by brett sokol

Mañana (2009), from Ruscha’s On the Road exhibition

“The only people for me are the mad ones,” Jack Kerouac famously declared in his loosely autobiographical novel, On the Road, beckoning readers to take to the open road and seek out “the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn….” Artist Ed Ruscha is just one of the many devoted fans who took Kerouac’s proviso to heart. But when he was first passed a copy of On the Road shortly after its 1957 publication, its author’s fevered travels came as less of an epiphany than an affirmation: “I read that and I felt like, Wow! This is very much what I’m already doing!” Ruscha recalls with a chuckle.

Indeed, in 1954, at the tender age of 16, Ruscha had already set off hitchhiking from his Oklahoma City hometown without much of a plan beyond spending the summer in South Florida. “It took 26 rides to get to Miami, and it took 26 rides to get back,” he says matter-of-factly. In between, he landed jobs as a busboy at restaurants a few blocks from the ocean and seemingly a galaxy away from Oklahoma. The work was hardly glamorous, but Ruscha says that horizon-expanding summer—from exploring the Everglades to the anything-but-buttoned-down surfside scene—made it clear that his future was neither in the Midwest nor in his father’s insurance trade.

Two years later, immediately after graduating high school, Ruscha lit out for Los Angeles and enrolled in the first art school that would accept him, Chouinard Art Institute. The rest, as the saying goes, is (art) history. Present-day critics consider him the progenitor of “California Cool,” as well as the West Coast’s answer to Andy Warhol. The art market heartily agrees: Sales of his paintings have fetched more than $21 million at auction in the last 12 months alone. (And that’s not even counting the private sales brokered by his dealers at the heavyweight Gagosian Gallery.)

On that note, call his new show at North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art an aesthetic homecoming: Ruscha’s On the Road exhibition marries imposing landscapes with choice snippets of prose from Kerouac’s signature novel. “That book has always been important to me,” he explains. “I just needed an excuse to go back to it. I was doing paintings of mountaintops, and I began to see them as fractions of scenery—as though you would spot them driving down the road. I already had some favorite statements that are verbatim from the book, things I had marked that I wanted to spotlight. It all fell into line.”

The Estate of Francis Bacon/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, DACS, London

 

ARTIST Francis Bacon

TITLE 'Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror'

AUCTION HOUSE Sotheby's

ESTIMATE $30 million to $40 million

THE market hasn’t seen a record-breaking price for Bacon since the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich bought his 1976 “Triptych” for $86.3 million at Sotheby’s in May 2008. Since then prices have not come anywhere near that sum, but neither have the offerings. Now, on May 9, Sotheby’s is selling a 1976 canvas depicting a male figure who is thought to be the artist’s lover, George Dyer, who committed suicide in 1971.

The painting was the star of a 1977 exhibition of Bacon’s work at the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris. It was the cover image of the show’s catalog and hung alongside the record-breaking “Triptych.” “It was such a popular show they had to close off the street,” said Mr. Meyer, who added that this painting is creating considerable buzz. One reason is that it has not been on the market for 35 years. Another is the painting itself, with the hypnotic reflections of the man in the mirror and on the floor.

Mr. Forstmann bought the painting in 2001 from the Acquavella Galleries in New York.

Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

At the Nasher museum in Dallas, Rodin’s “Age of Bronze” sits in dappled light as glare streams through a patterned screen.

May 1, 2012

By ROBIN POGREBIN

DALLAS — Two things were supposed to happen when the Nasher Sculpture Center opened here in 2003. Famous works like Rodin’s “Age of Bronze” and Matisse’s “Madeleine I” were to be bathed in copious sunlight streaming through a glass roof. And new vigor was to come to the surrounding neighborhood.

The results exceeded expectations. And Dallas has a mess on its hands.

The center, designed by Renzo Piano and Peter Walker, was considered so appealing that a 42-story condominium called Museum Tower sprouted across the street. But the glass skin of the condo tower, still under construction, now reflects so much light that it is threatening artworks in the galleries, burning the plants in the center’s garden and blinding visitors with its glare.

