Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Rosemarie Trockel, an influential German artist, is receiving her first prominent exhibition in the United States with a show at the New Museum.

Any simple description of the solo exhibition opening on Wednesday on three floors of the New Museum on the Lower East Side runs the risk of sounding like a passage from a Paul Auster novel: the artist is a German woman whose work is among the most celebrated in Europe; the artist is a man from rural Idaho who could neither read nor speak and pieced together haunting constructions from cardboard; the artist is a Chicago man who secretly fashioned and photographed childlike dolls; the artist is a California woman with Down syndrome who made sculpture from yarn; the artist is an orangutan named Tilda.

“Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” — a highly unorthodox survey of more than three decades of Ms. Trockel’s work and the first time she has had such prominent exposure in an American museum — is described accurately by all of the above. Ms. Trockel, 59 and based in Cologne, is indeed esteemed and widely influential, though for various reasons she has never been as well known in the United States as German contemporaries, including Anselm Kiefer and Martin Kippenberger, who died in 1997.

And yet several years ago, when she and Lynne Cooke, the chief curator of the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, began considering a retrospectivelike exhibition that would define Ms. Trockel for a larger audience, the idea that emerged was a show that, if anything, would make it difficult for viewers to decide which works were hers and which were by somebody else.

She wanted to include pieces she loved by James Castle, a highly regarded, self-taught artist who died in 1977 after laboring in utter obscurity in Garden Valley, Idaho, making work that seemed to lie in some forgotten land between Rauschenberg and Warhol. She wanted art by Morton Bartlett, a commercial photographer from Chicago whose eerie plaster child-dolls, discovered after his death in 1992, have become a minor sensation, and by Judith Scott, a profoundly disabled woman who began making cocoonlike, yarn-encased sculpture at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, Calif., in the last two decades of her life.

In addition to these artists, there are nine more, living or dead, not counting a few anonymous ones, who join Ms. Trockel in the show, their work sometimes intermingled closely with hers.

“I think of work often as the invisible made visible, and it doesn’t matter so much to me whether I made it or not,” Ms. Trockel said one recent afternoon on the New Museum’s second floor, as pieces by her and the other artists were readied for three large glass vitrines that looked like museum appurtenances from the 19th century.

In a recent essay in The New York Review of Books, the critic Charles Rosen wrote, “Art does not, of course, liberate us completely from meaning, but it gives a certain measure of freedom, provides elbow room.” In contemporary art Ms. Trockel has long provided more elbow room than most, in wildly esoteric work that ranges from figurative drawings to textile “paintings,” artist books, appropriation and surrealist sculpture and video.

In itself, the work can look like that of several different artists, as Ms. Trockel burrows into ideas, exhausts them and then moves on, sometimes returning to recycle the old, occasionally with a vengeance. One piece in the New Museum show is a clear plastic cube filled with the cut-up remains of many years’ worth of her trademark textile paintings, which she had saved in her studio. (A single painting similar to those she destroyed sold last year at auction for almost a million dollars.)

“It felt strange, but it also felt good,” she said of creating a kind of tomb of her earlier work. “I thought: it’s done.”

Part of the affinity Ms. Trockel feels for the so-called outsider artists she has included in the show comes from a sense of isolation that has often defined her life, caused by severe agoraphobia, which prevented her when she was younger from going outside much at all, and which still limits her ability to interact with people.

In a wide-ranging interview at the New Museum, where she was dressed elegantly and casually, with a dark sweater thrown around her shoulders, she spoke with an easy friendliness and enthusiasm about the exhibition. But throughout, she kept an interpreter at her elbow, despite being fluent in English and rarely having to search for words.

“I often see myself as an outsider artist,” she said at one point, “though of course I’m not. It’s wishful thinking, I suppose.”

Ms. Trockel shows at the Gladstone Gallery in New York and had a prominent installation at the Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea from 2002 to 2004. But perhaps because of her relative isolation and her general ambivalence toward the conventions of museum exhibitions, her exposure in the American art world has long been out of sync with her international reputation.

“With her the focus is always on the art, not the artist,” said Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum’s director of exhibitions, who organized the show there with Jenny Moore, an associate curator. “Rosemarie’s work is important for a lot of younger artists right now, I think, because we’ve had so many years of the phenomenon of artist as rock star.”

He added, “You could think of this as a choral solo show.”

As at the Reina Sofía museum, where Ms. Trockel and Ms. Cooke originated the exhibition, the artwork has been supplemented in New York by natural-history objects that were never intended as art. But they embody many of Ms. Trockel’s biotic interests and slip into the new context as if they were made by her, or perhaps by Dalí or Matthew Barney or Mike Kelley. One is a giant taxidermied lobster nicknamed Cedric that Ms. Moore tracked down and borrowed from the Delaware Museum of Natural History. (The wall label for the lobster notes, with impressive precision, that it was “cooked on May 13, 1964, and weighed 27.5 pounds.”)

