007 but said that she retired it the following year and that the institution was in the process of correcting “architectural mistakes” like the acoustics. “The biggest challenge was not having established an endowment dedicated to the maintenance of the facility,” she said.

In part because of these experiences and the economic downturn, the researchers say, the cultural building boom is decidedly over. The trend now is toward adaptive reuse of existing buildings and cultural districts that link various smaller organizations.

“We’re less interested in the idea of palaces of the arts,” Mr. Webb said. “A lot of these communities got in over their heads. I think we’ve learned our lessons.”

Gustav Klimt: 150 Anniversary Celebration
Neue Galerie
Through Aug. 27

New York

Few artists evoke the troubled opulence of Vienna before World War I as vividly as Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). To mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, the Neue Galerie has mounted an exhibition of paintings and drawings from its own and private collections.

"Gustav Klimt: 150th Anniversary Celebration" is not the exhausting blockbuster you might expect. Instead, having staged a larger Klimt show in 2007, the Neue Galerie has now zeroed in on some of his top works, offering a succinct and cogent presentation of Klimt's fairly rapid artistic evolution from polished academic realism toward his distinct, increasingly abstract style vividly linked to Art Nouveau.

Klimt absorbed old and recent influences as he needed them, from ancient Egypt and Byzantium through 19th-century Orientalism, Impressionism and Symbolism. Among the show's landscapes, "The Park of Schloss Kammer" (c. 1910) presents a shimmering blend of French influences—the massive trees and dappled background light rendered with Pointillist textures, the opalescent lake suggesting one of Monet's water-lily views. "Forester House in Weissenbach on the Attersee" (1914) is another wonderfully decorative composition, its textures of slate roof, flower-strewn lawn and vine-covered wall punctuated by the open casement windows whose slightly wavy delineation conjures up the flamelike intensity of Van Gogh.

Beyond the visual impact of Klimt's portraits and figure studies, their allure rides upon their libidinous candor. In the era when the essentially conservative Viennese were disquieted by Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical probing into the unconscious, Klimt's increasingly rebellious imagery disturbed the establishment. He loved women, and his posing, floating and reclining female subjects seem sexually aware—and willing. Even when they aren't nude, he implies they ought to be.

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Neue Galerie New York/Estates of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer

"Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (1907).

 

Thus Klimt, who in 1897 co-founded the anticonservative artists group Vienna Secession, was at the artistic center of an imperial capital increasingly divided between the traditions of the Habsburg empire and the revolutionary ideas of a rising generation. Apart from their sexuality, Klimt's oil portraits and allegorical groups reflect this through persistent tension between naturalism and stylization.

"The Dancer" (1916) is a prime example. Her face, bare bosom and legs, painted in morbid blue-gray tones, are engulfed in a polychrome welter of stylized floral patterns. The riotous Japanesque background seems to flow from the dancer's flower-patterned chemise—provocatively unbuttoned. And so busy is that background and enigmatic the perspective, that you can easily miss the yellow daffodils in her left hand. Another naturalistic touch is the meticulous rendering of the dancer's shoes—Klimt pays conspicuous attention to their wide ribbon ties and gracefully curved "Louis" heels, then at the height of fashion. He was, after all, a close companion of the fashion designer Emilie Flöge, with whom he is depicted in several rare photographs hung in the adjoining room.

The stark sensuality of "Pale Face" (1903), suggests 17th-century Dutch portraiture seen through an Art Nouveau lens. The pale pinks and delicate modeling of the subject's calm, sculptural profile are set against softly defined, sinuous black-and-white passages of her hat, hair and coat. And the smokelike quality of these passages is sharply offset by a typical Klimtian touch—a silver-gray checkerboard pattern in the upper right corner further accented with the portrait's only stroke of red.

