The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Liindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Pharrell Williams Gets Happy About Art" Inti Landauro

Pharrell Williams —the rapper, record producer, fashion designer and hat-toting singer of pop smash-hit "Happy"—is diving head first into the Paris art scene, curating an exhibition of modern art at one of the city's premier galleries. Photo: Getty Images

Happiness is curating.

Pharrell Williams —the rapper, record producer, fashion designer and hat-toting singer of pop smash-hit "Happy"—is diving head first into the Paris art scene, curating an exhibition of modern art at one of the city's premier galleries.

Called "G I R L," like his most recent album, the show displays art produced by Mr. Williams's friends on the contemporary art scene, such as street artist JR and two artists known for mixing fine arts and Japanese pop culture, Takashi Murakami and a Japanese artist who goes by the name "Mr." Also in the show: Brooklyn-based painter-graphic designer KAWS, Belgian sculptor Johan Creten and French performer-sculptor Prune Nourry. The exhibition opened Tuesday and will close June 25.

                                  

Pharrell Williams at the press conference for the exhibition 'G I R L' at the Galerie Perrotin in Paris. Charlotte Gonzalez for The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Williams's latest creative exploit is a cross-pollination of his different artistic worlds. "It says 'curating by Pharrell Williams,' but it should really be 'the education of Pharrell Williams,' because I'm just learning," said the musician.

French gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin, whom Mr. Williams met in 2007, introduced him to the world of art. The idea for the "G I R L" art show came after Mr. Williams gave the album of the same title to Mr. Perrotin. Both men played with the idea of accompanying the album's launch with an art show, but the huge success of "Happy" brought the record launch ahead by two months.

Mr. Williams isn't a total novice. The musician, age 41, has already created art pieces himself and collaborated with artists on a couple of projects. His first artwork—a series of chairs with human-shape legs, made with the support of Mr. Perrotin—drew positive reviews. He then met several artists, some of whom he ended up working with on projects, as often happens with other musicians.

Photos: Pharrell Williams's Paris Art Show

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Pharrell Williams in front of Takashi Murakami's 'Portrait of Pharrell and Helen - Dance,' 2014. Charlotte Gonzalez for The Wall Street Journal

With Mr. Perrotin and his Galerie Perrotin team, Mr. Williams selected and commissioned art pieces around three themes, building in just 50 days a collection that spreads over two floors of an old townhouse in the chic Marais neighborhood in Paris.

First come art pieces inspired by the singer and made for the show by other artists. There's a tribute to women by a diverse array of artists with varying artistic and political views. Finally, Mr. Williams has picked works by female artists inspired by their relationship to their own bodies.

Being the subject of artworks feels "weird," said Mr. Williams. He worked on some of those pieces, including a collaboration with American artist Rob Pruitt on a couch covered with drawings related to Mr. Williams's career. The pieces of that section include a cast of the singer made of resin and covered with broken glass, by Daniel Arsham. The work required Mr. Williams to stand motionless for several hours, and breathing through a straw for a long period.

Other artworks focus on the music and videos: A painting by Japanese artist Mr. depicts Mr. Williams as a manga-style character dancing amid girls from a host of countries.

While he doesn't see himself as an activist—"I make no apology for my affinity for women"—Mr. Williams says he is a firm supporter of gender equality and doesn't hesitate to speak in favor of causes he considers worthwhile. On Twitter last week, he spoke out for the Iranian youths jailed for posting a video of themselves dancing to "Happy."

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "His Own Private Mythology" @wsj by Karen Wilkin

'Bye and Bye' (2002) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Houston

Those of us who spend a lot of time looking at art can usually anticipate what we are going to see. We've made the effort to get to the exhibition, in the first place, because we know the artist's work or have a particular interest in the period or culture under review, and we've often already read the press materials. We don't often come upon shows without foreknowledge or expectations, and when we do, that serendipity is no guarantee that we'll be excited by our discovery. Sometimes, though, the unexpected is thrilling, as it was when I was recently in Houston. A curator friend at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston whisked me off to preview an exhibition about to open at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, down the street. The artist, Trenton Doyle Hancock, she said, was meeting us there.

The name was dimly familiar to me from Whitney Biennials some years ago, and, I thought, from something at the Studio Museum in Harlem, but I couldn't conjure up an image. "R. Crumb meets Philip Guston," my friend said, helpfully, as she steered me into "Trenton Doyle Hancock: Skin and Bones, 20 Years of Drawing" and introduced me to a sturdy youngish African-American man with chic glasses and a graying beard. Hours later, I was still deeply engrossed in conversation with Mr. Hancock and moving slowly among the many, often obsessively detailed works in the show, beginning to recognize characters, following tangles of sinister vegetation and reading oblique texts. I was not only compelled by the artist's inventive command of mark and tone, but also completely caught up in his uncanny, invented worlds, fascinated by his sometimes raucous, sometimes wrenching, sometimes hilarious private mythology.