No one quite knows what to do. The condo developer and museum officials are at loggerheads. Fingers are being pointed. Mr. Piano is furious. The developer’s architect is aggrieved. The mayor is involved. A former official in the George W. Bush administration has been asked to mediate.

Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

Glare from a condo tower is a problem for a nearby museum.

The situation has been characterized by some here as a David-and-Goliath battle between a beloved nonprofit and commercial interests. But the dispute has also raised the broader question of what can happen when, as is currently the rage, cultural institutions are cast as engines of economic development.

The Nasher was seen as an important spur to the renaissance of downtown Dallas, much the way Lincoln Center was viewed as something of a cure for urban blight on the West Side of Manhattan. But the forces unleashed in these situations can prompt a distinctly uneasy relationship between cultural organizations and the neighborhood changes they attract.

“These things start to bump into each other,” said the mayor of Dallas, Mike Rawlings. “How we as a civic society power through this is an important moment for us. You’ve got a high-growth engine that is trying to do right by Giacometti.”

Dallas’s interest in raising its cultural profile is palpable here: the city has been building its arts district over the last 20 years; Saturday Cowboys Stadium hosted a simulcast of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” by the Dallas Opera. The Nasher problem has the whole city concerned and watching.

“Typically, neighborhood disputes are not this dramatic — an offending sign or a barking dog,” said Veletta Forsythe Lill, the executive director of the Dallas Arts District. “This is a cultural, civic and commercial tragedy. The Nasher is a kind of a masterpiece, and the building and the garden were perfectly designed.”

Mr. Piano said he designed the Nasher with natural light in mind. The museum has an arched glass roof with a perforated aluminum screen in an egg-crate pattern that directs the sun into the galleries, which were laid out in anticipation of the sun’s daily arc from southeast to southwest.

Now, sun, magnified by reflection, shines into the galleries from the north and raises the temperature in the sculpture garden — designed by Mr. Walker — to levels that jeopardize the specially planted live oak trees and grass.

“By doing this, they destroy completely the logic of the building,” Mr. Piano said in an interview.

For the museumgoer, the sculptures in the galleries and the garden can be obscured or distorted by distracting light patterns or glare. The museum was forced to install light-blocking panels inside the roof for a recent exhibition of works by Elliott Hundley because the reflections from the tower exceeded the acceptable light levels for the art.

Scott Johnson, the Los Angeles architect who designed Museum Tower, said he was willing to consider remedies but that the Nasher also had to be open-minded. “My responsibility is to fully vet solutions vis-à-vis Museum Tower — that’s my building,” he said. “But I can’t say sitting here now that the Nasher may not need to do something on their end.”

Museum Tower’s owners said in a statement, “All parties desire resolution to these issues as quickly as possible.”

Glare problems, of course, can cut both ways. In Los Angeles a few years ago, the architect Frank Gehry had to sandblast portions of his stainless-steel-clad Disney Concert Hall because the reflected sunlight was creating problems for residents in a nearby apartment building.

Mr. Piano, for his part, said it would be “impossible” for the museum building to make adjustments to offset the glare.

“What do you do — put a roof on the garden? You destroy everything,” he said. “They must solve the problem because they created the problem.”

Architecture experts say the owners of Museum Tower could cover its glass facade with a solar shading system that cuts the glare, at potentially considerable expense.

A regulation that set a strict limit on the reflectivity of buildings on the site expired in 2008 and was revised with more lenient restrictions, though the tower’s opponents say the building still exceeds them. Mr. Johnson said that he learned of such rules only recently through the local news media and that he hoped the conflict “ignites a larger conversation about urban communities and neighbors.”

Not everyone here, of course, views the dispute as a cataclysm. Writing in The Dallas Observer last month, the columnist Jim Schutze made light of it.

“Nothing takes our minds off this misery we call middle-class survival in America like a rich kids art fight,” he wrote. “It’s like our own little hometown Brangelina.”

Since the building that overlooks the sculpture center and its garden is using the Nasher as a selling point — prices stretch into the millions — those involved say its owners should want to keep the Nasher healthy.