Not surprisingly, the place of honor is accorded the Neue Galierie's prized possession, the 1907 portrait of Klimt's possible lover, Adele Bloch-Bauer. In all its gleaming allure of gold and silver leaf, this portrait stands as a more modernist riposte to John Singer Sargent's once-notorious portraits of Madame X (1884) and of Isabella Stewart Gardner (1888). Like many of Klimt's mature portraits, it is iconic not just because it is so familiar, but because it actually evokes the style of Byzantine and Russian icons, the latter with their characteristic gilt metal coverings. Bloch-Bauer's head, shoulders and arms seem to peer out from behind a carapace of gold, its surface a dazzling swirl of burnished and stippled textures.

It is hard to separate precisely Bloch-Bauer's gown from the elaborately patterned background, or to determine whether she is seated or standing. But in the adjoining gallery a series of eight preparatory drawings for the portrait reveal how painstakingly Klimt worked out the pose and composition that today seem so spontaneous. The drawings also reveal the various ways Klimt arranged her hands to conceal her deformed finger.

Klimt was associated with the Wiener Werkstatte, which was dedicated to raising the quality of design of domestic objects. Placing Klimt's paintings in the context of Viennese decoration are three important Modernist-style clocks, designed by architects Adolf Loos, Otto Prutscher and Josef Urban. And to provide a telling reflection of the jewel-like patterns of the Bloch-Bauer and "Dancer" portraits, the gallery also features a group of brooches and related jewelry whose burnished silver and gilt mounts glow with the seductive radiance of polished cabochon emeralds, opals, carnelians and other precious stones.

When Klimt died in 1918 at age 55, painting and music were at a crossroads, and his late imagery prompts us to speculate which path he'd have taken had he lived into the 1920s and '30s. Would he have reflected Arnold Schoenberg's atonality and become more abstract? Or would he have continued to vent his erotic nature by maintaining his increasingly stylized representational idiom, echoing the late-Romanticism of Richard Strauss? It's tantalizing to ponder.

Mr. Scherer writes about classical music and the fine arts for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared June 26, 2012, on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Forever Between Two Worlds.

via online.wsj.com

By RACHEL WOLFF

From the masterworks by Louis Sullivan, known as the "father of skyscrapers," to the ultrathin Spire project by Spain's Santiago Calatrava that never rose above its foundation, Chicago has remained synonymous with tall buildings.

So it's the perfect place to focus not only on the buildings themselves but on how contemporary artists have looked at such feats of engineering.

Enoc Perez/MCA Chicago

Enoc Perez's vision of Chicago's 'Marina Towers,' part of a residential-commercial complex created in the 1960s.

"Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against Gravity" opens next weekend at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. The 70 or so artworks featured span the past 58 years and nearly all media. The interpretations are funny, sublime—and sometimes possess a dark and haunting edge.

"One thing that became pretty evident was how many artists really anthropomorphize the skyscraper," says Michael Darling, co-curator of the exhibition and chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Some of the renderings, he adds, are plainly meant to be critical, "things that have to do with the inhumanity of the skyscraper, putting people in boxes and stacking them up and all the pathos that comes with that."

It's unsurprising that the skyscraper holds such a fascination for contemporary artists, says David Van Zanten, a professor of architecture and urbanism at Northwestern University in Chicago's Evanston suburb. Many artists trained as architects. He adds that skyscrapers are worlds unto themselves. "There are all sorts of different people inside them. And they're all too obvious a symbol of social hierarchy—the up and down makes that very clear."

Each of the exhibition's five sections tackles a theme. "Urban Critique" includes Michael Wolf's "Transparent City #6," from 2007-08, a cropped photo of Chicago's own Marina Towers that looks almost abstract—a tapestry of sorts woven from apartment windows in a style typical of this Hong Kong-based photographer. In a 2011 piece, New York artist Enoc Perez, known for a brushless technique that positions his work somewhere between paintings and prints, depicts the same towers as a pair of striking red monoliths.

A section titled "Improvisation" is anchored by a room-size piece by the French artist Kader Attia. His "Untitled (Skyline)," from 2007, includes 80 refrigerators of various sizes, blanketed with thousands of tiny mirrors.