Organized in sections devoted to key aspects of Mr. Hancock's evolution, beginning with some astonishingly accomplished boyhood efforts, the installation at CAMH first confronts us with an enormous, mainly black-and-white "drawing," "Bye and Bye" (2002). The dense fabric of delicate lines and patches of hatched tone translate Jackson Pollock's pulsating linear expanses into a completely vernacular idiom. It's rather like the work of the obsessed, supremely gifted 10-year-old boy that Mr. Hancock once was, rather than a 28-year-old art-school graduate, albeit a 10-year-old possessed of a fearless approach to scale and a completely adult degree of sophistication; the more time we spend with the work, the more sophistication dominates. Rowdy images begin to assert themselves: engaging and not so engaging critters of all descriptions, gathered around a sort of skeletal tree with dense, tangled branches, crowned by a confrontational skull. As we explore this enigmatic scene and note the extraordinary variety of marks with which it is made, we discover more wildlife among the dark, hatched tree trunks and start to notice the repeated words "bye and bye" scattered across the image. Suddenly, the whole thing reveals itself as an obscure ritual, changing the way we read the related large works installed nearby. "These are part of the Mound series," Mr. Hancock tells me. "It's been going on for some years."

The Mounds are major players in the artist's invented cosmology, benevolent meat-eating creatures locked in a ferocious, ongoing battle with mean-spirited, nasty Vegans who, among other unpleasant attributes, are unable to see color. Confrontations between the two tribes, often involving elaborate transformations and elaborate machinery, shown at different times in the continuing combat, form another section of the show, while, elsewhere, a Mound-Vegan story, rich in wordplay and written in bold capitals, covers an entire wall. (Hancock is a connoisseur of anagrams and word games as well as visual complexities; just as he likes to conflate the visual languages of comic books and high modernism, he enjoys playing with the verbal, even turning his scores from an online word game into wallpaper.)

Another important figure in Mr. Hancock's mythic world is the stocky, barrel-chested "Torpedo Boy," part alter-ego, part superhero. He appears first in those boyhood sketches, holding a wonderful shaggy bear over his head. Most recently, he is featured in 30 beautiful, unsettling drawings, with cut-out texts below, itemizing racially loaded events in the history of Paris, Texas, where Mr. Hancock was raised. Here, Torpedo Boy meets Guston's Klansmen, with disquieting results, leading to a cliff-hanger finish. The series, Mr. Hancock says, bears witness to the fact that his home town fairgrounds, which he viewed, when young, as a desirable place to visit, were the site of horrendous public lynchings of African-American men in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mr. Hancock's exquisite command of line almost obviates his brutal imagery, heightening the tension and unease that his images provoke.

Other sections of the show focus on Mr. Hancock's permutations of the self-portrait, often in relation to his mythologies, and on his experiments with animating line drawings of his characters' heads. And much, much more. There's a lot to look at, since everything shares the complexity and richness of the first works we encounter. Born in 1974, Mr. Hancock is hardly the only artist of his generation today producing work in which sheer effort and time expended are important components, but unlike many of his colleagues, he never makes that effort seem an end in itself. Mr. Hancock's ravishing drawing skills are always in the service of compelling, mysterious, often disturbing narratives that subtly comment on current issues in wholly visual ways. After this unplanned, fortunate encounter, I'll be watching attentively for his future work.

Ms. Wilkin is a critic and independent curator

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Norman Rockwell’s Art, Once Sniffed At, Is Becoming Prized" @nytimes by JAMES B. STEWART

Photo

“Rockwell’s greatest sin as an artist is simple: His is an art of unending cliché.”

In that Washington Post criticism of a 2010 exhibition of Norman Rockwell paintings at the Smithsonian, Blake Gopnik joined a long line of prominent critics attacking Rockwell, the American artist and illustrator who depicted life in mid-20th-century America and died in 1978.

“Norman Rockwell was demonized by a generation of critics who not only saw him as an enemy of modern art, but of all art,” said Deborah Solomon, whose biography of Rockwell, “American Mirror,” was published last year. “He was seen as a lowly calendar artist whose work was unrelated to the lofty ambitions of art,” she said, or, as she put it in her book, “a cornball and a square.” The critical dismissal “was obviously a source of great pain throughout his life,” Ms. Solomon, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, added.

But Rockwell is now undergoing a major critical and financial reappraisal. This week, the major auction houses built their spring sales of American art around two Rockwell paintings: “After the Prom,” at Sotheby’s, and “The Rookie,” at Christie’s. “After the Prom” sold for $9.1 million on Wednesday; “The Rookie” for $22.5 million on Thursday.

In December, “Saying Grace” set an auction record for Rockwell, selling at Sotheby’s for $46 million.

Rockwell isn’t yet at the level of Francis Bacon (top price at auction: $142.4 million), Picasso ($104.5 million) or Andy Warhol ($105.4 million) — all of whom critics eventually embraced — but he’s poised to join a select handful of artists whose work is instantly recognizable not just for its artistic quality but, for better or worse, the many millions it took to acquire one.