“I think when people come to the show,” Ms. Trockel said, “they should try first just to look and not to think, not to bring all of their conceptions and influences into it.”

It is a lesson that Ms. Trockel said she tried hard to follow in her own life. A creature of habit (she eats the same type of pasta for every lunch), she starts her day by staring deeply into a Bridget Riley dot painting that she owns, until the dots seem to move and sometimes change color.

Then her meditation moves on to a group of spare, smeary canvases also in her collection. These were painted not by an artist or even a human but by Tilda, an orangutan in the Cologne zoo. Three of them are included in the New Museum, credited to Tilda but identified as a single work by Ms. Trockel and given a title she has used for many works over the years: “Less Sauvage Than Others.”

“I just think of it as abstract art,” she said, looking at the green and yellow marks of simian expressionism. “Of course it’s not intentional, but it doesn’t matter so much to me.”

“I look at them so often,” she added. “But every time, it seems like the first time.”

“Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” continues through Jan. 20 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side; (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org.

-By Randy Kennedy

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"Miami Art Museum donations on pace with building" @Miamiherald

Miami Art Museum officials are more than halfway to their goal of raising millions in private donations for their new waterfront home.

Seeing is believing for donors to the new Miami Art Museum now under construction alongside Biscayne Bay in downtown’s Bicentennial Park.

With elevated platforms resting atop columns, a trellis-like roof, and a grand staircase that opens onto the water’s edge, the MAM building designed by the Swiss firm of Herzog & de Meuron has generated enthusiasm among architectural critics and museum officials alike.

Lately, MAM director Thom Collins said, that sense of excitement has spread to the museum’s benefactors.

As workers give shape to the museum’s Stiltsville-inspired design, donations to the building campaign are on pace to meet the promise made by museum trustees to raise $120 million in private funds to offset the costs of construction and future operations, he said. More than half has already been pledged.

“People don’t get on board until they see things,’’ Collins said during a recent tour of the construction site. “We’re well within $2 million of finishing the bricks and mortar fundraising.’’

Collins said he is much more relaxed these days than he was last December, when it was announced that upon completion of the building in fall 2013, MAM would be renamed the Jorge M. Perez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County, or PAMM for short, in exchange for a donation of $35 million from the Miami real estate developer.

The community response was divided among those who congratulated the museum and Perez on the generosity of his gift, and those who criticized the name change for giving one person all the credit for a museum built largely with public money approved by Miami-Dade voters in 2004.

In fact, MAM will need even more public support when the new building opens because operational costs are projected to more than double from the present $4 million a year to about $10 million. Currently, MAM relies on about $2 million a year in public funds to cover the costs of exhibitions, educational programs and staff.

Many warned that the museum’s name change would hurt future private donations, which help offset those operating costs, by sending the unintended message that the institution is taken care of.

“Bringing money in is going to be harder,’’ said Miami collector Carlos de la Cruz, who along with his wife, Rosa, runs the De la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space in the Design District. “I think that’s incontrovertible.’’

But nearly one year since the announcement, said MAM’s board chairman, Aaron Podhurst, the fundraising campaign is riding the momentum of its unmistakable landmark rising from the ground.

“Now we’re getting excitement,’’ he said, “and we’re trying to get some of the big gifts in.’’

Yet the work of fundraising for any cultural nonprofit, he added, “never stops.’’

The guaranteed maximum price for MAM’s new building is $131 million, Collins said, but the total price tag on the project, including an endowment to ensure its future operations, is about $220 million.

Public money from a general obligation bond approved by Miami-Dade voters in 2004 will pay $100 million of that cost. Museum trustees pledged to raise an additional $120 million in private donations, including $31 million to offset construction costs, $70 million for an endowment to ensure future operations, and $19 million for transitional expenses.

Collins said MAM trustees have raised about $70.5million in pledges to date, and about $33.5 million of that sum has already been paid.

The remainder will be raised in the months leading up to the museum’s scheduled opening next year — and beyond, Podhurst said.

With much of the museum’s share of construction costs already raised from private sources, Podhurst said, MAM officials are now focused on building the endowment.

“The key for the next year and a half is to get the endowment as high as we can get it,’’ he said, “so we can really do some great operational programming.’’

Museum trustees made a number of promises to ensure that the new building does not run into the same cost overruns and delays that plagued the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, which cost nearly $500 million to complete and experienced numerous delays before opening in 2006.

“After the performing arts center, I think that this community was really gun shy, as I can understand,’’ said Rose Ellen Meyerhoff Greene, vice president of the museum’s board of trustees.