“Skyscrapers are worlds unto themselves. And many artists trained as architects.”

Another section, titled "Personification of Architecture," includes Madelon Vriesendorp's 1975 "Flagrant Délit," which roughly translates to "Caught in the Act" and cheekily shows a skyscraper catching two fellow towers together in bed. The image graced the cover of "Delirious New York," a well-known 1978 manifesto written by her husband, the architect Rem Koolhaas.

The proverbial elephant in the gallery is the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, tackled in the exhibition section "Vulnerability of Icons."

For "Exploded City," a cluster-like installation from 2009, Turkish artist Ahmet Ögüt crafted scale models of all of the buildings that were attacked by terrorists in the years leading up to and following 9/11, including the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the Oberoi-Trident Hotel in Mumbai.

Eerier yet is Robert Moskowitz's "Skyscraper," from 1998, which presciently depicts the matching behemoths as two solid-black fields of color—dark shadows set against a bleakly gray sky.

By KEN JOHNSON

Published: June 22, 2012

When I was in graduate school in the mid-’70s, trying to learn how to paint, a useful, shorthand criticism for a certain kind of creation was, “It looks like a LeRoy Neiman.” A reasonably sophisticated art student knew what that meant, and it was not a compliment. It referred to the splashy, garish, instantly recognizable style of illustration, a formulaic mix of impressionism, expressionism and realism, that Mr. Neiman used to make himself one of the most famous artists in America. To compare a student’s work to Mr. Neiman’s meant, “You are trying to distract the viewer from noticing your wooden draftsmanship and your ineptitude with matters of form and structure by larding your canvas with loud color and patchy accretions of paint.” Or, “What you are making is all frosting, no cake.”

 
LeRoy Neiman Inc.
A portrait of Joe Namath by LeRoy Neiman, whose bread and butter was sports subjects.

Mr. Neiman, who died this week at 91, was not an artist whom anyone in what I will here call the serious art world ever cared about. The world that I identified with, and aspired to be a part of, was the one whose orbit included New York Times critics, Artforum and Art in America magazines, institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art and galleries like those lining the streets of Chelsea.

From that exclusive vantage point, Mr. Neiman was the archetypal hack, his immense popularity explicable only by his ambitiously opportunistic personality and his position as Hugh Hefner’s court artist, which gave him monthly visibility to millions in the pages of Playboy. With his ever-present cigar and enormous mustache, he was a cliché of the bon vivant and a bad artist in every way.

I suppose that what Mr. Neiman’s fans found in his painting was a sense of engagement with the kind of subjects regularly proffered by network television: professional sports and its heroes, like Muhammad Ali and Joe Namath. He was, after all, a modern artist, as concerned as any with synergies of form and content. He made infectiously frothy paintings about exciting subjects. But there was nothing in his work to upset the couch potato’s televisual worldview.

It is one of the big lies of the serious art world that anything goes. That may be the case in regard to form, material and techniques, but when it comes to cultural politics, my art world leans decidedly leftward. In Chelsea galleries you are not going to find art made in the service of family values, patriotism or orthodox religion. Republican presidents may be satirically skewered, those who are Democrats hardly ever. You are unlikely ever to see anything condemning abortion or advocating looser gun control laws in a Whitney Biennial.

The serious art world expects, ostensibly at least, that Modern and contemporary art should be in some way critical of mainstream culture, as the avant-garde, from Manet to Pollock, is supposed to have been. Pop Art of the 1960s seemed to view the circus of American mass entertainment and consumerism with a mordantly amused eye. Warhol cranked out portraits of celebrities, but in a way that left you uncertain what he really thought of them. Mr. Neiman’s shamelessly fawning portraiture and uncritical view of big-time athletics left no room for doubt.