Apart from any critical reappraisal, Rockwell’s paintings show that in art, as well as in the stock market, it can pay to be a contrarian. Rockwell’s paintings have turned out to be a singularly good investment. “After the Prom” last sold at Sotheby’s in 1995 for $880,000. This week’s sale price represents a compounded annual rate of return of 13.1 percent, compared with 7.9 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index over the same period.

Michael Moses, a retired professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a co-founder of the Mei Moses Art Index, said his database contained 39 works by Rockwell that had sold more than once at auction. Taken together, their sales prices represent a 9.7 percent annual rate of return over the period from 1960 to 2008. (The latest round of sales isn’t included.) “That’s extremely good for an American painter,” Mr. Moses said.

Mr. Moses said that his research suggests that the adage — “buy the best,” or the most acclaimed by critics — doesn’t hold true, at least when it comes to investment returns. “Rockwell was so out of favor, there was ample room for appreciation,” Mr. Moses said. Paintings already acknowledged by critics as masterpieces “tend to underperform the market,” he said. “It turns out you don’t have to be an art expert to earn good investment returns.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/business/norman-rockwell-captures-the-art-markets-eye.html

British painter Glenn Brown's current show in New York offers a rare stateside look at his latest work. © Glenn Brown/Gagosian Gallery/

Authors like Maurice Sendak try in their books to conjure the real terror that children often feel about the hidden creatures they imagine crouching in the pitch-black night.

Most adults later dismiss such fears. Not Glenn Brown.

The London-based artist revels in the uneasy beauty of the monstrous, a quality that infuses his latest Gagosian Gallery show, through June 21, in New York. Since the early 1990s, Mr. Brown has built an international reputation painting unearthly renditions of other artists' works—borrowing ideas from the floating, sci-fi cities of Chris Foss to the surreal landscapes of Salvador Dalí to the powdered-wig portraits of Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

Over time Mr. Brown's reimagined versions take on a deep-sea strangeness: His Fragonard girl might have mustard-colored skin and vacant, cataract eyes. His flowery still lifes rot.

Mr. Brown's latest works mainly depict overripe bouquets and portraits of zombie-eyed old men dressed in velvety fashions he has cribbed from the Baroque. The artist, age 48, sees memento mori in the combination. "Flowers are at their prettiest just before they die, and men are at their wealthiest just before they die," he said. "I think there's beauty in something that's not quite dead yet because that means it's still transforming."

Collectors must agree, because they have paid as much as $8.1 million at auction for his paintings. His colorful sculptures, in which he slathers lumpen blobs of paint atop kitschy copies of bronzes by artists like Auguste Rodin, have sold for up to $500,000 at auction as well. Mr. Brown's work has been exhibited in major museums like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

In a marketplace that covets mirrored surfaces and aspirational imagery, Mr. Brown's morbid oeuvre stands apart. So does his glacial working pace. Mr. Brown said he rarely finishes more than a half-dozen paintings a year; the 13 canvases in his Gagosian show took him more than three years to finish, he said. That is partly because a few are so big. "Necrophiliac Springtime," which depicts an array of wilting chrysanthemums letting off decaying vapors, stretches 10 feet wide.

Others, like "Cactus Land," appear straightforward at first glance but aren't. The saint he has painted is looking heavenward, but the figure has minuscule gaping mouths and eye sockets peppered throughout his beard, a Boschian hell hidden beneath the halo.

From a distance, Mr. Brown's curly brush strokes evoke the thickly painted impasto of abstract masters like Frank Auerbach or Willem de Kooning, but his surfaces are actually glassy smooth. Such dexterity was prized in Rembrandt's day but is rare now. Mr. Brown said he honed the technique while studying art in 1990s London, when his peers like Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn were making "shock art" using rotting meat and frozen blood. Painting was considered passe, so Mr. Brown decided he would need to master the form before he could use it to say anything new.

The artist also relied on his own upbringing for inspiration. In rural Norwich, England, where he grew up, Mr. Brown said his workaday parents didn't pay much attention to art—but they did ply him with gothic novels and folk tales about the Green Man who supposedly haunted the woodlands nearby. The artist's father was also fond of the Transcendentalist philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and encouraged his son to think about the unseen, spiritual forces that may be at work in the world.

Mr. Brown remains particularly fond of the Pre-Raphaelites and the wall-size history paintings at London's Tate museums. Initially, he tried to match their grandeur in his own canvases, but bog-like creatures and eerie eyeballs kept popping up. "It's likely my father's fault," he said, with a grin.

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "A Mogul Shrinks His Art Focus" @wsj by Kelly Crow

Few collectors buy art with the single-minded focus of Leslie Wexner, a Columbus, Ohio, retailing billionaire who has over the past four decades whittled his once-varied art holdings down to primarily works by a single artist: Pablo Picasso.