“By doing this, they kill what they use to sell it,” Mr. Piano said.

The Dallas Arts District — which now includes the AT&T , Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center and the Dallas Museum of Art — always also hoped to attract commercial projects.

“I want Museum Tower to be very successful — I want people living in that building and loving to live in that building,” said Deedie Rose, a Dallas arts philanthropist who was active in establishing the arts district. “But the Nasher has to be protected.”

The sculpture center was created by Raymond D. Nasher, a real estate developer and banker who, along with his wife, Patsy, amassed one of the world’s leading collections of Modern and contemporary sculpture. Although several cities courted the collection, Mr. Nasher, who died in 2007, decided to build and personally finance the $70 million center in Dallas, where he made his fortune.

“He gave a tremendous gift to the city,” Mayor Rawlings said, “a gift we’ve got to be good stewards of.”

Complicating matters is that the $200 million Museum Tower is owned by the Dallas Police & Fire Pension System, on whose board sit four members of the City Council.

Mayor Rawlings stepped in after the two sides failed to come to terms on their own. He appointed a “facilitator,” Tom Luce, a prominent local lawyer who served under President George W. Bush as an assistant secretary of education. The first meeting with Mr. Luce is this month.

Construction of the tower continues. And the Nasher had to remove Picasso’s “Nude Man and Woman,” an oil on canvas, to get it out of dangerous direct sunlight. (The artist James Turrell also insisted that the Nasher shut down his installation “Tending, (Blue)” because its roof aperture was meant to reveal open sky, not a skyscraper.)

Vel Hawes, a Dallas architect who served as Mr. Nasher’s representative for the design and construction of the museum, said the founder would not be happy. “I assure you,” Mr. Hawes said, “he’s not resting easy in his grave right now.”

By LEE ROSENBAUMUniversity of Iowa Museum of Art, Gift of Peggy Guggenheim

"Mural" (1943) by Jackson Pollock

Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock
Hood Museum of Art
Through Jun 17
Then travels to the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.

Hanover, N.H.

The late Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art, was a tough act to follow. Probably because no one can top his definitive 1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective, we have no major show in the U.S. this year to commemorate the centenary of that towering Abstract Expressionist's birth.

But there are aspects of Pollock's work from the years preceding the famous "drip" paintings that remain underexplored. Dartmouth College's Hood Museum of Art, under its new director, Michael Taylor (former curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art), has seized the moment by hastily assembling an absorbing dossier exhibition focusing on a crucial period in Pollock's trajectory from representational landscapes, heavily influenced by his teacher Thomas Hart Benton, to his signature abstract masterpieces that, according to popular and Hollywood legend, seemed to spring out of nowhere.

The Hood's "Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock," organized by Sarah Powers of the Hood with Pollock expert Helen Harrison, reveals that many of the pictorial strategies employed by Pollock in his celebrated monumental canvases of the late 1940s to early 1950s can be traced to his intensely charged easel-size paintings from the brief period, 1938-41, when this quintessentially American artist was haunted by Orozco's macabre visions of skeletons and ritual sacrifice. Pollock had seen the Mexican's murals in 1930 at Pomona College in California and, six years later, at Dartmouth. While there are plenty of pyrotechnics in the works of both artists, "Men of Fire" might have been more aptly (if less appealingly) titled "Men of Skulls and Bones."

Pollock owed his enthusiasm for the visceral impact of monumentality to Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and, above all, Orozco. In his first oversize horizontal canvas, a 20-foot-wide 1943 composition, "Mural," commissioned by his patron Peggy Guggenheim (on view at the Des Moines Art Center through July 15), Pollock was influenced not only by Orozco's larger-than-life scale but also by the swirling energy of his brushstrokes and dramatic use of black to define curving contours. Orozco's archetypal images of snakes, skulls and flames, which must have resonated with the American's Jungian sensibility, are abundantly present in Pollock's works at the Hood.

Gallery: 'Men of Fire'

View Slideshow

2012 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. .

