"First a Black Hood, Then 81 Captive Days for an Artist in China: Ai Weiwei"

May 26, 2012

At the rear of a white van, one policeman sat on each side of Mr. Ai, China’s most famous artist and provocateur. They clutched his arms. Four more men sat in the front rows.

“Until that moment I still had spirit, because it didn’t look real,” Mr. Ai said. “It was more like a performance. Why was it so dramatic?”

On the morning of April 3, 2011, the policemen drove Mr. Ai, one of the most outspoken critics of the Communist Party, to a rural detention center from Beijing Capital International Airport, where Mr. Ai had planned to fly to Hong Kong and Taiwan on business. So began one ofthe most closely watched human rights dramas in China of the past year.

China’s treatment of social critics has been thrust back into the spotlight by the diplomatic sparring over Chen Guangcheng, the persecuted rights advocate who left here on May 19 for the United States. A blind, self-taught lawyer, Mr. Chen pulled off a daring nighttime escape from house arrest. Like that case, the tale of Mr. Ai’s 81 days of illegal detention, recalled during a series of conversations in recent months, reveals the ways in which the most stubborn dissidents joust with their tormentors and try to maintain resistance in the face of seemingly absolute power. No critic has so publicly taunted the Communist Party as Mr. Ai, even as security officers have employed a variety of tactics in a continuing campaign to cow him.

Despite warnings from the authorities, Mr. Ai, 54, uses Twitter daily and meets with diplomats, journalists, artists and liberal Chinese. This month, a Beijing court agreed to hear a lawsuit that Mr. Ai has filed against local tax officials for demanding that he pay $2.4 million in back taxes and penalties. Last month, Mr. Ai set up four Web cameras to broadcast his daily home life, his way of mocking the police surveillance that surrounds him. Officers ordered him to stop.

“His personality is, ‘The more you push me, the harder I’m going to push back,’ ” said Liu Xiaoyuan, a lawyer and friend who was also detained last year.

During the 81 days, interrogators told Mr. Ai that the authorities would prosecute him for subversion, Mr. Ai said. The three main interrogators worked in an economic crimes unit of the Beijing police, and their aim was to gather evidence to charge him with subversion, tax evasion, pornography and bigamy. (Mr. Ai has a 3-year-old son from an extramarital relationship.) They questioned him repeatedly on his use of the Internet, his foreign contacts, the content of his artwork, its enormous sales value and a nude photography project from 2010.

Mr. Ai’s eyes grew moist when he recalled how interrogators threatened him with a dozen years in prison. “That was very painful,” he said, “because they kept saying, ‘You will never see your mother again,’ or ‘You will never see your son again.’ ”

In two different centers, Mr. Ai was confined to a cramped room with guards watching him around the clock. The second site, a military compound, was harsher, he said: lights remained on 24 hours, a loud fan whirred and two men in green uniforms stared silently from less than three feet away. Mr. Ai got two to five hours of sleep each night. He stuck to a minute-by-minute schedule dictating when he would eat, go to the toilet and take a shower. Mr. Ai, known for his portly frame, lost 28 pounds.

But the authorities at the military center ensured that he saw a doctor four to seven times a day. He received medicine for his many ailments: diabetes, high blood pressure, a heart condition and a head injury from a police beating in 2009. Mr. Ai noticed the hard-boiled egg on his breakfast tray each day had a tiny hole; a guard told him the authorities were keeping samples of each meal in case he got sick or died.

Mr. Ai’s ordeal began the morning that police officers drove him from the airport into the countryside. He was marched into a building and pushed into a chair.

“Stand up,” someone said.

Mr. Ai stood up. A man whipped off his hood. “I saw this tall guy right in front of me,” he said. “This guy looked like he was from an early James Bond movie.”

Mr. Ai thought he was about to get beaten. Instead, the man emptied Mr. Ai’s pockets and took his belt. His right hand was handcuffed to an arm of his chair.

The first team of interrogators arrived much later, at 10 p.m. One typed on a laptop, the other asked questions. The main interrogator, Mr. Li, about 40, wore a pinstriped sports jacket with leather elbow patches. He said he had never heard of Mr. Ai until he did an Internet search.

Mr. Li questioned Mr. Ai for more than two hours while chain smoking. He asked Mr. Ai about Internet chatter urging Chinese to start a “Jasmine Revolution.” Mr. Ai was questioned about a sculpture to be displayed in New York that consisted of 12 bronze heads of the Chinese Zodiac’s animals. Mr. Li accused Mr. Ai of not deserving credit for the work, since the display was modeled after a fountain at the old Summer Palace in Beijing, and workers had done the casting for him.

He also said he was surprised one head could sell for a half-million renminbi, or $80,000.

“Very few people know why art sells so high,” Mr. Ai replied. “I don’t even know.”

Mr. Li asked Mr. Ai about his extramarital relationship with the mother of his son. The policeman threatened Mr. Ai with a bigamy charge. “Don’t try to insult me,” Mr. Ai said. “You wouldn’t call that a marriage.”

As the two argued, Mr. Li took another tack.

“Your real crime will be subversion of state power,” Mr. Li said, as Mr. Ai recalled. “You scold the government all the time, you talk to foreign press all the time. We have to teach you something. We have to announce you’re a liar, you have economic problems and you married twice. And you put pornography on the Internet.”

So it went for about two weeks. Guards brought in a mattress each night. He was interrogated almost daily. Mr. Li alternated with a short, plump man named Mr. Liu.

The investigators were “respectful,” Mr. Ai said. Eventually he sensed them getting bored. Mr. Liu talked about noodle-making. The guards played with their cellphones. “You feel like a bead falling into a gap somewhere and you are forgotten, totally cut off from your connections and whatever experiences you had before,” Mr. Ai said.

The transfer to the second detention center happened without warning. Once again, officers hooded Mr. Ai. The guards were 80 young soldiers from the People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary force. They put Mr. Ai in Room 1135. White padding was taped to the walls, as in an asylum. The compound housed prominent suspects, including billionaires.

The new interrogator was sterner. One day, he and Mr. Ai mused on why Mr. Ai had embraced political activism. Was it because Mr. Ai had lived in New York for 11 years? Or because he had suffered during the Cultural Revolution? No, other Chinese had gone through those experiences and not been radicalized. The two men then hit on the reason: the Internet. Before Mr. Ai began blogging in 2005, he had been a stranger to computers.

On May 15, Mr. Ai was ordered to shower and put on a white dress shirt to see his wife. Mr. Ai knew the visit was for propaganda purposes and did not want to go. Officers told him he could say only three things: that he was being treated well; that he was being investigated for economic crimes; and that his family should not talk to journalists. Mr. Ai and his wife, Lu Qing, met for 15 minutes in the Chaoyang District police headquarters. “I didn’t even want to look at her,” he said. “It was completely insulting.”