Mr. Wexner, the 76-year-old founder and chief executive of L Brands, formerly Limited Brands, earned a reputation in the 1970s and 1980s as one of the country's top collectors of Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Jean Dubuffet and Willem de Kooning; he still owns de Kooning's seminal "Pink Lady." But at one point, Mr. Wexner had an epiphany: He said he realized that no other 20th-century artist had influenced art history to the same degree as Picasso, and as a result, Mr. Wexner began "trading out" his larger roster and collecting Picasso in-depth.

The reasons behind Mr. Wexner's one-man metamorphosis will be explored in "Transfigurations: Modern Masters from the Wexner Family Collection," an exhibit set to open this fall, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of Columbus's Wexner Center for the Arts, named for Mr. Wexner's father, Harry. The show, which opens Sept. 21, will include examples by a handful of other artists remaining in Mr. Wexner's collection, including Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet and his wife Abigail's favorite artist, Susan Rothenberg--but the bulk of the show will focus, like them, on Picasso.

Recently, Mr. Wexner agreed to discuss the winnowing. Below, an edited transcript:

"When I was a kid, I could draw reasonably well, but my mother said she would only agree to let me study art if I would also take piano, so we stalemated. I never got art lessons.

Then in the early 1970s, Alfred Taubman, the landlord for some of my stores, and I got into an argument about leases, and he invited me to Detroit to debate it out in his office. Then he invited me to have lunch at his house, and that was the first time I saw art in a private home. It never occurred to me that people lived with significant art. Al suggested I start going to galleries and museums to see what appealed to me. That was daunting.

What I responded to first was the New York School, the abstract artists of the 1940s and 1950s. The Old Masters just seemed old, but the colors and expression of the New York School were interesting to me. So during the first 10 years, I built a reasonable collection of Rothko, Kline and artists of that ilk. I bought a large Henry Moore single figure and a cubist Georges Braque. I lived with different things, René Magritte, Joan Miró. I was experimenting, but the collection felt adrift.

Then one day in the early 1980s, I went to an art fair in Chicago and saw a Picasso drawing. It was a 1920s picture of a seated woman; it was just remarkably moving and very different than the New York School and the abstract things I'd been buying. That was transformational for me because it started me in a very different way. I started looking closer at Picasso's work. My feeling was, and still is, that when you look at Picasso, you realize that he was the true founder of modern and contemporary art. That idea intrigued me. I was also taken by how often he reinvented himself. Picasso was classically trained, but he used his imagination to shift from the representational styles of the Old Masters to something new and authentic. His bandwidth of creativity outmatched all artists who came after him. I made a conscious decision to follow him.

I still own some Giacometti, because he is a disciple of Picasso in a different form, and Jean Dubuffet as well. Once when I was in London in my 30s, I was walking down Bond Street, and there was a crowd around an art show. I went in, and the paintings were so good. The prices were $10,000 to $20,000, which was a hell of a lot of money to me back then, and a man told me they were already sold, so I didn't get one. The artist was Francis Bacon. I had no idea who he was at the time, but I knew he was extraordinary.

Picasso still wins, though. Without Picasso, there wouldn't have been a Bacon. I'm sure of that."

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

At ICFF and Beyond, Designs That Shine

Credit Evan Sung for The New York Times

After walking the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, the annual showcase of new design that ended its 26th run at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on Tuesday, I have just one word to say. Are you listening?

Horsehair.

That was the most surprising material I found integrated into a light fixture. Which is saying a lot.

As light emitting diodes have grown cooler in temperature, warmer in color, dimmable and programmable, they have been combined with a startling range of materials to create luminous sculptures otherwise known as lamps. Sometimes you can even read by them.

At this furniture fair, I thought I had seen it all: LEDs embedded in resin pigeons, in classical busts, in paper bags. Then I caught sight of the Horsehair sconce by the New York design studio Apparatus: twin hanks of hair suspended like pigtails from a brass arc, each ending in glowing frosted glass.

Gabriel Hendifar, Apparatus’s creative director, described the light as a “muscular thing, nonchalantly hanging from a hook.” Asked whether you could trim your fingernails by it, he said, “I conceived of it more as an art piece that hangs on the wall.”

It was only recently (in other words, pre-2008) that a global wave of “design art,” or small-batch expressive work with limited or nonexistent functionality, was the subject of debate. Some loved and collected it. Others called it pretentious.

But there were no apologies for the small-batch expressive lighting, some of it quite beautiful, that I saw this year at the Javits and beyond. Throughout the citywide group of exhibitions and other events known as NYCxDesign, designers argued for the importance of setting a mood in a room, or creating a showstopper. If the word “art” didn’t turn up in these conversations, “jewel” often did.

And more than ever, lighting looked like a young designer’s pursuit, particularly for a knot of professionals who have emerged out of Brooklyn and matured together as collaborators and friendly competitors.