But Greene said museum trustees — nearly all of whom pledged gifts to the campaign — have taken a personal interest in ensuring that the new building comes in on time and on budget.

“If you’re building your own home, you hire an architect; you hire a contractor; and then you watch every light socket put in the home,’’ she said. “That’s how we’ve treated this project.’’

Among the most important commitments made by MAM trustees was management of the building’s design and construction, which ensures that any cost overruns will be paid for by the museum and not the public.

“Those are written assurances,’’ said Michael Spring, Miami-Dade’s cultural affairs chief and one of the principal public officials overseeing the project.

Spring said museum trustees signed a contract promising to raise $120 million in private donations, though there is no timetable specified for raising the funds.

If MAM fails to meet those fundraising goals, then museum trustees and benefactors will be expected to make up the difference, Spring said.

Miami-Dade and the city of Miami, which contributed about $2.8 million in bond funds to the project plus the land for the building, exercise some oversight of the project. For instance, all project costs are paid first by MAM, then submitted for reimbursement to the county and city.

Public officials also receive updates on the project through monthly meetings with museum officials, and annual reports required for receipt of bond monies.

But much of the responsibility for the project’s success rests with museum trustees.

With their own skin at stake, Collins said, museum officials have hired teams of consultants to help manage construction costs, and to gauge future operational expenses.

“We have spreadsheets, and spreadsheets, and more spreadsheets,’’ Collins said. “We really feel confident we have a handle on it.’’

According to the museum’s projections, operating costs for the new building will more than double from the current $4 million a year to about $11 million annually.

Some of that additional operating cost may be borne by the county, which already contributes about $2 million a year to the institution. But county officials have not yet made a commitment to increase funding of the museum.

“It’s inevitable that the budgets for bigger buildings will be bigger,’’ Spring said. “We understand that, but we can make no guarantees that the county can do anything more than what we’re doing now.’’

Podhurst said MAM trustees have not yet asked the county for increased public support, but he enthuses over the opportunities for generating income in ways the museum’s current home in the Miami-Dade Cultural Center cannot.

“We expect to make a lot of money in our predictions on rentals on weddings and bar mitzvahs and parties, and all that kind of stuff, because they’re beautiful spaces,’’ he said. “It’s one of the most gorgeous spots to be on the water.’’

Still, Collins makes it clear that MAM will be looking to county leaders to increase annual support of the museum, as well.

“We have to grow funding through every revenue stream,’’ he said, “but everything has to grow: government funding, private support, earned income.’’

MAM’s fundraising campaign took an unexpected turn in December when the museum announced Perez’s donation of $35 million in cash and art.

MAM trustees voted to accept Perez’s gift and the museum’s renaming by a 46-4 vote, but the news also triggered a backlash.

Four members of the museum’s board of trustees resigned, including past president Mary Frank., who with her husband Howard Frank, chief operating officer and vice chairman of Carnival Corp., vowed to stop paying on their $1 million pledge. Carnival Corp., which had pledged $5 million to the museum, also reneged.

The Franks paid $417,791 of their pledge, MAM officials said, and Carnival Corp. paid $1.5 million.

The museum does not plan to return those gifts, said Tracy Belcher, a MAM spokeswoman.

Yet while some donors have severed ties with the museum over the change, the renaming also has helped open new doors for MAM.

“The Jorge Effect was really positive and fantastic,’’ said Collins, the museum’s director, “because he’s given us access to people we otherwise wouldn’t have talked to.’’

Ranked the 360th richest person in America by the October issue of Forbes magazine, Perez, 63, has a personal fortune estimated at $1.2 billion — and he travels among a broad circle of influential friends.

His gift to MAM, divided into $20 million cash and $15 million in art, was meant to lead by example, Podhurst said.

Perez has paid $6.5 million of the cash pledge to date, Podhurst said, and he is scheduled to pay an additional $3.5 million in January. The remainder of his cash pledge — $10 million — will be paid in installments by 2022.

The art, however, is already in hand.

Collins and MAM’s chief curator, Tobias Ostrander, recently hand picked the works from Perez’s personal collection. Those works have been appraised by Christie’s, the art auction house, and their value is greater than the pledged amount of $15 million, Podhurst said.

In a video interview posted on Forbes.com, Perez said his commitment to MAM is now closer to $40 million.

But he doesn’t mind.

“I want the best pieces to go to the museum,’’ he told Forbes.

Among the donors whom Perez brought on board for the museum’s campaign is a fellow member of the Forbes 400: Number 83, Stephen Ross, the billionaire owner of the Miami Dolphins.