Back in detention, the interrogations dragged on. One morning, the officers said they were sending Mr. Ai to prison, and asked him whom he wanted to see one last time. Then they said he might be released if he could persuade Ms. Lu to sign a document stating he was in charge of Beijing Fake Cultural Development, the company registered under Ms. Lu’s name. The police were building a tax case against the company, and the document would give them leverage over Mr. Ai.

The police called Ms. Lu. “Just sign whatever they want you to sign,” Mr. Ai told her.

She signed. Then officers sat Mr. Ai down in front of a videocamera and made him promise certain things: Never get on the Internet again. Never talk to foreigners. And so on. Mr. Ai signed a document saying he had been notified he owed back taxes. Officers blindfolded him for the drive to the Chaoyang police station.

At the station, he met his wife and mother. Together they went home.

Mia Li contributed research

"An Abstract Master Puts on a Plant Show: Ellsworth Kelly's Plant Drawings at New York's Metropolitan Museum" in @WSJ

[ICONS kellynew](Philip Montgomery for The Wall Street Journal

Ellsworth Kelly with two of his plant drawings earlier this week in New York. 'Shape and color are my two strong things,' he says.

Throughout his career, American abstract painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly—famed for panels of saturated color, grids of varying shades like organized confetti and shapes layered upon each other—has nurtured a second occupation: closely observed drawings of plants.

On June 5, 74 of these works—six decades' worth—will go on view at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I've got to draw," Mr. Kelly said. "And drawing for me is the beginning of everything."

"Plant Drawings" includes his first of the genre, made in Boston and Paris in the late 1940s, as well as others made as recently as last year in upstate New York. Mr. Kelly describes his earliest attempts as "a little brutal," and his later work, refined to contour lines and "voluptuous" shapes, as more sophisticated. "When I finish, when I compare it to what I looked at, it's never as good. Nature wins," he said. "But now, 40 years, 30 years, 20 years later, I see that I was pretty good."

Mr. Kelly, 89 years old this month, spoke to The Wall Street Journal this week. Below, an edited transcript.

Wall Street Journal: When did you begin to draw plants?

Ellsworth Kelly: "Ailanthus" [1948] is the first plant drawing that I did, in Boston. Later on you'll see a drawing of just the branch that I made, 40 years later. "Hyacinth" [1949] was the first one I did when I was in Paris. It was cold and the hotels were not very well heated, so I bought a flower in the flower market and brought it into the hotel room to think about spring.

In Paris, I continued drawing constantly, people, and then when I got back to New York, I drew plants, rather. In my studio down in Coenties Slip, I had a loft with a roof. I planted sunflowers and all kinds of things on the roof. From then on, in the summers, I would continue to draw.

'Drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.'

Why and how do you draw?

My ideas come, and I draw. And I draw because I have to note down my ideas. Not so much in the plant drawings. I have to see my plants.

[ICONS kelly]© Ellsworth Kelly/Metropolitan Museum of Art

Detail of 'Apples,' by Ellsworth Kelly

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation. And I think artists all work that way really. I'm not special. But I like plants, and I don't think anyone else draws like this, today. I'm special in that way.

How do the plant drawings speak to your relationship to shapes?

The negative space is like one of my shapes, and when you look at a drawing of mine you can call off the number [of shapes]. Matisse draws what I call the essence of the plants. He leaves a shape open. He'll do a leaf and not close it. Everybody used to say, oh, I got it all from Matisse, and I said, "Not really."

[Mine] is a different kind of spirituality. It's more a portrait of a plant. I do the contours, and I make space by overlapping. I don't want to put shading in because they're about drawing, not about shading.

Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.

Write to Kimberly Chou at kimberly.chou@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 26, 2012, on page C20 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: An Abstract Master Puts On a Plant Show.

 

"The New Barnes Shouldn't Work—But Does" in @wsj Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

May 23, 2012, 3:04 p.m. ET

By ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

[barnes2]Tom Crane

The Barnes Foundation’s new Philadelphia campus.

Philadelphia

The richness and the eccentricity of the Barnes Collection is legendary; its unequaled concentration of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings far exceeds the number in any major art museum. (Imagine, if you can, 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 46 Picassos, 59 Matisses and 18 Rousseaus.) Installed in a dense mix of Asian, African and American Indian art and artifacts, with decorative ironwork scattered among the iconic images, it defies all rational curatorial practice. For Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951), the physician who devoted a fortune made from a drug of his own invention, Argyrol, to the creation of this extraordinary collection, every item expressed his obsessively personal vision and idiosyncratic ideas about art.

The collection is owned by the Barnes Foundation, established in 1922 under a legal arrangement called an indenture of trust, with the specific stipulation that everything was always to remain exactly as it was in Dr. Barnes’s lifetime. It has been housed in a small building in the Philadelphia suburb of Merion, Pa., commissioned by Dr. Barnes from the distinguished American classicist Paul Cret. The burlap-covered walls of the domestically scaled interiors were crowded with the unconventional groupings he called “ensembles,” meant to provide “teaching moments” about line, color and space to the students of the art school that was part of the foundation. He would wander between his home and the galleries at night, rearranging the unorthodox hangings. Access was limited and visibility was poor, but once you had been there you never forgot it. The Barnes’s quirky magnificence is increasingly rare in today’s corporatized and homogenized art world.

A sampling of some of his collection shown at the Philadelphia Academy in the 1920s was met with outrage and derision. Dr. Barnes retaliated by refusing entry to any member of the Philadelphia establishment, an embittered payback that he nurtured for the rest of his life. When he died in 1951, his will reconfirmed the terms of the indenture, including the stipulation that nothing could ever be moved or changed, to protect his legacy, but also to foreclose any attempt by the Philadelphia art establishment to take over the collection, no longer underappreciated and now enormously valuable.

[barnes3]Michael Moran/OTTO

An exterior detail of the new building.

The ensuing years brought problems of access, administration, deferred maintenance, and disputes and lawsuits with the local community. Mismanagement and the depletion of the endowment eventually led to insolvency and the need for large infusions of cash. A consortium of Philadelphia art institutions and philanthropists, all of whom Dr. Barnes detested, came up with the funds, but with the nonnegotiable provision that the collection had to be moved to Philadelphia. A petition to make the move was granted by the court as a permissible modification of the terms of the indenture. The enemy took over.