Bec Brittain, for instance, was all over town. The 33-year-old Brooklyn lighting designer showed her angular fixtures at the Javits, while her toothy Seed chandelier was part of a Midtown exhibition by the Brooklyn lighting company Roll & Hill. Downtown, the SoHo design gallery Matter featured Ms. Brittain’s wonderfully weird collaborations with Hilda Hellstrom, a London designer who works in a mottled resin called Jesmonite.

At the same time, Jamie Gray, 46, Matter’s founder and creative director and now a newly hatched lighting designer, was introducing Discus at the furniture fair. This LED system has a language of illuminated circles meant to fit anywhere, floor to ceiling, in homes or offices.

Also at the Javits, Rich Brilliant Willing, a seven-year-old Brooklyn design studio, presented an LED collection that included Mori, a pendant lamp made from a wire skeleton spray-coated with a thin layer of material. At Sight Unseen Offsite, an invigorating new design show in SoHo, it showed a big scribble of a chandelier called Palindrome. And several weeks ago, the company, which has produced all manner of furnishings, announced that it would confine itself to lighting in the future.

“It’s where we think our best ideas are,” said Theo Richardson, 31, one of the three founders.

Jason Miller, 42, who started Roll and Hill four years ago after creating a ceramic lamp cast from deer antlers that became an emblem of Brooklyn design, believes it is only to be expected that young New York designers would find their way to lighting.

“It fits the business of an independent designer well,” he said, explaining that economies of scale prevent small design companies from producing and selling their work cheaply. They need to make premium goods that consumers won’t balk at, and lighting is looked at as a justifiable luxury.

“That’s the sculpture over the table,” Mr. Miller said. “That’s the jewelry.”

No one thinks of a couch as jewelry, he added. “It’s a practical thing.”

Which is not to say that other kinds of items at ICFF lacked pizazz. My husband, who accompanied me to the show one afternoon, pointed out the impressive number of stylish bathtubs, including a turquoise model from the Italian company Teuco with black, gray and gold stripes.

Decorative surfaces were the order of the day. MT Casa, a Japanese brand of “low-adhesive-strength” tape, set up a booth demonstrating how the exuberantly colored and patterned material can be applied to your walls.

And Trove, a wallpaper company never satisfied with being merely pretty, presented Allee, a fantasy image of a misty formal garden inspired by the 1961 film “Last Year at Marienbad.” (Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the film is about many things, but chiefly ambiguity.) The 12-foot-tall panorama was shown in the muted graphite of a pencil sketch being erased.

“I think things are starting to look a little softer,” said the New York interior designer Benjamin Noriega-Ortiz about his impressions of ICFF. “Design has become romantic.”

In his view, Brooklyn designers fitting together raw hunks of wood have long set the tone for the show, but this year a subtler handling of the material was in evidence.

“Even Ross Lovegrove did this beautiful chair in wood,” Mr. Noriega-Ortiz said, referring to the Anne chair commissioned from the Welsh designer for the 125th anniversary of Bernhardt. “That was romantic,” Mr. Noriega-Ortiz added. “And it was comfortable.”

Those descriptors also applied to a standup desk by the German company Stilvoll, with compartments neatly stashed under the top. Of course, you have to pay for these virtues: in this case, about $8,300 for the walnut version, and $15,000 for the rosewood.

But affordable design was on view as well. Sauder, an 85-year-old company near Toledo, Ohio, that pioneered ready-to-assemble furniture made of particleboard, presented a modish collection of pieces, none selling for more than $650. (Its Objeti table by Joseph Ribic, for example, with a black-and-white painted pattern and compartmentalized top, was about $300.)

ICFF takes the initial standing for “international” seriously. Once again, there were group displays from Britain, Spain, Austria and Norway, among other countries. But Wanted Design, a satellite exhibition in Chelsea, now in its fourth year, was also an inspiring venue for global talent. A small but eloquent division of Latin American pieces was an eye opener, with collections from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Puerto Rico and Chile. Bravo! from Santiago, for instance, showed hollowed-out river rocks of appealing purity.

Another highlight of Wanted was “Nasz,” Polish works curated, and in many cases designed, by Studio Rygalik in Warsaw. “The name means ‘ours,’ ” said Gosia Rygalik, who leads the company with her husband, Tomek. “We didn’t want ‘Poland’ in the title.”

Seeing the simple, pale furnishings, one would be challenged to identify their origins, with the possible exception of a folkloric-style carpet adorned with a picture of an urban scene.

Like the new Sight Unseen Offsite and the two-year-old Collective fair, which ended last week, Wanted Design showed the advantages of concentrating smartly selected, well-arranged design under a single roof. Not everything was of comparable quality, but there was enough excellence to reward making the trek over. More important were the connections and reverberations established among various designs — the way Poland, for instance, converses with Mexico in the language of objects.

Even ICFF, despite the terrible ambience native to convention centers, had many bright spots from its more than 600 exhibitors. O.K., maybe not the aluminum lamp in the shape of a tiny man playing a guitar.