Though Ross sits on the boards of some of New York’s most prestigious cultural institutions, including the Guggenheim Museum and the Lincoln Center, he had not taken an active role in MAM’s capital campaign until his longtime friend, Perez, asked.

Ross, a real estate developer who is founder and chairman of the Related Companies, said he and Perez are friends and business associates dating back to 1979.

“Knowing that’s important to him, I gave it in his honor,’’ Ross said of his gift to MAM. “Jorge told me how important it was, and asked if I would be interested in giving. It wasn’t a hard sell, if you know what I mean.’’

"Lawsuits Claim Knoedler Made Huge Profits on Fakes" @nytimes

For more than a dozen years the Upper East Side gallery Knoedler & Company was “substantially dependent” on profits it made from selling a mysterious collection of artwork that is at the center of a federal forgery investigation, former clients of this former gallery have charged in court papers.

The analysis is based on financial records turned over as part of a lawsuit against the gallery filed by Domenico and Eleanore De Sole, who in 2004 paid $8.3 million for a painting attributed to Mark Rothko that they now say is a worthless fake.

The Rothko is one of approximately 40 works that Knoedler, which closed last year, obtained from Glafira Rosales, a little-known dealer whose collection of works attributed to Modernist masters has no documented provenance and is the subject of an F.B.I. investigation.

Between 1996 and 2008, the suit asserts, Knoedler earned approximately $60 million from works that Ms. Rosales provided on consignment or sold outright to the gallery and cleared $40 million in profits. In one year, 2002, for example, the complaint says the gallery’s entire profit — $5.6 million — was derived from the sale of Ms. Rosales’s works.

“Knoedler’s viability as a business was substantially — and, in some years, almost entirely — dependent on sales from the Rosales Collection,” the De Soles claimed last month in an amended version of the suit they filed this year.

While the forgery allegations are well known and have been the subject of three federal lawsuits against Knoedler, the recent filings expand the known number of Rosales artworks that were handled by the gallery, which was in business for 165 years, and assert that they played a pivotal role in the gallery’s success. After the F.B.I. issued subpoenas to the gallery in the fall of 2009, Michael Hammer, Knoedler’s owner, halted the sale of any Rosales works. Knoedler ended up losing money that year and in 2010, the court papers say.

Lawyers for the gallery and its former president Ann Freedman declined to discuss the accuracy of the De Soles’ financial analyses. But they suggested the level of profits is irrelevant if the artworks sold were the authentic and valuable works of acknowledged masters; the gallery and Ms. Freedman still insist on their authenticity.

“Labeling a work a forgery is an extreme step,” Luke Nikas, one of Ms. Freedman’s lawyers, said in an interview, “especially when substantial evidence of authenticity exists. Plaintiffs’ irresponsible lawsuits caused the very harm they complain of.”

Ms. Rosales’s lawyer has said that his client never knowingly defrauded anyone.

The size of the profits is significant, the De Soles contend, because they say the gallery should have realized that someone cannot buy undiscovered masterpieces for the prices Knoedler paid Ms. Rosales. For example, Knoedler paid her $950,000 in 2003 for the untitled Rothko that it sold the following year to the De Soles for a 773 percent markup.

John D. Howard, another former Knoedler customer who is suing, paid $3.5 million for a work said to be by Willem de Kooning (plus a $500,000 commission to an intermediary dealer), a 366 percent markup over the $750,000 that Knoedler had paid to Ms. Rosales just two days earlier. In his complaint Mr. Howard’s lawyer, John Cahill, described the $750,000 as “a price so low it virtually announced its dubious nature.”

(A third suit, over the authenticity of a $17 million painting attributed to Jackson Pollock, was settled this month in a confidential agreement.)

Of course buying cheap and selling high is every seller’s goal. And Ms. Freedman, few would dispute, is a good saleswoman. But several art dealers described the markups as unusual. Speaking generally Michael Findlay, a director of Acquavella Galleries in New York, said a price way below market should be a “red flag.”

“Why is it so cheap?” he said. “That’s a smell test.”

One reason for the low prices, though, is the lack of paperwork attesting to provenance. Ms. Freedman’s lawyers said that the payments to Ms. Rosales reflected the enormous risk Knoedler undertook as well as the substantial costs of researching, conserving and evaluating the newly uncovered art. That research confirmed the authenticity of the works, and thus their value, the lawyers said.

Ms. Rosales has said the bulk of the newly discovered masterworks came from an old family friend, an anonymous collector whom she has steadfastly refused to name. Files at Knoedler about him were labeled “Secret Santa.”

Ms. Rosales said the collector had inherited the works — about two dozen major pieces by artists like Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Pollock and de Kooning — from his father, a European émigré with homes in Switzerland and Mexico.