A new, vastly enlarged complex that contains the Barnes Collection and expanded administrative, educational and social facilities has just been completed on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, close to the Rodin Museum and not far from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Critics have denounced the relocation as a steal and a violation; defenders point to increased public access, enhanced programs and additional amenities. There were some conscientious objectors who suggested that the job should be turned down on principle. When Tod Williams and Billie Tsien of New York won the commission through a competition held by the Barnes Foundation, they even received the architectural equivalent of hate mail. They faced a formidable challenge: The one part of the indenture that could not be broken was the prohibition of change—the shapes and sizes of the galleries and the hanging arrangements must all remain the same. The architects had to create a replica that could pass for the real thing.

I take history and authenticity seriously. I have never disguised my defense of originals over copies, or my distaste for the Disneyfication of reality or the more genteel “authentic reproduction,” an oxymoron that devalues the creative act by glossing the knockoff with a false veneer of respectability, because a faux is a fake is a phony, by any other name. And I have been one of the most ardent defenders of the small, personal museum that you remember with particular affection, as opposed to the awe inspired by the increasingly affectless grandeur of our enormous arts institutions that expand relentlessly as their price of admission rises.

So how does it feel to have one’s core beliefs turned upside down? The “new” Barnes that contains the “old” Barnes shouldn’t work, but it does. It should be inauthentic, but it’s not. It has changed, but it is unchanged. The architects have succeeded in retaining its identity and integrity without resorting to a slavishly literal reproduction. This is a beautiful building that does not compromise its contemporary convictions or upstage the treasure inside. And it isn’t alchemy. It’s architecture.

The solution goes far toward resolving the problem of the accommodation of the auxiliary functions of today’s museums that increasingly dominate and destroy the art experience. The genius is in the plan. Architecture is not just buildings, but the way in which they are put together to direct our progress through a calculated sequence of spaces, and how those relationships control our movement and mood. In this case, they lead us, physically and emotionally, away from the distraction of the social entertainments and support services to the Barnes itself.

Two long, rectangular, parallel buildings are joined by a soaring interior court, surmounted by a lightbox that filters daylight through a series of baffles into the court as a softly diffused glow, supplanted by artificial light at night. The entry building has the support facilities; the facing building, across the court, contains the collection. At no point do the two buildings touch. Their only connection is through the court, which is also the only way to get to the collection and serves as barrier, buffer and lounge.

The carefully choreographed procession begins with an approach through an allée of trees flanked by long, flat pools of water in a parklike setting designed by landscape architect Laurie Olin. It takes you to a tall slit in the outermost building, where an offset door makes you turn right into an entry area, avoiding an immediate, direct full view of the interior. You turn again to face the serene void of the court, and only then do you see the entrance doors of the Barnes Collection, in the second long building, directly parallel, across the way.

Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien practice a kinder, gentler modernism, with an enormous sensitivity to materials and textures, and a particular affinity for crafts. They responded immediately to the love of pattern, color and craft that informed all of Dr. Barnes’s acquisitions. Because they knew that the long, flat expanses of wall would lack Cret’s enriching classical ornament, they did not go to the original quarries for the closest match. A warmer, more varied Negev stone is divided into elegantly proportioned sections mounted on stainless steel with slender bronze fins for accents. Delicate reveals for window setbacks add surface interest.

Behind its entrance doors, the “new” Barnes is an uncorrupted, enhanced experience. The paintings are rehung in their original configurations, in rooms of the same size and proportions, the walls covered in the same burlap, windows facing south, as at Merion. If you look closely, you will see many small, subtle details that keep the building from being a lifeless, born-dead replica. Every aspect of the design followed intensive study of the original architecture and the collection—for relevance, not reproduction.

There were infinite drawings and models of the profiles of door frames and ceiling moldings; the simplified woodwork departs from classical formulas to incorporate motifs from Dr. Barnes’s interest in native crafts and cultures. There are hanging fixtures, as at Merion, carefully updated. Fabrics are inspired by Dr. Barnes’s African textiles. Full daylight comes through the windows, and gently raised, coved ceilings that make the galleries feel much more spacious have concealed illumination by Fisher Marantz Stone for a balance of natural and artificial light that reveals the glory of the paintings. The second-floor balcony has been enlarged to permit a better view of Matisse’s spectacular “La Danse,” and his “Joy of Life,” once in a stairwell, has been given its own space. Brooklynites mourning the loss of their Coney Island boardwalk to a concrete replacement will find it in the handsomely recycled wood of the court floor.

The only obvious intervention, the insertion of a classroom and an interior garden between the galleries at either end, may disturb some, but they relieve the aesthetic overload without disturbing the illusion or the flow.

I have been waiting a long time for a building like this. It’s not about flashy starchitect bling, high-tech tricks, minimalist sensory deprivation or narcissistic egos. The Barnes is all about the Barnes. This is what architecture does, when it does it right.

Ms. Huxtable is the Journal’s architecture critic.

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"Saving Dr. Barnes's Vision" in @wsj via Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

By ERIC GIBSON[barnes1]

One of the longest and bitterest

Michael Moran/OTTO

The new museum faithfully re-creates the experience of the Barnes’s original installation.

Philadelphia

One of the longest and bitterest battles the art world has ever seen—the fight over the future of Philadelphia’s storied Barnes Foundation collection—has, for now, anyway, come to an end with the opening of the superb new facility on Benjamin Franklin Parkway. It is a win for both advocates and opponents of the move from the foundation’s original location in suburban Merion.

Long in financial peril thanks to a sorry, two-decade-long record of mismanagement, the institution is at last on a sound footing. At the same time, the integrity of Albert C. Barnes’s vision has been preserved. The new museum faithfully re-creates the experience of the original installation and makes Dr. Barnes himself present as never before.

Its successful outcome notwithstanding, this was a battle that needed to be joined. For at stake was the future of a one-of-a-kind collection and an important episode in the history of American taste, a subject the general public knows too little about.

For Dr. Barnes was a collector like no other, a man whose contributions to the art life of this country were unprecedented in his time and have been unmatched since. Unlike today’s Fashion-Victim Medicis, he didn’t chase after the latest hot thing but bought what moved him; didn’t regard art collecting as a means of social advancement but as an all-absorbing intellectual and spiritual quest; built a permanent home for his collection as an educational institution, not as a monument to himself.

Central to this didactic purpose were the installations, the so-called “ensembles,” nonchronological groupings of objects that mixed media, periods and styles, cultures, fine and decorative arts. Dr. Barnes’s aim was twofold: The point of the ensembles was to show the continuity of all art. In particular, Dr. Barnes wanted to show that modern artists were indebted to, rather than dismissive of, the traditions of the past. And in his teachings and writings, Dr. Barnes drew on his scientific background (as well as the writings of Henry James, John Dewey and George Santayana) to bring a new rigor to the criticism of art, replacing approaches he found intellectually flabby or simply beside the point. He emphasized the formal properties of painting—line, color, space and the like. Today his method might seem rather narrow. But it still has value, particularly as a way into a painting for someone with no prior knowledge—Dr. Barnes’s intended audience. And it’s a welcome antidote to the theory-drenched obscurantism that passes for art criticism today.