But that did make me laugh.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Gleeful Museums Unpack a Bequest" @ nytimes by CAROL VOGEL

John Frederick Peto’s “Still Life with Cake, Lemon, Strawberries and Glass,” from 1890. Credit National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon

The final group of paintings, drawings and sculptures bequeathed to museums by Paul Mellon before his death in 1999 have at last begun to arrive. Hidden away for decades, many are rarities that had never been seen by curators.

The group includes more than 200 works — examples by such artists as van Gogh, Degas, Gauguin, Monet and Seurat — that were only recently removed from the walls of the Mellons’ many homes, where they were enjoyed by his widow, Rachel Lambert Mellon, who died in March at 103.

Mellon, the son of Andrew W. Mellon, one of the world’s richest financiers and the founder of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, supported the National Gallery, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond for decades and left each institution a substantial trove. Some works were delivered at his death and others just recently. The latest gifts held some of the biggest surprises, curators report. “I knew most of these works but only from black-and-white photographs,” said Kimberly A. Jones, associate curator of French paintings at the National Gallery, which recently received 62 of the works left to the museum that had remained at the homes. “This was the art the Mellons lived with and treasured.”

This final group from the Mellons’ vast art holdings reflects the personal tastes of a fiercely private couple who kept homes in New York, Cape Cod, Paris and Antigua as well as Oak Spring Farms, their 4,000-acre primary residence in Virginia horse country. Together, experts estimate, the works are worth close to $1 billion.

“When Paul Mellon was interested in something, he collected in depth,” said Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery. “We just received 12 oil sketches by Seurat, and when you see them together, they are truly amazing.” In 2016, he added, the museum plans a big exhibition of highlights from the Mellon gift timed to coincide with the institution’s 75th anniversary.

Mrs. Mellon, who was known as Bunny, would occasionally surprise an institution with a painting, drawing or sculpture as she started closing some of her homes in recent years. Last December, she unexpectedly gave the National Gallery a van Gogh, “Green Wheat Fields, Auvers” from 1890, considered one of his most important landscapes.

Now, it has another “historically important” van Gogh, Ms. Jones said: “Still Life of Oranges and Lemons With Blue Gloves” (1889) is among the 62 works that arrived this month. It is to go on view June 8 in the museum’s West Building with its other van Gogh paintings and one loan, his “The Postman Joseph Roulin” from the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands.

Ms. Jones said the Mellons’ taste was not strictly conventional. For example, when other collectors were scooping up classic Impressionists of the 1870s, she said, the couple went for earlier examples. Included in the current round of gifts is Monet’s “Still Life With Bottle, Carafe, Bread and Wine” from 1862-63, a subject not generally associated with him.

At the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, sporting art and French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works donated over the years by the Mellons are at the core of the collection, said Mitchell Merling, head of the European art department there. The museum has just received 25 more works, including a still life painted by Gauguin in Tahiti around 1892 and a Degas canvas, “At the Milliner’s,” from around 1882-85. “We already have nine waxes by Degas, and now we have this important painting, which is a profound statement of modern life in the 1880s,” Mr. Merling said. Over the decades, he said, the Mellons gave the museum examples of “every important artist, moment and style in French Impressionism.”

Yet their taste didn’t end there. The couple also had an eye for American painters like Winslow Homer, John Frederick Peto and Raphaelle Peale. And for everything British: Mellon created the Yale Center for British Art, which opened in 1974 and has the largest collection of British art to be found outside Britain. The center just received 90 additional works, including four by Alfred Munnings, known for his horse paintings. “We’ve had a steady stream of art coming to us over the last few years,” said Amy Meyers, the museum’s director. “What is particularly special about these last things is that they are coming off the walls of their houses.”

Star among the Mellon gifts to the Yale University Art Gallery is Degas’s “Four Jockeys,” a painting from around 1889 in which he depicts horses and jockeys in motion. Mr. Mellon had a lifelong passion for horses: He rode them, bred them and watched them win races from the Kentucky Derby to the Epsom Derby.

But as extensive as these gifts to museums have been, a great deal of the Mellon estate is still up for grabs, including jewelry, decorative arts and paintings by artists including Seurat, Braque, Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn.

Sotheby’s and Christie’s have been pitching hard for the business, perhaps hoping to hold sales as early as this fall, but officials close to the Mellon estate say no decision has been reached.

THE BOOK OF HOURS, WRIT LARGE

For the last four summers, the Morgan Library & Museum has installed contemporary sculptures in its soaring glass atrium, from large steel works by Mark di Suvero to hundreds of carved and painted Chinese characters spelling out the word “bird” by Xu Bing. Now, Spencer Finch, the Brooklyn artist whose commission for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum recently went on view, is creating a site-specific installation inspired by the Morgan’s renowned collection of medieval Books of Hours.