But the lawsuits state that over the years Ms. Rosales altered her account in several ways. For example, after saying the art was acquired in the 1950s with the help of Alfonso Ossorio, a painter and a friend of Pollock’s, she later identified a different middleman when an independent art panel called Mr. Ossorio’s involvement “inconceivable,” the papers report.

According to Ms. Freedman’s lawyers Ms. Rosales at one point told Ms. Freedman to stop pressing for more information about the unnamed collector, saying, “Don’t kill the goose that’s laying the golden egg.”

At the moment 14 works Ms. Rosales brought to market — 9 of which were handled by Knoedler — have been judged as fake by authenticating bodies.

A company called Orion Analytical also conducted forensic tests on at least five Rosales paintings and reported that materials on the canvasses were not available or were inconsistent with the dates on the works.

To counter the charges Ms. Freedman’s and Knoedler’s lawyers have collected affidavits from two experts who vouch for the authenticity of the art along with other evidence. For example, to rebut the idea that paint found on the Rosales Pollock work was not available in Pollock’s day, the lawyers cite a 1980 interview that Lee Krasner, Pollock’s widow, gave The Partisan Review in which she said that Pollock “at one point got DuPont to make up very special paints for him, and special thinners.”

Charles D. Schmerler, Knoedler’s lawyer, dismissed Orion’s conclusions: “Certain individuals appear to be creating a cottage industry out of attacking these paintings. There are no accepted scientific methods or standardized guidelines in this area.”

And as Ms. Freedman herself said in a recent e-mail, “These paintings were exhibited in museums around the world and heralded as masterworks.”

-By Patricia Cohen

"Frieze Has the Art Fair Mastered: The British Brand Hits a Home Run With a New Event for Older Art " @adamlindemann

Last week, London hosted three major art fairs and several smaller and younger ones, enough to make any sane person wonder: have we reached the point of art fair overkill? I’ve often thought—and written—that the art fair scene has gone overboard, and now I’m not alone. On his Facebook page New York magazine’s art critic Jerry Saltz recently lamented the explosion of art fairs and the new custom among hungry galleries to send out email blasts from them announcing how many works they’ve sold. “We’ve built a worm into the system,” Mr. Saltz wrote. “The system is self-supporting and draws its power from everyone.” The point is timely, because London’s annual Frieze art fair—the highlight of a week of art parties and hobnobbing in British style—has sprouted a second fair, Frieze Masters, for more “historical” artworks. I was there for the opening of Masters, and it forced me to change my tune. And so, in the words of the great Marcel Duchamp, I will now “force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”

 

Since 2003, Frieze has brought dozens of galleries from all over the world to London every October, and showcased some of the best and worst in cutting-edge contemporary art. The show happens under an architect-designed big top in Regent’s Park, and it has been a smashing success since its inception, drawing thousands of buyers and gawkers who feast their eyes and empty their wallets on fresh pieces of art. By riding the Saatchi wave of hipness and hotness in British art, Frieze founders Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover succeeded in crowning London as the world’s second great capital of contemporary art. For one crazed week every year, London’s parties and gallery openings rival anything New York can offer.

 

So, in 2012, has the sinking world economy affected London’s weeklong art bonanza? Apparently not, since several New York galleries continue to open across the pond in a big way. There was plenty of “friezing” at the opening of Pace’s brand-spanking-new space in the Royal Academy building, which featured the unlikely pairing of painter god Mark Rothko with Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. Then there was the opening of a swanky new townhouse outpost for David Zwirner, who presented a large Luc Tuymans show well-tailored to European taste. There was even an all-new gallery for Milan’s ever-popular Massimo De Carlo featuring new work by Piotr Uklanski, as well as sundry other extensions, expansions and pop-up shops.

 

With so much going on, it seems that now almost everyone is saying that art fairs are “out of control.” I’ve thought so for quite a while, yet when I satirized Art Basel Miami Beach less than a year ago, some readers were confused, while others, like Mr. Saltz, attacked me as if I had committed heresy against their church. Funny how quickly the tide turns in art’s little pond. In his Facebook post last Friday, Mr. Saltz proved he’s a switch hitter, rightly pointing out that we have “a hundred art fairs and international biennials … skyrocketing prices during a worldwide economic contraction. The art world’s reflexes are shot; its systems so predetermined that they’re driving us; we’re no longer driving them.”