'Untitled (Bald Woman and Skeleton)' by Jackson Pollock

To appreciate "Men of Fire," you need to start not in Dartmouth's art museum but in its Baker Library. That's where the 24-year-old Pollock made pilgrimage in 1936 to see Orozco's 24-panel mural "The Epic of American Civilization" (1932-34), a sweeping history of the Mexican people. Its darkly symbolic and ritualistic content made a strong impression on the younger artist. Dartmouth also owns Orozco's studies for the mural, included in the Hood's show.

Nowhere is the connection between Dartmouth's mural and Pollock's work clearer than in his "Untitled (Bald Woman with Skeleton)" (c. 1938-41), acquired by the Hood six years ago. With a lumpish, crouched female at its center, it quotes the image of a skeletal ribcage and extended limb from Orozco's fiercely satiric panel "Gods of the Modern World." That work had stirred an uproar at Dartmouth over its depiction of a ghoulish cadre of skeletal professors in caps and gowns, overseeing a female skeleton as she gives birth to a skeletal baby with a mortarboard on its head (representing "stillborn knowledge").

Like many of the Pollocks in the show, "Bald Woman" is densely composed and difficult to read. Only close scrutiny can unpack the contorted anatomy of the drooping woman and the many images derived from Orozco's mural—winding serpents, orange flames and the jumble of tiny, sickly green skulls surrounding the central figure. Pollock had transmuted Orozco's politically charged imagery into psychological totems. The morbid scene is redolent with death and despair.

Pollock's use of semiabstraction and his partial concealment of representational images point ahead to the layered complexities of the drip paintings, where representation seems to disappear. The Museum of Modern Art's "Flame" (c. 1934-38), for example, is a precursor to all-over abstraction, with its jagged orange, black and white slashes that represent a raging fire. Without help from the label text, you might miss the ribcage—parallel light and dark lines. Lying near the bottom of the canvas, amid the conflagration, the bones suggest that this is a sacrificial pyre.

Pollock's use of disguised and obscured representation, although later difficult to detect, persisted into his abstract masterpieces of the late '40s and early '50s. As noted in the catalog for MoMA's show, close analysis of Pollock's signature "drip" paintings (informed by Hans Namuth's famous images of Pollock at work) reveals their structural underpinnings of veiled and hidden figures.

The link between the proto-Pollocks seen at Dartmouth and the mature abstract masterpieces is the groundbreaking, ex-Peggy Guggenheim "Mural" of 1943. Designed for her apartment's entrance hall, that dazzling achievement, said to have been largely executed in one day, is not only the first but also the biggest of the mural-size Pollocks.

A frenzy of black verticals and whorls, enlivened with touches of pink, yellow and turquoise, "Mural," under sustained scrutiny, comes into focus as a cross-canvas parade of upright, abstracted figures, with outlines strongly reminiscent of the black-defined curves of the marching Aztecs' muscled flesh in the "Migration" panel that begins Dartmouth's Orozco mural. Tightly focused on the brief period when Pollock was most strongly influenced by Orozco, the show doesn't include (or illustrate) works like "Mural" that marked the next step toward Pollocks signature style. But the black swirls that animate Orozco's and Pollock's murals also figure prominently in a painting displayed at the entrance to the Hood's show, the Tate Gallery's powerful "Naked Man with Knife" (c. 1938-1940), a chaotic jumble of three fiercely grappling nudes.

Comparing the little-known Pollocks at the Hood with the paintings that later became touchstones of international veneration reveals that we might not have had the latter without the foundation laid by the former. Contradicting the myth of the sudden epiphany, Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, once noted that there were "no sharp breaks" from the works of the pre-"drip" period to the mature masterpieces, "but rather a continuing development of the same themes and obsessions."

You can see the truth of that in Hanover.

Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

ARTIST Picasso

TITLE 'Femme Assise Dans un Fauteuil'

AUCTION HOUSE Sotheby's

ESTIMATE $20 million to $30 million

Estate property is especially desirable in part because it has generally been off the market for years and comes with reasonable estimates. This canvas, from 1941, is one of 17 works being sold on Wednesday from the estate of Theodore J. Forstmann, the New York financier who died in November. Painted in the early years of World War II, the distorted figure of Dora Maar, Picasso’s muse and lover, posed in a chair is one of scores of seated women whom he depicted. “The anguish of the war and his relationship with Dora, which was deteriorating, is reflected in these paintings,” said John Richardson, the Picasso biographer. “He painted Dora in such an angular way, she almost looks like a pair of scissors.”