In the galleries, Dr. Barnes’s curatorial outlook made for some pretty strange artistic bedfellows. One typically head-snapping juxtaposition places a proto-Cubist Picasso painting of a head near a 16th-century French wood sculpture of the crucified Christ—and those are just two objects among more than two dozen on that wall. The total effect of a single room and certainly of a whole visit could be both confusing and exhilarating. Indeed, one might speak of the Four Stages of the Barnes Experience: Bewilderment, Curiosity, Insight, Appreciation. Whether or not they ultimately “got” the Barnes, all visitors who entered left knowing they had partaken of an art experience of unparalleled richness and intensity. Hence the protracted uproar over the proposed move and earlier rescue plans going back some 20 years. People who know and love the Barnes felt something precious and irreplaceable was in danger of being lost.

The more so because the Barnes’s future too often seemed to be hostage to other agendas. For example, it isn’t entirely clear if the idea hatched in 2002 to move the Barnes downtown happened because it really was thought to be the only way to save the financially beleaguered institution, or because relocation would help then-Gov. Ed Rendell to realize his dream of turning Benjamin Franklin Parkway into a center of cultural tourism. (Around the same time, the state was also negotiating to establish an Alexander Calder museum on the parkway, an effort that ultimately came to naught.)

Still, there was only one relevant issue once the decision to move was made: Would the result be a Disneyfied simulacrum—the Barnes in quotation marks, as it were? Or would visitors have the same intimate, revelatory encounter with works of art in the new locale as in Merion?

Thanks to the architects, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, who understood from the beginning the delicate nature of their task, the Barnes experience today is identical to what it was previously. They have created a carefully staged entrance, ensuring that the hurly-burly of the everyday world is left behind so the visitor enters the collection in the proper frame of mind to absorb its riches. It’s an arrangement that recalls Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with its new entrance pavilion by Renzo Piano, which now houses all the necessary but distracting museum functions such as ticketing and coat check to ensure that once inside the Venetian palazzo you are able to focus exclusively on art and taste.


Inside the Barnes’s galleries the architects have made subtle enhancements, such as using a special glass in the windows to admit more daylight than was possible in Dr. Barnes’s day, and reflecting artificial light off raised ceilings. The result is the best of both worlds: The works of art are more visible than previously, and yet the installation is so thoroughly and convincingly replicated that there are times you have to remind yourself that you’re on the parkway, not in Merion.

Especially welcome is the new temporary-exhibition gallery that will be used for shows exploring Dr. Barnes’s life and career in art. The inaugural exhibition, “Ensemble: Albert C. Barnes and the Experiment in Education,” uses works of art and archival material to provide visitors with an excellent primer on Dr. Barnes, his collection and his aesthetic formation. There was nothing like this in Merion, and it is certain to go a long way to dispel the aura of strangeness that has long attached to Dr. Barnes, his vision and his method.

Not everything is perfect. The architects have broken the sequence by inserting an interior garden between two sets of lateral galleries at one end, and done the same thing at the other end with a classroom. It’s a decision that orphans the outermost rooms, thus diminishing the overall effect of the installation. We also could have done without Ellsworth Kelly’s banal geometric sculpture “Barnes Totem” gracing the forecourt. Talk about a downer.

Most perplexing of all, the large, day-lighted central atrium has been named in honor of Walter and Leonora Annenberg. Whatever his virtues as a collector and philanthropist, Annenberg was a longtime foe of Dr. Barnes. If any aspect of this new arrangement is likely to have Dr. Barnes fulminating in his grave, it’s the presence of the Annenberg name on this new museum.

Those are, however, details. The fact is that after touring this new facility, you come away convinced that the Barnes Foundation is poised at the beginning of a bright new future—one that will allow its magnificent collection to become better known, Dr. Barnes’s ideas to be more widely understood, and the man himself to be recognized as the generous, idealistic visionary he was instead of the eccentric curmudgeon of popular caricature. It’s a future that could scarcely be imagined until now, and one that everyone, including those of us critical of the Barnes’s stewards in the past, has a stake in seeing come to pass.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal’s Leisure & Arts features editor.

"Going With the Grain - Craft Turns Heads at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair" in @nytimes

DESIGN NOTEBOOK

Clockwise from left: the May chair in teak by Miles & May; a credenza with aluminum-nail ornamentation by Peter Sandback; and Rope Lights by Tanya Aguiñiga.

 

ANDREW MAU had a man bun — or rather, two of them. “A bun and a thing,” Mr. Mau said, referring to the stylish knot of hair perched high on his scalp and the smaller tuft gathered near his collar. If it’s not the coiffure you associate with the ancient vocation of woodworking, you clearly did not spend time at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, which on Tuesday ended its annual four-day run at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

Enlarge This Image

The Corliss chair by Studio Dunn.

Mr. Mau, 25, a founder of Studio Dunn, a two-year-old furniture company in Providence, R.I., was part of an army of youthful exhibitors who were rocking on the heels of their pointy-toed leather shoes or fuzzy polka-dot sneakers as they introduced updated versions of such hoary designs as Shaker chairs and gentlemen’s valets.

Studio Dunn’s Corliss chair, for instance, was a supple handmade fusion of cast-aluminum back and maple seat and legs that paid tribute to George Henry Corliss, the inventor who improved the steam engine.

“All of our new pieces are named after game-changers in industrial design and transportation design,” Mr. Mau said.

At Richard Watson’s booth, one looked in vain for the wrinkly codger who produced an 18th-century-style highboy and accompanying stool. But it turned out that Richard Watson wasn’t elderly. In fact, Richard Watson isn’t a person at all, but a New England furniture brand that bears the surnames of its female founders, Brooke Richard, 34, and Laura Watson, 33.

“My initial inspiration was preciousness,” Ms. Richard said, indicating the $18,000 highboy’s white bronze pulls, hammered by a jeweler, and the contrasting walnut fronts and maple sides intended to give each drawer, when removed, the appearance of a keepsake box.

For as long as factories have efficiently spat out objects, craft has been an antidote to the chilly uniformity of mass production. Fragrant knotty furniture of one variety or another has always appeared at this fair, along with the occasional woven tapestry and thrown pot. This year, however, craft, with its quirks and nicks, threatened to overshadow the sleek machined goods that are a calling card of the 23-year-old event.