 

This may be true, but the dynamic has changed for good and there’s no turning back. I can no longer think of the art fair phenomenon as “out of control,” because the fairs are the ones firmly in control. They control a large percentage of gallery sales, and therefore exert a big influence on the size and shape of art; they are a huge force behind art-buying habits and tastes. Fairs are no longer a good or bad thing, they are the thing, the new reality. Fewer and fewer people go to gallery shows, because sadly, people just don’t have the time or the interest. Or perhaps it’s just easier and more fun to show up in London, Miami, Rio or Dubai to see your friends and party like a rock star, while picking up a painting by a hot artist. These days, art fairs are the only weapons smaller galleries can wield against the large and ever-more-powerful auction houses, which continue their incursion even outside the sales rooms, with the expansion of their own privately brokered art sales. Fairs give the art-buying experience an auction-house sense of urgency, and those impulse sales keep many smaller galleries afloat.

 

Understanding the delicate balance between art and the art market is where the founders of Frieze have proven their mettle. Remember last May when they launched Frieze New York on Randall’s Island and drew dozens of galleries from around the world? Back then, I thought New York needed another art fair like I needed a root canal, but I was wrong. It was a big success—the place rocked, and it was packed. I was at first skeptical about the new London fair, Masters, which ran simultaneously with Frieze in another tent, across Regent’s Park: why would a company cannibalize its own business by running two fairs in the same town at the same time? The stated charter included only a subtle difference between the venues: “old” Frieze (now called Frieze London) shows only newish work, whereas new Frieze (Frieze Masters) is limited to “oldish” art. The criterion for “old” seemed pretty random: the work merely had to predate the year 2000, meaning in order to qualify for inclusion, it only had to be 12 years “old”!

You may recall that London already has a modestly successful fair for older and more expensive art that runs concurrently with Frieze, the two-year-old PAD (Pavilion of Art and Design), located conveniently in Berkeley Square. No matter, the Frieze duo forged ahead and hooked up Masters with a whopping 175 of the world’s top galleries, easily dwarfing the two-year-old PAD and creating a fantastic new art fair experience, arguably the best I’ve ever seen. Pace Gallery had a $17 million early black mobile by Alexander Calder that was drop-dead, and Helly Nahmad rivaled it with his own colorful 1960s Calder mobiles fancifully twirling to a ’60s bossa nova soundtrack, one of them priced at $20 million. I got to ogle a sumptuous 16th-century portrait of Jesus by Luis de Morales at Madrid’s Galería Caylus, priced at 250,000 euros, and then swoon over Donald Ellis Gallery’s Navajo chief’s blanket, arguably the finest in the world (the ultra-rare first phase), justifiably priced at $2.5 million; now that’s fun. Frieze Masters was an unqualified success, another feather in the cap of the British franchise, and a considerable feat.

But what does Masters mean in the grand scheme of things—and what does all of this say about the market today? Remember the story of the Greek god Kronos, king of the Titans. He came to power by castrating his father, Uranus, and then, fearing his own children (the Olympians) were destined to do the same to him, he ate them (Zeus was spared and eventually overthrew him, fulfilling the prophecy). Like Kronos, Frieze Masters has castrated its father—this year’s Frieze, newly dubbed Frieze London to distinguish itself from its younger New York sibling, logically lacked the energy and testosterone of prior Frieze fairs. It was crowded with art and people but lacking in quality, although, to be fair, there were hidden treasures. Why would the Frieze founders jeopardize their successful franchise by creating a fancier and more mature version of the same thing? Going forward, collectors will demand a higher-quality experience—more bang for their art fair buck—and the new Masters fair delivers the goods. This is not a bad thing; now the Frieze London fair can keep to its original course and stay true to its commitment to be younger and, hopefully, edgier.

 

In a sinking world economy, dollars will, in all fields, seek out the best values. The feeding frenzy and knee-jerk hunt for the hot, the new and the trendy will not come screeching to a halt, but it is definitely slowing down. Art collectors are bound to get smart and demand quality. Frieze has anticipated this shift and built an all-new venue, one that is both elegant and sophisticated. The decision to emasculate your own art fair by creating a new one must have been a tough one, but in the clash of the titan art fairs it was a smart bet, and it paid off. Frieze Masters could also work well in New York, where fairs of historical art are generally to be found in the fustier confines of the Park Avenue Armory. I hope to “see you real soon”!

-By Adam Lindemann

No ‘Thomas Crown Affair’ @nytimes

AFTER thieves broke into the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on Monday night and stole a king’s ransom’s worth of paintings by the likes of Picasso, Monet, Matisse and Gauguin, the public and the press were shocked. As usual, a combination of master art thieves and faulty security was blamed. But this seductive scenario is often, in fact, far from the truth.

Most of us envision balaclava-clad cat burglars rappelling through skylights into museums and, like Hollywood characters, contorting their bodies around motion-detecting laser beams. Of course, few of us have valuable paintings on our walls, and even fewer have suffered the loss of a masterpiece. But in the real world, thieves who steal art are not debonair “Thomas Crown Affair” types. Instead, they are the same crooks who rob armored cars for cash, pharmacies for drugs and homes for jewelry. They are often opportunistic and almost always shortsighted.