The painting was made the same year as Picasso’s “Dora Maar With Cat,” a far more dramatic canvas with a black cat perched on Maar’s shoulder that sold for $95.2 million at Sotheby’s in 2006.

Mr. Forstmann bought the painting in 2001 from the Acquavella Galleries in New York.

Christo Crocker

Tour participants displaying their tan lines at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, in Sydney, as they view Robert Owens’s “Sunrise #3.”

By MARK WHITTAKER

Published: May 1, 2012

SYDNEY, Australia — The people gathering for a tour of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia on Friday evening smiled awkwardly in the way of strangers who had to undress in front of one another. Which is what they were about to do.

Christo Crocker

Stuart Ringholt

The artist leading the tour, Stuart Ringholt, wearing scruffy black clothes and a misshapen porkpie hat, stepped forward.

“Who’s from the naturist community?” he asked.

A bunch of older, rounder men put up their hands.

“Who’s nervous?”

A dozen or so others, including this reporter, barely managed to raise their hands to half-mast. The Museum of Contemporary Art has enjoyed a surge in attendance since it reopened on March 29 after being closed for an 18-month, $56 million refurbishment, but these particular visitors would have the place all to themselves. They were here, after hours, for a tour of museum works that was itself billed as an artwork and had this as its title: “Preceded by a tour of the show by artist Stuart Ringholt, 6-8pm (the artist will be naked. Those who wish to join the tour must also be naked. Adults only).”

Mr. Ringholt, 40, is a Conceptual and performance artist who was recently named one of Australia’s 10 “artists who matter” in the Australian newspaper The Age. He has led tours of this kind in three other Australian cities in the last year, and was able to offer some insight about the experience to come.

“It’s very beautiful,” he told his audience. “We are sexualized with our clothes on — with them off, we are not.”

Not everyone, he explained, was going to be naked. “A couple of M.C.A. staff members will come with us for security reasons, but they will be clothed,” he said. But many employees, he added, “if they have to do the tour two days in a row, often take off their clothes on the second day because they feel very uncomfortable being clothed around so much flesh.” He apologized that security cameras would be recording the group, joking that “the footage will be kept for three months, for the enjoyment of the security staff.”

Mr. Ringholt then led the 32 men and 16 women into a brightly lighted conference room, where the clothes just seemed to fall away.

“Everybody seemed to concentrate very much on what they were doing,” Lance Barton, a 57-year-old Sydney office worker making his debut as a nudist, recalled later. (“I have fantasized about it, but never done it,” he added. “Only a bit of midnight streaking by myself in the parklands around where I live.”)

The first stop on the tour was a 2007 work by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson, “Earth-Moon-Earth”: a player piano doing a version of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, complete with glitches picked up in the course of converting the music to Morse code, bouncing the signals off the Moon, then reconverting them to musical notes. Against this ghostly backdrop, Mr. Ringholt noted that modern museums strip back architecture, floor coverings, windows and adornments for the sake of foregrounding art, and that in the same way contemporary artists have since the 1980s taken to wearing black.

“There’s this process of reduction going on,” he said. “I asked the question of why the contemporary art community stopped at wearing black. Why didn’t they reduce further and strip back the clothing from the visitor?”

The next stop was an untitled Stephen Birch work from 2005, an installation in which Spider-Man faces off with a primitive, phallic figure. Mr. Ringholt spoke about fear, and most of the visitors agreed that their anxiety had subsided. He said that in his 20s, he was profoundly affected by experiences of extreme embarrassment, a subject now at the center of much of his work. One of these involved toilet paper hanging out of his pants as he walked on the field at an Australian football game with hundreds of people looking on.