Wafting through the convention center and satellite design exhibitions around town was nostalgia for preindustrial and early industrial technology. Members of the British group Designers in Residence, which presented the exhibition “Tools for Everyday Life,” were typical in their adoration of gleaming brass rivets, which they embedded into lamps, and the gauges and shims used at machine shops, which they turned into building blocks.

Where were the cheeky midcentury motifs of recent years? The bathroom hardware company Lefroy Brooks’s Belle Aire tub faucet, with fins like a 1950s automobile, looked as out of place as a poodle skirt on Louisa May Alcott.

Vintage charm is one thing, but craft really seized attention this year by turning itself into theater.

At Wanted Design, an exhibition in Chelsea that ran concurrently with the fair, the furniture company Bernhardt Design sponsored a blue-jean-making demonstration. Employees of Raleigh Denim stitched on antique sewing machines that had been transported to New York from their workshop in North Carolina. The buttonhole machine, which dated to 1940, had leather belts and produced the sound of a machine gun, appropriate for a tool made during World War II, pointed out one of the company’s founders, Victor Lytvinenko.

At the Standard hotel at Cooper Square, one of several sites that made up the pop-up NoHo Design District, James Carroll, a woodworker with the Dublin company Makers & Brothers, sat in front of a plate-glass window, hewing chunks of Catskills ash to make three-legged stools.

And back at the convention center, Hellman-Chang dramatized the struggle between human and hand tool by setting up a workbench, where the furniture company’s publicist was spotted trying to sculpture a table leg with an implement intended for shaping wheel spokes. “It’s pretty safe,” Eric Chang, a founder of Hellman-Chang, assured an onlooker. “I’m more worried about the wood.”

With a workshop in Brooklyn, Hellman-Chang exemplifies the growing self-assurance (and visibility) of that borough’s design community. The fair featured a record 51 exhibitors from Brooklyn this year, about 9 percent of an international crowd that included Denmark, Spain and Japan (not to mention Manhattan).

Brian Volk-Zimmerman, who builds furniture in Red Hook, Brooklyn, under the company name Volk, displayed a child’s stool with the name Abigail embedded in round vintage typewriter keys, and a walnut dresser and hutch with a sliding panel of Harris tweed.

“It’s got to be the will of the public,” Mr. Volk-Zimmerman said about the popularity of handmade furniture. “I’m succeeding at making money, although it’s a difficult business model.”

Heirloom pieces are appealing purchases, Mr. Volk-Zimmerman suggested, because they’re forever. And forever is another word for sustainable.

In the Venn diagram of the modern American marketplace, the intersection of lovers of luxury and friends of the environment is growing. Refinement, authenticity and restraint define the products that are coveted in this territory. Which explains the appearance of so much natural stone at this fair, like the slabs of white marble topping both an austere wood block in Phase Design’s Nemesis coffee table and a wire basket in Blu Dot’s Scamp table. Such materials offer both elegance and the appearance of green cred, even if they are clawed from the earth.

The business of craft is taking off well beyond Brooklyn, too. On view at the convention center was British Bone, a ceramics collection directed by Emily Johnson, a fifth-generation scion of a family that began manufacturing porcelain in North Staffordshire, England, in 1882. Working with the designer and curator Suzanne Trocmé, Ms. Johnson is reviving the region’s industry by producing contemporary pieces by herself, Ms. Trocmé and the British designer Max Lamb.

By no means was industrial technology absent from the fair, but much of it assumed an attitude of humility, seizing every opportunity to hide itself. Big Ass Fans tucked a direct-current motor into the core of its new Haiku ceiling fan to achieve a slimmer profile while increasing efficiency so dramatically that the fan is said to consume roughly $5 a year in electricity. Equally striking were the periodic gusts of air Haiku emitted, which mimicked natural breezes and which the company literature describes as a Whoosh. But that, too, was invisible.

Similarly, the lighting company Pablo introduced an LED ceiling fixture called Cielo that integrates the transformer required to dim the light, rather than exiling it to a bulky external box. And even a lamp as attention-getting as Humanscale’s Halo, a glowing brass ring hung from a wall peg and controlled remotely, is a “look, Ma, no wires” invention.

On the whole, exhibitors kept things simple.

Colin Cobb, a fabricator in the studio of the New York lighting designer Lindsey Adelman, used technical language to explain the process of assembling lamps with bespoke brass components and blown-glass spheres. But the small band of spectators at the convention center who watched him work had no trouble following his descriptions, perhaps because of the terminology he used. Each suspended glass globe had a slightly different weight, Mr. Cobb said. So in order for the lamp to balance, “It has to be zhuzhed just right.”

Designing a Better Design Week

EARLY last Saturday, Takeshi Miyakawa, 50, a Japanese-born furniture designer, was hanging illuminated shopping bags in trees in Brooklyn when he was arrested on the suspicion that he was planting bombs. Mr. Miyakawa protested that he was preparing an art installation to coincide with what is informally known as New York Design Week, a cluster of exhibitions, lectures and parties that take place during the International Contemporary Furniture Fair. Nevertheless, he was held in police custody for four days before being released.

It is a sober commentary on the stature of New York design that Mr. Miyakawa’s arrest was Design Week’s most newsworthy event. But that may change now that influential designers, business owners, cultural leaders and local government officials are uniting to promote the design industries’ prominence.

Design Week NYC is the working name of a city-supported initiative, set to begin next year, that would enlarge the scope of the annual New York design festival, making it comparable to popular design weeks in Milan, London and Paris.

The idea of bringing together architects, designers, manufacturers and sellers to create a more robust public presence is not new. This latest effort emerged last fall from conversations among representatives of local design organizations, including WantedDesign, a two-year-old exhibition and event program that takes place in May, and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Then, on Feb. 9, Christine Quinn, speaker of the New York City Council, publicly declared her support for an annual design event along the lines of Fashion Week. Citing data from “Growth by Design,” a report on the economic contributions of New York’s design industries released last year by the Center for an Urban Future, Ms. Quinn said: “We have more designers than any city in the United States, with nearly 40,000 New Yorkers working in everything from graphics to movie sets, architecture to interior decorating. We’ll grow our design sector by stealing an idea from the fashion industry.”

On April 9, 55 designers, design leaders and journalists met with representatives from her office and from NYC & Company, the city’s marketing and tourism bureau. The discussion hinted at the difficulties in uniting the variegated and disparate strands of New York’s design professionals. Attendees challenged everything from the initiative’s proposed name to its communications platform.

It took Fern Mallis, the founder of Fashion Week, to galvanize the assembly. Ms. Mallis, who established a progressive but ill-fated design center in Long Island City in the 1980s, recounted the struggle to make the semiannual fashion event and its allied Fashion’s Night Out program a success. (Today, they attract 300,000 visitors and reap more than $800 million in revenue.)