Take the 1961 theft of Goya’s “Duke of Wellington” from the National Gallery in London. While all of Britain believed that the Goya was taken by cunning art thieves, it was actually taken by a retired man, Kempton Bunton, protesting BBC licensing costs. (He apparently stole the painting by entering the museum through a bathroom window.) In 1973, Carl Horsley was arrested for the theft of two Rembrandts from the Taft Museum in Cincinnati. Later, after serving a prison term, he was arrested for shoplifting a tube of toothpaste and some candy bars.

The illicit trade of stolen art and antiquities is serious, with losses as high as $6 billion a year, according to the F.B.I. There have been teams of thieves who have included art among their targets, like the ones who stole a Rembrandt self-portrait from the National Museum in Stockholm in 2000. (The only buyer they found was an undercover F.B.I. agent.) But in general, it is incredibly rare for a museum to fall victim to a “professional” art thief. The reason is simple: the vast majority of people who steal art do it once, because it is incredibly difficult and because it is nearly impossible to fence a stolen masterpiece.

The wide attention that a high-value art heist garners makes the stolen objects too recognizable to shop around. And there are very few people with enough cash to purchase a masterpiece — even for pennies on the dollar — that they can never show anyone. Once an art thief realizes this, he turns to other endeavors. Meanwhile, the stolen treasures lie dormant in a garage or crawl space until he figures out what to do with them.

It’s easy — and sometimes justified — to criticize security systems as flawed or inadequate, but securing a museum is uniquely challenging. Consider this: The goal of an art museum is to make priceless and rare art and antiquities accessible to the public. They are among society’s most egalitarian institutions. Contrast that with a jewelry store or a bank, where armed guards and imposing vaults are the norm. No one expects to be able to be alone with diamonds worth thousands, but museumgoers do expect an intimate experience with masterworks worth millions. Clearly, it is a daunting task to provide robust security without disturbing the aesthetics of the artwork and its environment.

So what is the remedy for the all-too-frequent scourge of art theft? Museums must build systems that cannot be compromised by a single error or failure. Thieves should have to overcome several layers of security before they can reach their target and several more on the way out. At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, we took such an approach after the 1990 theft of several masterpieces — a crime that hasn’t been solved. This not only makes it more difficult to steal and get away with stolen art, but it gives the police precious extra minutes to respond to alarms, especially if, as in Rotterdam, they sound at night.

When art is stolen, local law enforcement should focus on the right sort of criminals rather than conjecture about multinational art theft rings. The key to finding these missing needles in the haystack is to make the haystack smaller; homing in on the most likely suspects quickly is essential to recovering the stolen item. The F.B.I.’ s Art Crime Team has gathered impressive intelligence on who steals art and what becomes of it. For instance, they’ve learned that upward of 90 percent of all museum thefts involve some form of inside information. So often the best approach is to look at active local robbery gangs, and to investigate connections between past and present employees and known criminals. Enhanced employee background checks and discreet observation of visitor behavior also help to deter thefts.

Confronting these realities is essential to preventing more pieces of our cultural heritage from being lost.

 

Anthony M. Amore is the director of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the author, with Tom Mashberg, of “Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists.”

-By ANTHONY M. AMORE

"A Picasso and a Gauguin Are Among 7 Works Stolen From a Dutch Museum" @wsj

PARIS — With impeccable timing and taste, thieves in the wee hours of Tuesday morning plundered an art museum in the Netherlands that was celebrating its 20th birthday and made away with seven borrowed paintings, including valuable works by Picasso, Monet, Gauguin, Matisse and Lucian Freud.

The Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam — which was exhibiting a private collection owned by the Triton Foundation — was closed to the public after the theft, but the bare spaces on its walls were visible to photographers through windows in its modern building by Rotterdam’s museum park and busy Maasboulevard.

The theft was the latest alarm about museum security in Europe, now a prime hunting ground for art thieves. In 2010 five paintings, including a Picasso and a Matisse, together valued at about 100 million euros, or about $130 million, were stolen from the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris; they are still missing.

Police investigators combed the grounds of the museum and studied surveillance video for clues to the burglary, which they said happened about 3 a.m. and set off an alarm linked to a security agency. But by the time police arrived soon after, the works had vanished.

The art, part of a collection amassed by a Dutch investor, Willem Cordia, who died in 2011, was exhibited in public for the first time last week at the Kunsthal, which does not have a collection of its own. The stolen paintings span parts of three centuries: Meyer de Haan’s “Self-Portrait” of 1890 and Gauguin’s 1898 “Girl in Front of Open Window”; Monet’s “Waterloo Bridge, London” and “Charing Cross Bridge, London,” both from 1901; Matisse’s 1919 “Reading Girl in White and Yellow” and Picasso’s 1971 “Harlequin Head”; and Freud’s haunting 2002 portrait “Woman With Eyes Closed.”