“I was wrecked — I went home and explained it to my girlfriend, and she was killing herself laughing,” he said. “I was distraught for a whole week.”

Being a dabbler in performance, Mr. Ringholt turned shame into art. He went to Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and stood in front of a marble fountain for 20 minutes with toilet paper trailing from his trousers. He walked around for a day in Basel, Switzerland, wearing a prosthetic nose with a “gob” of fake mucus hanging from it.

“I tried to understand how fear manifests in the body and how it debilitates you,” he said. Knowing these acts of abjection were performances didn’t make them easier, he added: “It was just as bad. You get a panic attack. You get cold sweats. I realized it was the same fear I got when I rang up a woman to ask her on a date.”

Eventually, he said, he learned to conquer his fear by understanding it. He called the woman and got the date, and he took his fear workshops on the road. That led to the nude museum tours.

This tour finished with a glass of sparkling wine on an open terrace overlooking the Sydney Opera House. Asked if he had any plans to take his nude museum tours overseas, to the Metropolitan in New York, perhaps, Mr. Ringholt became animated.

“Imagine walking in there with all that armor” in that museum, he said. He loves the symbolism of masks, and a whole suit of medieval armor offered wonderful new metaphors.

As for the visitors, they seemed to be divided on the question of whether art was enhanced by viewing it naked.

“Not really,” Mr. Barton said.

But another participant, Tracey, who wouldn’t give her last name because she works for “a Christian organization,” said that “there was more focus on the art.”

“You’d think you’d turn up with all these other people without clothes and you’d be checking them out,” she said, “but I wasn’t looking at anyone.”

Afterward, as the visitors walked back to the changing room, glowing from the wine, a crowd on the street outside looked up at the parade of nakedness coming down the glassed-in stairs. But nobody in the group seemed to mind.

Christie's

 

ARTIST Cézanne

TITLE 'A Card Player'

AUCTION HOUSE Christie's

ESTIMATE $15 million to $20 million

For nearly six decades this watercolor, depicting Paulin Paulet, a gardener on Cézanne’s family estate near Aix-en-Provence, France, was familiar to scholars only as a black-and-white photograph. No one knew if the actual work, a study for Cézanne’s celebrated Card Players paintings, still existed and if it did, who owned it.

But it recently resurfaced, and the Dallas collector who had it in his home is selling it on Tuesday. Cézanne’s images of workers on his farm — pipe-smoking men sitting around a table, their expressions dour, absorbed in a game of cards — are among his most recognizable work. Executed from 1890 to 1896, they were the artist’s take on genre paintings made famous by 17th-century Dutch masters. Although not as instantly recognizable as “The Scream,” the watercolor is considered an art historical landmark, but one that will most likely appeal to the connoisseur collector rather than a speculator or a trophy hunter.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: April 26, 2012

ODDS are 3-to-1 that when Edvard Munch’s “Scream” comes up for sale at Sotheby’s on Wednesday night, it will fetch $150 million to $200 million. And there’s a 3-to-2 chance that pastel will become the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, breaking the current record of $106.5 million set two years ago at Christie’s for Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust.” As for who will buy “The Scream,” bets are 5-to-2 that it will be a Russian, 3-to-1 an Asian or European and 4-to-1 an American. That’s the thinking, anyway, from Ladbrokes, the British bookmaking chain, which has been analyzing the fate of what Sotheby’s is billing as the most recognizable image in art history after the “Mona Lisa.”

Art isn’t generally Ladbrokes’s métier, but laying odds on just how much this work will get has even captured the attention of gamblers used to putting their money on horse races or boxing. Jessica Bridge, a spokeswoman for the company, said that the bookmakers “apply the same math and algorithms we do for football or hockey.”

While it is certain to be the big draw, “The Scream” is not the only highly recognizable work up for sale at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury over the next two weeks. Other highlights include a classic red abstract Rothko canvas; a Warhol image of Elvis Presley; a Picasso portrait of Dora Maar, the artist who was his lover and muse; and a watercolor of one of Cézanne’s famed Card Players.