The hand-painted Books of Hours served as prayer books for different times of the day and periods of the year. Mr. Finch, whose work often incorporates light, color and memory, said he plans to apply films of color in groupings to the atrium’s windows, with each palette corresponding to a time of year. He is effectively creating a kind of calendar based on the movement of the sun. He will also hang clear panes in the center of the atrium to increase the reflectivity of his colored light.

Isabelle Dervaux, the Morgan’s curator of modern and contemporary drawings, said she invited Mr. Finch to the museum after viewing photographs of an installation he did at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. “When he saw the medieval Book of Hours, he got the idea of using 365 squares of color,” she said.

The installation, on view from June 20 through Jan. 11, 2015, will also be visible from the street.      

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "The Ups and Downs of The Spring Auctions" @wsj by Kelly Crow

                                  

Midway through New York's major spring auctions, collectors of Impressionist and modern art appear to be showing signs of sticker stock, even as contemporary-art buyers prepare to splurge on.

Earlier this week, Sotheby's BID -0.05% Sotheby's U.S.: NYSE ^$40.48 -0.02-0.05% May 14, 2014 9:51 am Volume (Delayed 15m) : 39,739 P/E Ratio 18.97 Market Cap $2.79 Billion Dividend Yield 0.99% Rev. per Employee $576,249 41.0040.7540.5040.2510a11a12p1p2p3p 05/07/14 The WSJ's Kelly Crow at the So... 05/07/14 Loeb Wins by Losing at Sotheby... 05/07/14 Court Ruling Bolsters New Type... More quote details and news » BID in Your Value Your Change Short position and Christie's sold a combined $611.2 million worth of Impressionist and modern art, a total that fell within their presale expectations and exceeded a similar series last May that sold for $478 million.

Bidding proved thin for some of Christie's priciest works Tuesday—dealer Paul Gray was the lone bidder on a $22.6 million Pablo Picasso —and around a third of Sotheby's offerings on Wednesday went unsold. Sotheby's failures included a Picasso portrait of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, expected to sell for at least $15 million.

But the same collectors who sniffed at Sotheby's art trophies turned up in force the next day for its sale of lower-priced material. It was a clue that this seasoned subset of collectors is willing to bid—but at price levels below $5 million, unless the art on offer is truly museum-worthy.

New York collector Donald Bryant thought he had hit his limit at Christie's on Tuesday after he offered $6.1 million for Constantin Brâncusi's toaster-size stone sculpture of a kissing couple, "The Kiss." But when he bowed out, he got a nudge from his wife, Bettina, and jumped back in at $7.2 million. "Is it because of her?" auctioneer Andreas Rumbler asked, adding with a grin, "She's the boss." The extra effort didn't pay off, though: The Brancusi sold to another bidder for $8.7 million.

Auction specialists say the art market has seen this divergence in collecting categories before. Decades ago, Old Masters enjoyed top billing until Impressionist and modern art became fashionable among wealthy collectors. Suddenly, its roster of artists such as Claude Monet began fetching the kinds of prices once reserved for Rembrandt and Canaletto. Now the art market appears to be shuffling again: With the majority of Impressionist and modern masterpieces now tucked away in museum collections, new buyers are finding it difficult to amass an enviable collection in a short time.

Many Asian collectors are still trying. At least eight of Sotheby's pricier works on Wednesday went to Asian collectors—including a $19.2 million Henri Matisse view of a woman painting at her easel, "The Afternoon Session."

Dealers say the art market will undergo its greater stress test this week, when both houses, plus boutique house Phillips, hold their sales of contemporary art. In recent seasons, auction prices for contemporary artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Christopher Wool have quadrupled—a pace that's encouraged speculators to buy up even younger artists in hopes of profiting later in resales.

Last November, Christie's sold a yellow Francis Bacon triptych for $142.4 million, almost $60 million above its estimate and the most ever paid for a work of art at auction. Next Tuesday, the house will offer up a seafoam-green Bacon triptych, 1984's "Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards," for an estimated $80 million. The seller is computer-chip maker Pierre Chen.

Mr. Chen's Bacon carries a third-party guarantee. This means the auction has promised him it will sell—to an outside investor who has pledged to buy it for an undisclosed sum if no one during the sale offers more. If the guarantor is outbid, he or she will reap a share of Mr. Chen's potential profits and take home a financing fee from Christie's no matter what. (Sotheby's doesn't offer financing fees.)

Unlike Impressionist and modern art, next week's contemporary sales are swimming in guarantees—at least $650 million worth across the three houses. The amount eclipses Sotheby's entire guarantee portfolio for 2008, the last market peak.

Both Christie's and Sotheby's say they feel comfortable with their volume of guarantees.

For the Tuesday sales, third-party guarantors claim a financial interest in 39 of Christie's 72 contemporary artworks, which means that 54% of the estimated $500 million sale will change hands whether anyone even shows up with a paddle. This includes Andy Warhol's "Race Riot," a red-white-and-blue silk-screen that recently belonged to a trust of dealer Bill Acquavella's family and that Christie's estimates will sell for around $45 million.