Later, Ms. Mallis compared the relative dedication of Europeans and Americans to design. “In Italy and France, it’s a part of the culture from the get-go,” she said. “There have been hundreds of years of caring about those disciplines.

“It’s not an American thing. It needs to be.”

Her prescription is to “identify the key talents and players and make them sexy, make them like the fashion designers.”

First, though, the initiative needs leadership — and financing.

 

"Dispute Over Bill on Borrowed Art" in @nytimes, via Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr,

Todd Heisler/The New York Times
The heirs of Malevich sought to recover paintings, including the ones displayed above center and right.
By

The lending and borrowing of famous artworks is the essence of cultural exchange between museums in the United States and abroad. So routine is the practice, and so universally valued, that the American government has traditionally protected it with a law that shields a lent work from being seized by anyone with a claim to legal ownership while the art is on display here.

In recent years, though, American museum directors have come to fear that this safeguard has eroded, and that foreign museums, dreading entanglement in costly ownership battles, are more hesitant to make loans. So they have asked Congress to increase the security for global art swaps.

But a nonpartisan effort to do so, which sailed through the House of Representatives on a voice vote in March, has slowed in the Senate amid an unexpected storm of protest from those who say it goes too far in blocking efforts by owners to recover looted treasures. The bill would prevent all claims, except those filed by families whose valuables were taken by the Nazis in World War II. But even they will find the process harder if the bill becomes law, opponents say. Other scholars and legal experts question why the Holocaust alone, among atrocities affecting ownership, is being afforded special treatment.

“This is a master attempt to put away all the legal claims,” said Marc Masurovsky, a historian and co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project. “How can you excuse 28 different kinds of plunder and only outlaw one subset of one subset? What is the point here? The only people who have anything to gain are the museum directors. So we’re basically saying it’s fine to plunder?”

The driving force in favor of the stronger legislation, known as the Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act, has indeed been the Association of Art Museum Directors. The organization is concerned that it is no longer enough for museums to arrange for a special waiver from the State Department to shield a work from seizure while it’s on loan for an exhibition in the United States.

In Paris, the International Council of Museums was initially in favor of the new legislation, but, given the criticism, is now encouraging “further consultation,” according to Julien Anfruns, director general of that organization, which offers mediation as an alternative to court.

The issue is particularly important in the United States because victims of looted art consider this country a legal refuge where they can press claims against powerful state institutions in Eastern Europe and Russia.

  But concern on the part of American museum directors has grown since a federal court ruling in a 2005 case said that although the waivers can prevent outright seizures, they do not block claimants from filing lawsuits to recover artworks.

The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by the heirs of the abstract painter Kazimir Malevich, who sought to recover paintings from the Stedelijk in Amsterdam while they were on loan for an American exhibition. The Dutch museum believed its State Department waiver protected the works from seizure. But the judge ruled that the family could still sue.

The new bill, sponsored by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, would in effect overturn the judge’s decision and bar lawsuits, except those related to art looted by the Nazis or their agents. The bill would cover loans from the state-owned foreign museums like the Louvre or the Prado, but not private ones.

“If lenders perceive a potential risk, it can prevent artifacts from traveling and therefore potentially deny people in our community the opportunity to learn about cultures,” said Elizabeth Pierce, a spokeswoman for the Cincinnati Museum Center in Ohio, the home state of Representative Steve Chabot, who introduced the legislation in the House.

Russia, for example, has banned art loans to the United States, fearing that works could be seized because of a continuing legal battle in the United States with the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement over 40,000 books and manuscripts that are in Russian government possession. (To reduce tensions, the movement has promised not to sue, but the ban remains in place.)

In sponsoring the legislation, Senator Feinstein cited exhibitions in her state that “may have been endangered,” including one last year at the de Young Museum in San Francisco featuring loans from the Picasso Museum in Paris. A spokeswoman for the Picasso museum, Emilie Augier-Bernard, said she was not aware that anyone had raised claims regarding any of those works.

Despite the efforts to exempt Holocaust-era claims, the fiercest opposition to the bill has come from those who maintain that the exception is too narrowly drawn because it covers only people who lost art directly to the Nazis or their agents.

Experts say many Jewish families lost art, not directly to the Nazis, but because they were pressured to abandon it as they fled or had to sell pieces quickly for a fraction of their worth. Opponents of the bill, like the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a New York organization that seeks restitution for Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, contend that the bill would prevent even these heirs from suing. Some opponents said that they believed that the bill was fast-tracked without a hearing in the House not because Congressional officials did not anticipate opposition, but because museums wanted to be discreet about pushing legislation that would block people from reclaiming looted art.

“Clearly, this is an effort to get the bill passed in the middle of the night,” said Charles Goldstein, a New York lawyer for the Commission for Art Recovery, which works on Holocaust restitution cases. Mr. Chabot’s office said the bill moved swiftly because support was bipartisan and because there was no opposition at the time of the House vote.

Dan Monroe, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, defended the legislation’s special handling of art looted by the Nazis, as opposed to works that might have been taken during, say, the Cambodian civil war or the Bolshevik Revolution. He described the Holocaust as “so massive and egregious that there are few if any other situations that rise to the same level of injustice.”

“To assure the ability to present art and culture to the American public from sources around the world,” he continued, “there are some inherent limits to how museums can act to redress all possible injustices.”

But others are uneasy about granting special treatment.

Derek Fincham, an assistant professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston who specializes in cultural heritage law, said the exclusion probably also reflected the notion that the bill would be difficult to pass without an exception for Holocaust-era claims.

“To put it bluntly, how many Cambodians donate to political campaigns?” he said. “All of this goes back to political influence on a money level, which is unfortunate.”

Corinne Hershkovitch, a lawyer in Paris who specializes in recovering plundered art, said she questioned whether a bill that tried to distinguish between the severity of atrocities was sound. “There should be a common system for all looted art,” she said. “If you offer protections just for one group, it will seem illegitimate.”

Allan Gerson, a specialist in international law who has a client trying to recover paintings seized by the Bolsheviks, agreed. “Why are Nazi storm troopers looting art any different from Bolshevik storm troopers?” he said.

In California in 2009, a federal appeals court struck down a state law that sought to extend the statute of limitations in lawsuits filed there against museums and galleries by people who had art taken from them during the Holocaust. The ruling did not focus on the special nature of the protection, but on constitutional flaws in the statute. When California enacted amended legislation in 2010, it covered artworks lost in all periods.

Jo Backer Laird, a lawyer who specializes in art law, said the pending Senate bill was founded on the view “that the Holocaust is simply different.”