The theft “was carefully thought out, cleverly conceived and it was quickly executed, so that suggests professionals,” said Charles Hill, a retired Scotland Yard art detective turned private investigator who went undercover to retrieve a version of “The Scream,” by Edvard Munch, after it was stolen in 1994 in Oslo.

“The volume,” he added, “suggests that whoever stole it owes somebody a lot of money, and it’s got to be a major-league villain.”

“My best guess is that someone doesn’t have the cash to repay a loan,” he said.

Marc Masurovsky, a historian and an expert on plundered art in Washington, noted the possibility that the theft was “a contract job,” adding: “These works were picked out. Could it be they had been targeted well before the theft, and the exhibit was the opportunity to strike?”

Willem van Hassel, the chairman of the Kunsthal’s board, announced the closing of the museum on Tuesday and later held a news conference to declare that adequate security measures had been taken.

At the same conference, the museum’s director, Emily Ansenk, said that night measures involved “technical security,” with no guards but camera surveillance and alarms. Museum officials said that the police had arrived on the museum grounds within five minutes of the alarm.

Ms. Ansenk told reporters that the burglary “has hit the art world like a bomb” and described it “as a nightmare for any museum director.” Kunsthal officials declined to estimate the value of the stolen works, though experts say they are collectively worth many millions of dollars, possibly hundreds of millions. Still, it would be difficult for thieves to sell such easily identifiable artworks, contributing to suspicions about underworld finances.

“I think it’s a form of repayment in kind, a barter — 'I don’t have cash, but I have these paintings,’ ” said Mr. Hill, the art investigator.

Kunsthal officials vowed that the museum would reopen on Wednesday.

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"Christie's to Auction a Monet Painting" @wsj

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Banker Herb Allen's family plans to auction one of Monet's water lily paintings for between $30 million and $50 million. Collectors are buying famous works on hopes they retain their value in the current economy.

In another sign that the smart money set is selling art this auction season, Christie's plans to auction off a Claude Monet painting of a water lily pond for between $30 million and $50 million. The painting was donated to a school by the family of investment banker Herb Allen.

The planned sale next month comes as prices for Monet's watery scenes continue to climb, buoyed by interest from emerging collectors in China and Europe who think values for name-brand artists will hold up during times of economic uncertainty even if prices for lesser-known painters plummet.

Monet's Water-Lily series—the artist painted more than 160 views of his garden pond at Giverny, France between 1905 and his death in 1926—seem particularly popular. Five of the artist's priciest paintings at auction depict his garden, including "The Lily Pond," a 1919 example that Christie's auction house sold to a European buyer for $80.4 million at the peak of the last market in 2008.

"Water Lilies," a painting that dates from 1905 and shows mint-green lily pads bobbing atop a periwinkle pool, will be offered at Christie's evening sale of Impressionist and modern art in New York on Nov. 7.

Christie's specialist Conor Jordan said Chinese interest is already piqued by "Water Lilies," so he's shipping it to Hong Kong next week so potential bidders can take a closer look.

Mr. Allen, the founder of the annual mogul-fest in Sun Valley, Idaho, said his father bought the painting in 1979 with his wife, Ethel Strong Allen. After Mr. Allen's father died in 1997, the painting remained in the collection of his stepmother, who died in June.

Mr. Allen said the school is also auctioning off a pair of Impressionist paintings by Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley that were included in his stepmother's bequest.

Pissarro's 1895 landscape, "Apple Trees and Haymakers, Eragny," shows a pair of women using pitchforks to rake hay into piles in an apple orchard near Pissarro's home in Eragny, France. Christie's estimates the work will sell for at least $2.5 million.

Pissarro's performance at auction has been patchy lately, with several works going unsold, but collectors tend to pay a premium for scenes like this one that show Pissarro's signature way of painting long, afternoon shadows.

Christie's also expects to get at least $2.5 million for Sisley's "Alley of Poplars at Moret on the Bank of the Loing," an 1890 view of a poplar-lined path near a riverbank in the French town of Moret. Sisley's auction record is similarly hit and miss these days, but his poplar series still seems to find plenty of takers: Seven of the artist's priciest works at auction feature riverbank views of Moret—including an 1891 example that broke the artist's auction record when it sold for $5.7 million at Sotheby's five years ago.

Mr. Allen said his stepmother's will bequested all three paintings to his prep-school alma mater, Hackley School, in Tarrytown, N.Y.

-By Kelly Crow