What’s bringing these paintings, drawings and sculptures to auction now? One reason is sheer serendipity, as several estates from seasoned collectors have come up for grabs this spring. The second is more opportunistic. Owners are hoping to cash in on the penchant of new, extraordinarily wealthy collectors from Russia, Asia and the Middle East for paying record prices for whatever strikes their fancy. “There are two markets, the regular market for the average collector and the super-market for global icons” that is fueled by the new rich, said Tobias Meyer, who runs Sotheby’s contemporary art department worldwide. “This last group is smart and gravitates toward the very top.”

Brett Gorvy, Mr. Meyer’s counterpart at Christie’s, says these buyers’ “tastes are conservative but they want quality, technical virtuosity, beauty and color.”

Estimates are high for some of the best works this season, although Sotheby’s figure of $80 million for “The Scream” is conservative by Ladbrokes’s standards. After that are several paintings estimated to fall in the $30 million to $50 million range: a Roy Lichtenstein comic book image and a 1976 painting by Francis Bacon, as well as the red Rothko and the Warhol “Elvis.”

Back on the block are also several works, including “Circles and Angles,” a stainless-steel sculpture by David Smith that failed to sell at Christie’s when the market collapsed during the financial crisis of 2008. Now they have considerably lower estimates. If there are any striking differences between the offerings this month, it is the selection of postwar and contemporary art at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Christie’s won a group of works collected by David Pincus, a clothing manufacturer from Philadelphia who died in December, and his wife, Geraldine. Their collection includes a large number of Abstract Expressionist paintings. Sotheby’s sale, on the other hand, features more classic Pop art.

Some art historians, who declined to be named for fear of offending Sotheby’s, laughed at the astronomical price predictions for “The Scream,” even the seemingly lowball house estimate, calling the work too ugly to live with, depressing or mere kitsch. Whoever buys it will have a hefty insurance bill, not to mention round-the-clock security, to worry about. But were any new museum to add “The Scream” to its collection, that institution would become an immediate destination.

The image of “The Scream” is so embedded in popular culture that it adorns products like mugs, mouse pads and inflatable dolls, even navel rings. Munch produced four versions of the composition. Three are in Norwegian museums and this one — a pastel on board from 1895 — is the only “Scream” left in private hands. It is being sold by Petter Olsen, a Norwegian businessman whose father, Thomas, was a friend and patron of the artist.

The painting’s fame is almost as much a liability for Sotheby’s as it is an asset. Versions of it have been stolen twice, first in 1994, when two thieves entered the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo and fled with an 1893 “Scream,” and then in 2004, when gunmen stole the 1910 version from the Munch Museum, also in Oslo. (In both cases the paintings were recovered.) This month Londoners had to go through metal detectors before entering the Sotheby’s gallery where it was on view. The crowds were so great that auction house officials have decided not to open the presale viewing in New York to the public, as they usually do. Instead, only Sotheby’s clients will have a chance to see the painting.

Among those who saw “The Scream” in London the betting game has already begun. As for the rest of the art for sale, just where today’s big money goes will be as much of a gamble as the fate of “The Scream.” It is the unknown, after all, that has always been the allure of auctions.

“The mystery is in the moment,” Mr. Meyer said. “Either people are in the mood to bid, or they’re not.”

via nytimes.com

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via Sotheby’s

Artist Andy Warhol
Title 'Double Elvis'
Auction House Sotheby's
Estimate $30 million to $50 million

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The Munch Museum/Munch-Ellingsen Group, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via Sotheby’s

Artist Edvard Munch
Title 'The Scream'
Auction House Sotheby's
Estimate $80 million More Photos »

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Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via Christie's

Artist Mark Rothko
Title 'Orange, Red, Yellow'
Auction House Christie's
Estimate $35 million to $45 millionMore Photos »

By SARA RUFFIN COSTELLO

Jack Shear

Ellsworth Kelly, Beijing Panels, 2003

With the negative press that the U.S. often garners abroad—whether about Wall Street corruption, intractable wars or a divisive presidential campaign—there's one category in which our standing remains untarnished: high art.