All this means that contemporary collectors, unlike buyers of Impressionist and modern art, are going to unprecedented lengths to keep fueling their segment's momentum, even if they must bankroll the offerings themselves ahead of time. If the strategy works, it could reshape the way art gets auctioned, with sellers essentially preselling their art privately but angling for a higher, backstop price at auction. If the broader financial markets sour suddenly, bidders could get spooked, and these deal makers may be left owning art at prices that may appear inflated. Stay tuned.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Strolling an Island of Creativity" @nytimes By KEN JOHNSON and MARTHA SCHWENDENER

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Christie’s First Spring Sale Drops Prices Back to Earth" @nytimes By CAROL VOGEL

A Modigliani portrait from 1919 was sold for $17.6 million, above its high estimate of $12 million, at Christie’s on Tuesday. Credit Christie's Images, 2014

After all the predictions that prices were only going one way — up — the spring auction season got off to a tepid start at Christie’s on Tuesday night, where some examples of Impressionist and modern art by Picasso, Kandinsky and Dalí brought far less than expected; others barely skimmed by, and two classic works by Degas were left unsold, victims of estimates that were simply too high.

Christie’s was kicking off two weeks of sales, including the more buoyant segment of the market, postwar and contemporary art, and expectations were running high. The opening night could be seen as a reality check.

“The market continues to be discerning at the highest level,” said Conor Jordan, deputy chairman of Christie’s Impressionist and modern art department. The evening was not without its bright spots. A portrait of a russet-haired young man with blue eyes that Modigliani painted in 1919 brought $17.6 million, well above its $12 million high estimate. It had last been on the market in 2002 at Sotheby’s, where it was sold by Robert C. Guccione, publisher of Penthouse magazine. Back then it brought $8.4 million.

Christie’s had high expectations, having secured several of the season’s high-profile estates, including that of Huguette Clark, the reclusive copper heiress who died in 2011 at the age of 104. Both her father, Senator William A. Clark, and his second wife, Anna, loved all things French, including their art. The most expensive painting was Monet’s dreamy “Nymphéas,” or Water Lilies, painted in 1907 and inspired by the artist’s garden in Giverny. Mrs. Clark had bought it in 1930 from the Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York, and it had not been seen in public since. Four bidders went for the painting, which sold to Elaine Holt, a Christie’s expert in the Impressionist and modern art department based in Hong Kong, who bid on behalf of a client. She paid $27 million, above its $25 million low estimate but far short of its $35 million high.

Asian bidders, especially from mainland China, helped fuel many of the auction’s higher prices, Christie’s officials said. Of the evening’s 53 works, six went unsold. The evening totaled $285.9 million. It had been estimated to bring $244.5 million to $360.4 million.

(Final prices include the buyer’s premium: 25 percent of the first $100,000; 20 percent of the next $100,000 to $2 million; and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

Also coming to auction were three paintings by Renoir, including “Jeunes Filles Jouant au Volant” (“Young Women Playing Badminton”), painted around 1887. Mrs. Clark had purchased it in 1958 for $125,000, a high price at the time, when the Minneapolis Institute of Arts deaccessioned it; on Tuesday night it sold with only one bid at its low $10 million estimate, or $11.3 million with fees. (The painting had been on loan to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington.)

But another Renoir saw some action. “Les Deux Soeurs,” a colorful scene of two sisters with wide-brimmed hats reading, painted around 1890 to 1895, sold to Sumiko Roberts, from Christie’s in London, who was taking bids on behalf of a client. She paid $8 million, well above its high $6 million.

Works from the estate of German collectors Viktor and Marianne Langen brought fairly solid prices and also some bargains. A 1942 Picasso, “Portrait de femme (Dora Maar)” of the artist’s lover and muse, regally posed in purple, was estimated at $25 million to $35 million. Paul Gray, one of the owners of the Richard Gray gallery in Chicago and New York, snapped it up for $20 million, or $22.6 million with fees. “Le Modèle,” one of Braque’s Cubist interiors, this one from 1939, that was expected to sell for $8 million to $12 million, sold for $9.1 million including fees. And a colorful 1909 landscape by Kandinsky sold to a telephone bidder for $17.1 million, above its low $16 million estimate.

Works on paper were in demand. The Langens’ Picasso watercolor, “Composition: Nu sur la Plage,” which he painted on July 13, 1933, was estimated at $1 million to $1.5 million but brought $2.5 million. Five bidders went after a gouache on paper of a Surreal setting — a giant leaf rising and round white ball — with two tiny people in a landscape that Magritte created in 1963. It had been expected to fetch $700,000 to $1 million, and sold for $1.25 million

As the crowd was pouring out of the auction house afterward, people were trying to draw conclusions from the evening’s results. “People are selective,” said Christophe Van de Weghe, a New York dealer. “Yes there’s a lot of money around — but the market is getting smarter.”      

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