But his enthusiastic embrace of the wide world of sports points up by comparison a troubling insularity and crabbed vision in the serious art world. Unlike, say, movies and books that expansively meditate on topics of urgent interest to lots of people and at the same time  earn the respect of smart critics — the novels of Richard Ford and the films of Wes Anderson, for example — the contemporary art scene tends to favor either navel-gazing or promotion of certain agendas. The movement known as Institutional Critique, which obsessively parses the system by which art is circulated and consumed and has been, paradoxically, much favored by museum curators, is only the most conspicuous instance of this blinkered view of real, multidimensional life in the world at large.

Mr. Neiman started out in the late 1950s and early ’60s near the cutting edge of cultural change in his association with the swinging yet literate, unapologetically hedonistic lifestyle promoted by Playboy. His single, most memorable creation was the Playboy Femlin, his deft cartoon figure of a curvy sprite in thigh-high stockings and big hair. She was an extraordinarily economical condensation of mid-20th-century heterosexual male desire and a muse for the sexual revolution in the new era of the Pill.

But Mr. Neiman did not evolve in ensuing decades, and his public profile faded, like that of the magazine he worked for. I suspect that few artists now under 30 have any idea who he was or what he represented.

Mr. Neiman  is not the only celebrated artist to be marginalized by the cognoscenti. Walt Disney, Salvador Dalí, Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth all incurred suspicion for the taint of kitsch attached to their work. But it is hard to deny the aesthetic and moral interest of what they did, so they have their high-minded apologists.

Is the serious art world wrong to exclude and disdain Mr. Neiman and his art? I don’t think so. But the artist who could galvanize both popular imagination and mandarin intellect and in so doing expand the serious art world’s spiritual horizons and tell us something true about real life in the real world — that is something to wish for.

 

Christian Marclay/Paula Cooper Gallery
Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film montage, “The Clock,” is coming to the David Rubenstein Atrium in Lincoln Center.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: June 21, 2012

This summer the city that never sleeps will have another glimpse of an artwork that doesn’t relent much either: “The Clock,” a spellbinding, time-telling 24-hour wonder of film and sound montage by Christian Marclay, the polymath composer, collagist, video artist and pioneer turntablist.

An assemblage of time-related movie moments that had its debut in London in autumn 2010, Mr. Marclay’s “Clock” is already a popular classic. It is also a functioning timepiece; a highly compressed, peripatetic history of film and film styles; an elaborate, rhythmic musical composition; and a relentlessly enthralling meditation on time as an inescapable fact of both cinematic artifice and everyday life. Perhaps the ultimate validation of appropriation art, it thoroughly demonstrates how existing works of art — in this case films — become raw material for new ones.

“The Clock” counts off the minutes of a 24-hour day using tiny segments from thousands of films. Bits of “High Noon,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Laura,” “On the Waterfront,” “The Godfather” and “A Clockwork Orange” speed past, mixed with early silent films and less familiar foreign ones.

As the action, music, sound effects and dialogue of one film bleed into those of another, each segment specifies a time, sometimes through spoken words, but mostly through shots of wristwatches, clocks, time clocks and the like. All are synced to real time. When it is 11:30 a.m. in “The Clock,” it will be 11:30 a.m. in the world outside. Exactly.

The first New York showing of “The Clock,” at the Paula Cooper Gallery in January 2011, had people lining up around the block in a relatively deserted west Chelsea in the dead of winter. Now, for 20 days starting on July 13, Lincoln Center will present the piece in a specially built theater in the David Rubenstein Atrium on Broadway between 62nd and 63rd Streets. Admission will be first come first served in a setting — lined with movie-palace velvet curtains and outfitted with enormous couches that blur boundaries between living room and screening room — that accommodates only about 90 people at a time.

It may be a challenge to get in, even in the wee hours, which is when I want to go, but I intend to make every effort, and recommend that you do too. The piece will run Tuesday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. and then settle in for three 38-hour weekend marathons beginning at 8 a.m. Fridays and running to 10 p.m. Sundays. It will be closed Mondays and ends on Aug. 1.