“It is a view,” she continued, “that has a compelling philosophical and moral basis — but one that may be more difficult to justify and implement as a matter of law.”

 

"Artist Edouard Duval Carrie branches out but keeps roots in Miami" in @MiamiHerald

Posted on Fri, May. 18, 2012

By John Coppola

   "The Messenger,'' by Edouard Duval Carrié, from his exhibition at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, May 2012.
Edouard Duval Carrié
"The Messenger,'' by Edouard Duval Carrié, from his exhibition at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, May 2012.

“This is my life as a tree, says Edouard Duval Carrié as he singles out an eight-foot-square work that is the centerpiece of his current exhibition at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery.

Purple Lace Tree, a backlit mixed media work on water-jet cut aluminum, depicts a single tree, its serpentine roots not anchored in the ground, its beleafed and flowering branches sprawling above. He describes the lone tree as “standing erect, keeping its dignity, yet rootless.”

The peripatetic artist was born in Haiti in 1954, immigrated as a child with his family to Puerto Rico, studied in Montreal and Paris before moving to Miami a dozen years ago. Here, he says, he found his anchor: “I’m very happy in Miami. I won’t move!”

Duval Carrié also cites the trees as a metaphor for the ecological problems in his native Haiti, which has been severely deforested, as well as symbols of family and history. He has made the images even more concrete by incorporating actual tree branches in his mixed media sculpture, Grand Bois.

Many of the works in his current gallery show, The Three Dimensional God and Goddesses Met Their Cousins The Trees, are back-lighted stencils. Duval Carrié says this Haitinizes stained-glass windows by incorporating the technique used in the oil drum metal cutouts.

Gallerist Bernice Steinbaum recalls asking the artist which vodou god he would like to be. “He chose the god of light,” she says, “and in this show he plays with light.”

Both in his gallery show and in an installation at Davie’s new Young at Art Museum building, Duval Carrié has eschewed the tropical lighting in favor of a dark stillness that conjures up a spirit realm that is simultaneously relaxing and ominous. The subdued lighting and almost cave-like layout of his Spirit of Haiti at YAA contrasts dramatically with the other brightly lit

A Knight Foundation Challenge grant to YAA provides free admission for 2,500 low-income children to experience The Spirit of Haiti exhibition and family workshops created and conducted by Duval Carrié.

“The museum came to me several years ago,” he says, “and asked me to create an environment for kids to learn in. At the time, I was interested in stenciling and mold making.”

Both found their way into his exhibition, which is an assemblage of stenciled cubes, oil drum sculpture, sequined vodou flags and even an altar that form what YAA calls “a story-filled realm of folklore and oral tradition.”

Visitors to Duval Carrié’s installation can trace designs from stencils of the artist’s work and build metal sculptures from magnetized squares and circles. This summer the artist will conduct a workshop teaching children how to make molds and resin casts

“It’s important for us to have an artist like Edouard Duval Carrié representing the cultural life of our community,” says Sandra Trinidad, YAA’s marketing manager. In fact, the artist represents Haitian and Caribbean art to the Miami community as much as he represents Miami to them.

Duval Carrié is Miami’s best-known Haitian artist, but he is also a relentless promoter of other artists from his native country and elsewhere in the Caribbean.

Immediately after the opening of the Young at Arts Museum, Duval Carrié was off to Martinque to oversee the installation of Global Caribbean, the first of a series of exhibitions he organized for the Little Haiti Cultural Center in 2010. Martinque is the last stop of a tour that took it to France and Puerto Rico. The third iteration of Global Caribbean will open at LHCC next year.

“Miami is placing itself very strongly in the art market, but Caribbean artists are very seldom seen in Miami,” says Duval Carrié, explaining why he embarked on the series of Global Caribbean exhibitions. “I wish Haitian artists were better in tune with the market here and there were more exchanges between Haiti and Miami.”

From his studio right across the street, Duval Carrié has been a driving force in the creation and operations of the Little Haiti Cultural Center.

“Edouard is a dynamo in our community as an organizer/curator and, of course, as a highly regarded artist,’’ says Miami mosaic artist George Fishman . Duval Carrie is curating an exhibition in conjunction with the symposium at the Little Haiti Cultural Center that was held May 18 and 19 to looked inter-university and professional collaborations aimed at promoting and advancing Haitian culture and society.

Next month, Duval Carrié will also be participating in a collaborative exhibition, Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, organized by three New York City museums — El Museo del Barrio, the Queens Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. It features more than 400 works spanning two centuries

On the horizon for Duval Carrié is an exhibition of Haitian photography that he will curate next year for the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art. Works by 10 contemporary Haitian photographers and ten from outside the country will be on display, offering contrasting visions of how Haitians and foreigners see the country.

 


© 2012 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miamiherald.com

 

A Pioneer of Walk-Through Art: Helio Oiticica in @wsj

What might it feel like to walk around in a painting or drink a color?

In the late 1950s, such questions bedeviled the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, resulting in some of the first environmental installations—and now an exhibition at New York's Galerie Lelong.

Oiticica, who lived from 1937 to 1980, was the son of a Rio de Janeiro photographer and entomologist. Wide-eyed and well-spoken, the artist began in the 1950s to cut large, flat boards into shapes that he dangled from the ceiling in increasingly elaborate arrangements. A few years later, he was constructing entire rooms using the same ordinary materials used to build Brazil's slums, or favelas. The hallways of his structures were often partitioned by colorful fabric panels, because he wanted people to experience art by walking through it.

Installation art is ubiquitous now, but these ideas—and his sociopolitical nod to the favelas—made Oiticica a maverick. At the time, high art was still largely created to view, not pass through, according to Mary Sabbatino, the gallery's vice president who organized the show, "Hélio Oiticica: Penetrables," on view through June 16.

[ICONS helio]Claudio Oiticica/Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro/Galerie Lelong, NY

The artist in the mid-1960s

Oiticica, Ms. Sabbatino says, is "still a discovery to a lot of Americans." London's Tate Modern and Houston's Museum of Fine Arts did a major survey of his work several years ago.

A highlight of the Lelong show is "Penetrável Filtro" ("Filter Penetrable," 1972), a room-filling maze whose path is occasionally blocked by yellow and blue plastic strips that viewers must brush past, as if in a miniature car wash. As they progress, they begin to hear various recordings of writers like Gertrude Stein reading one of her own novels, "The Making of Americans," its repetitive rhythm echoing their own circuitous walk. When viewers reach the final chamber, they see a table with plastic cups and a dispenser of orange juice, available to drink—orange being one of Oiticica's beloved sunset hues. (The gallery says that visitors have already gone through 60 bottles.)