Like Jackson Pollock's drip paintings and Christo and Jeanne-Claude's wrapped buildings, contemporary American artists have a reputation for making beautiful, challenging work—and, in doing so, reflecting back who we are as a nation. Since 1986 the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE), a nonprofit now led by collector and philanthropist Jo Carole Lauder, has acted as a kind of global curator for our national psyche, placing preeminent American art in consulates and embassies around the world—and allowing luminaries like Ellsworth Kelly and Louise Bourgeois to serve as our cultural ambassadors abroad.

Photos: Americans Abroad

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Photo by Tony Floyd

Odili Donald Odita, Light and Vision, 2010

 

In the 1960s, the State Department inaugurated a program called Art in Embassies, primarily as a vehicle to provide temporary art for ambassadors' residences during their diplomatic tenure. In 1986, Leonore Annenberg, former chief of protocol for President Reagan and wife of former U.S. Ambassador to the U.K. Walter Annenberg, launched FAPE, along with other diplomats' wives.

By exploiting their formidable connections to the artist and patron community, these women were able to help pay for extensive redecoration projects (including the U.S. Embassy's residence in London), fund much-needed restoration, and both purchase and solicit donations for embassies from preeminent artists to build what would become an enduring, important collection. Although the seeds of the foundation's legacy were growing, the scope was still small.

In 1996 leadership passed to Jo Carole Lauder, the wife of Ronald Lauder; she steered the foundation away from simply supplying loaner art to diplomatic residences and instead toward building a permanent collection at American embassies in more than 140 countries. Lauder quickly transformed what had been an elite, rarefied program into something more accessible and democratic. "Embassies are the visible face of our country," says Yale's fast-talking dean of art, Robert Storr, who moonlights as chairman of the organization's professional fine arts committee and guides its curatorial mission. "The art installed in and around those government buildings allows foreigners to have a glimpse of our cultural production."

“The point is not to just put up feel-good art, but to pay attention to a standard of sophistication. The one thing we don't do is just decorate.”

With certain site-specific installations, the art has been created with its architectural environment in mind. At the Charles Gwathmey–designed United States Mission to the U.N. in New York City (a federal building where dignitaries meet and greet), the State Department brought the foundation into the design process early, so Gwathmey could collaborate with artists as he designed the building.

Portrait by Alex Majoli and Daria Birang

PATRON SAINT | Jo Carole Lauder, right, and Odili Donald Odita in front of ?Light and Vision,? the elevator mural he created for the United States Mission to the United Nations (USUN) building in New York City.

From the Sol LeWitt painting on the dome of the 70-foot-high rotunda to the spectacular Odili Donald Odita elevator mural, the art and architecture flow together seamlessly. Standing under the blue LeWitt dome, visitors are engaged with the art rather than just passively looking at it. "There are a lot of things in the USUN that are not standard issue," Storr explains. "The point is not to just put up feel-good art, but to pay close attention to a standard of sophistication. The one thing we don't do is just decorate."

"So many things in today's world are fleeting," adds Lauder. "Having facilitated the collaboration between our country's best architects and artists, I can see things changing in a way that's wonderfully permanent."

At the American embassy in Beijing, visitors are greeted by two 18-foot-high sculptures by Ellsworth Kelly. Three aluminum panels are mounted on the walls outside—on one side, two red and one yellow, and on the other, red, white and blue.

“Whether people understand it or not, the art's mere presence works subliminally. In that way, the program waves a less obvious cultural flag for America.”

"I am very patriotic; that's why I've done this," says the 88-year-old artist, laughing. "And because of Jo Carole!" Kelly also considered how Chinese citizens would react emotionally as they waited in line for their visas. "When people ask me what my paintings mean," he says, "I say, 'It isn't a question of what it means—ask yourself, how does it make you feel?' "

The foundation's president, Eden Rafshoon, who runs the D.C. office, underscores Kelly's point about the effects of modern art. "Whether people understand it or not, its mere presence works subliminally. If it weren't there, people would feel differently." In that way, the art in our embassies program waves a less obvious cultural flag for America: proof that freedom of expression, opportunity, and unity through diversity are values for which American artists stand.