For his younger brother Cesar Oiticica, such graceful codas remain bittersweet. After the artist died of a stroke at age 42, Cesar and a younger brother, Claudio, formed the Projeto Hélio Oiticica to foster interest in Hélio's art. Two years ago, a fire caused by a faulty air conditioner destroyed some works. But many were salvaged and restored, and the works on view come from the Projeto's collection. "Even after 60 years, they feel unique," Cesar Oiticica said.

[ICONS helio]

 

 

 

Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro/Galerie Lelong, NY
—Kelly Crow

A version of this article appeared May 19, 2012, on page C14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Pioneer of Walk-Through Art.

Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit

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Museum Events: "Don't Miss: May 19-25"

May 18, 2012, 5:13 p.m. ET
[DONT MISS]Barnes Foundation

Dr. Albert C. Barnes's treasure trove of art

Barnes Raising

Philadelphia; opens to public Saturday

Dr. Albert C. Barnes's treasure trove includes 181 Renoirs, 46 Picassos and 59 Matisses (the doctor himself commissioned "The Dance"). These works and more have relocated from the Barnes Foundation campus in the Philadelphia suburb of Merion to a new 93,000-square-foot home downtown, not far from the city's main art museum.

DONT MISS
Harvard Art Museums

'Scent' (1976) Jasper Johns

A Technique Triptych

Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Cambridge, Mass., Tuesday-Aug. 18

The 20-plus work show "Jasper Johns/In Press" explores the artist as printmaker, featuring many of his "crosshatch" works like "Scent" (1976). Lithograph (left portion), linocut (center portion) and woodcut techniques (right portion) are used in the work.

DONT MISS
Morgan Library/Graham S. Haber

The map of the world showing Magellan's Route

Venice Before Google Maps

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, through Sept. 23

The map of the world showing Magellan's Route from "Portolan Atlas" by Battista Agnese will be among the 74 works in "Renaissance Venice: Drawings from the Morgan." The exhibition includes portraiture, landscape and religious imagery like Titian's drawing "Landscape with St. Theodore Overcoming the Dragon."

A version of this article appeared May 19, 2012, on page C14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Don't Miss: May 19-25.

Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit

www.djreprints.com

20 Odd Questions - Gallerist Paul Kasmin in @wsj via Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr,

[KASMIN Q&A]Cari Vuong

ART AND THE MAN | Paul Kasmin

TURNING GOOD TASTE INTO A BUSINESS is a tricky thing. London-born, New York-based contemporary art dealer Paul Kasmin stands out—not just as one of Manhattan’s snappiest dressers, but as an example of the special success that can come from following one’s eye. Since opening his Chelsea gallery in 1989, Mr. Kasmin has consistently championed the work of artists slightly outside the familiar, people not yet well known enough to be thought of as an “investment,” often creating a market where there was none before. The careers of Walton Ford, James Nares and Ivan Navarro have benefited from Mr. Kasmin’s irreverent connoisseurship and willingness to take a chance on the art he loves.

This month at Paul Kasmin Gallery is a celebration of the work of Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, the husband-and-wife sculpture and decorative arts team whose fame has been quietly growing since the ’70s. Mr. Kasmin was the first to show the Lalannes’ work in the United States. To accompany the exhibition (which ends June 16), and as a tribute to François-Xavier, who died in 2008, Mr. Kasmin has produced a book of his own photographs of the Lalannes’ home and studio. Eight years of collaboration and friendship are chronicled, and the result is a tender love letter to an eccentric and beguiling body of work.

KASMIN Q&A
Paul Kasmin Gallery

Ai Weiwei exhibit at Paul Kasmin Gallery

Mr. Kasmin, 52, lives with his two daughters in a townhouse apartment near Central Park. His home is filled with paintings and objects from any and all periods—”ancient to medieval to contemporary,” he explained—but most of the furniture is by the zany and joyful Mattia Bonetti, whom Mr. Kasmin represents. Downtown, business is booming. Last year, he opened a second gallery space on 27th Street, in the building that formerly housed the nightclub Bungalow 8.

My dream artist to represent—living or dead—is Walton Ford. Dreams can come true, I guess.

My advice to novice collectors is to just buy what interests you. Fear of being wrong is the single greatest obstacle to educating yourself and building a good collection.

The biggest influences on my personal style are my father—an art dealer who definitely knew how to dress—and my old friend Jasper Conran. Growing up in England, I didn’t like wearing a uniform at school, but it did make me appreciate the beauty of good clothes.

My 21st birthday was at One Fifth, a restaurant that figured largely on the scene in the New York of the 1980s. I did go out a lot then, to Limelight, to Area—but I wasn’t out of control.

[KASMIN Q&A]Paul Kasmin Gallery

‘Babouin’ fireplace by François-Xavier Lalanne

In my childhood, the most exciting thing was my first visit to New York with my dad, in 1970. Even though I was only around 10, he took me with him to see all the artists and hip people he was visiting. We went to the Factory. Coming from England, nothing prepared me for how much I would be blown away by New York. And here I am.

If I could own any work by the Lalannes it would be two—the “Babouin” fireplace by François-Xavier, and the “Choupatte” by Claude. And if I could build a museum for the Lalannes’ work, Markus Dochantschi of Studio MDA is the architect I would choose.

A collector whose taste I admire is Tom Ford. Nobody tells him what to think. He has very sophisticated and individual taste. Everybody would say that about him as a fashion designer, but I mean as an art collector. He and I commissioned Claude [Lalanne] to make a crocodile desk.

An art collection I covet is the Beyeler Foundation.

It’s a coincidence that two of my favorite artists, Walton Ford and the Lalannes, are known for animals. I love animals, but I was drawn to these artists for different reasons.

The best designed hotel is the Hotel Americano right here in Chelsea.

KASMIN Q&A

Everett Collection

Poster for ’ Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday’

Between Café de Flore and Deux Magots, it’s definitely the Flore for me.

My favorite movie is “Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday,” by Jacques Tati—for the music, the sounds, the inventiveness, the brilliant humor, the depiction of France as it was in that period.

My glasses are from Cutler and Gross.KASMIN Q&A

 

Marvis toothpaste

T he toothpaste I use is called Marvis, which comes from Florence in a very interesting looking rococo-style tube.

I have my own take on the English thing where you’re supposed to be in love with a country house, your garden and all that—I rent what is basically a shed in Millbrook. It’s a little like a painter’s studio, with two little bedrooms for my daughters and a lot of etchings by Hogarth, for rogue effect.

I just got back from Burma, which was a marvelous trip because there are fewer and fewer places you can go now that are really uncorrupted by modern life. We spent a few days walking the hills, and the country, I found, was everything I wanted it to be.

—Edited from an interview by David Netto

 

A version of this article appeared May 19, 2012 in WSJ print edition.