The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

PARIS — In a cultural twofer that makes it Frank Gehry week here, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, a private cultural center and contemporary-art museum designed by Mr. Gehry, had its official inaugural ceremony on Monday, attended by the French president, François Hollande. At the same time, the Pompidou Center across town is giving Mr. Gehry, based in Los Angeles, a major career retrospective, his first in Europe.

The Pompidou exhibition, “Frank Gehry,” establishes a narrative arc for a career that effectively started with small-scale, experimental wood-frame studios and houses in Southern California and culminates in the Vuitton Foundation in the Bois de Boulogne, which some critics have called one of the most technologically sophisticated, artistically motivated buildings of his oeuvre. A 126,000-square-foot, $135 million structure that formally opens to the public next Monday, it promises to add a major contemporary monument to Paris’s long list of historic architecture.

At the end of the ceremony, President Hollande described the building as a “cathedral of light” that was “a miracle of intelligence, creativity and technology.”

Mr. Gehry’s moment in Paris comes after his Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington was approved last week, following a bruising five-year process in which Mr. Gehry’s design went through more than 15 committees and commissions and many adjustments. In Paris, after settling concerns about building in a park, he needed the approval of only one client, Bernard Arnault, chairman and chief executive of the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, whose foundation owns the new building.

“The guy knew what he wanted, and he wanted a building that would be different than anything else anybody had ever seen,” said Mr. Gehry, interviewed over coffee on Monday in his hotel off the Champs Élysées.

Mr. Arnault hired Mr. Gehry, he has said, after seeing his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, a spectacle of fluid forms that reshaped that city’s derelict waterfront while enclosing classical white galleries inside. At Vuitton, Mr. Gehry builds on the Bilbao precedent, creating a more complex structure clad in glass rather than titanium.

Visitors encounter what looks like a Cubist sailboat, with glass sails and spinnakers rising above the tree line and billowing simultaneously fore, aft, port and starboard. The building appears to glide over a cascade of water lapping down a stepped embankment below its cantilevered prow. The two-story structure has 11 galleries, a voluminous auditorium and multilevel roof terraces for events and art installations.

The site is next to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, a 19th-century children’s park and zoo at the north edge of the Romantically landscaped Bois de Boulogne. The architect had to build within the square footage and two-story volume of a bowling alley that previously stood here; anything higher had to be glass. Mr. Arnault’s program for the Foundation, whose stated mission is to stimulate artistic creation, called for a museum with galleries for permanent and temporary exhibitions, and a concert hall.

Mr. Gehry said, “We talked to him about the site, and it was clear that it had to be something that fits into a garden, something in the tradition of a 19th-century glass pavilion or conservatory.”

Unlike his compatriot I. M. Pei, who placed the glass Pyramid at the Louvre to acknowledge the long axis of the Champs Élysées, Mr. Gehry ignored France’s geometric traditions. “The clouds of glass respond to nature’s geometry, to the park’s English landscaping,” he said of the Bois de Boulogne. “Nature’s apparent disorder has its own order.”

In trying to create a spirited adult version of the Jardin d’Acclimatation’s fantasy buildings, Mr. Gehry said he was “very moved by the park, which reminded me of Proust’s Paris.” He added: “I read him over and over again, and I realized it was a pretty emotional site for everybody. It brought tears to my eyes.”

He had two mandates: respecting the park and garden and satisfying the requirements for the galleries.

“Once we had the big, basic premise that there was a solid piece for the galleries, which we started to call the icebergs, and then the glass sails for the garden, we started to work them independently,” Mr. Gehry said. “Merging the two would not work, because you couldn’t have curvy galleries, and you can’t hang paintings on glass.” The diaphanous sails, supported on an acrobatic armature of wood and steel, project outside the iceberg.

The glass structure takes its place in a long Parisian tradition dating from the 13th-century Gothic Sainte-Chapelle on the Île de la Cité, with its tall walls of stained glass, and the 19th-century Grand Palais, an exhibition hall whose glass vaults echo the vast public spaces of Rome. The Foundation’s fragmented, multidirectional forms recall the Cubism of Braque and Picasso. The mission statement of the Foundation acknowledges 20th-century Modern art movements as a basis of the contemporary art it champions.

Visitors enter a tall hall from which angled staircases and meandering paths lead to the galleries and to a roofscape of outdoor terraces enclosed by the glass sails. Between the iceberg and the sailboat, accordion spaces expand and contract, alternately intimate and grand, in what Mr. Gehry called “a chaotic dance.” The white galleries, some with tall ceilings that act as chimneys of light, are “a refuge,” said Edwin Chan, a former design partner in the Gehry firm, who worked with Mr. Gehry and the main project architect, Laurence Tighe. One opens to the sky.

Frédéric Migayrou, the deputy director of the Pompidou, organized the full retrospective and a smaller boutique show of Mr. Gehry’s development drawings that will be on view at the Foundation. “This building doesn’t reveal itself at once, but over many encounters,” he said. “It’s a provocation for the viewer; you have to be part of it, as with an artwork where you make your own experience.”

Claude Parent, France’s 91-year-old éminence grise in architecture whose work in the 1950s and ’60s anticipated deconstructivism, said that when he first saw the Foundation building, “I was seized by an emotion so strong that it seemed to come from something other than architecture.” He called Mr. Gehry’s design “an act of unbridled imagination.”

Others describe the building less favorably. The architecture critic of The Guardian, Rohan Moore, known for his Spartan architectural attitudes, wrote dismissively, “Everything that is good about the Fondation could have been achieved, and better, without the sails.” Denis Lafay, writing in the online financial newspaper La Tribune, did not criticize the architecture but called the building the ostentatious result of an oligarch’s commodifying of artistic creation to burnish his own brand.

At the Foundation, Mr. Migayrou’s immersive show, “Voyage of Creation,” explains the building, with large-screen videos filmed from overhead cranes and drones that flew over and through the building.

“I wanted to give a dynamic view of the building, and the films put the building into movement,” he said in an interview. The show includes many conceptual and development models, along with the seminal sketches Mr. Gehry drew on the long flight back to Los Angeles after he and Mr. Arnault first met to discuss the project.

In the Pompidou retrospective, Mr. Migayrou includes little-known urban designs for housing projects and town plans, evidence of an urban-planning expertise that he said had informed the organization of all of Mr. Gehry’s architectural work. The exhibition also features a wall of previously unexhibited photographs by Mr. Gehry, who gravitated to raw moments in the cityscape, like cement plants, that his eye made beautiful.

“He was photographing the city, the spaces between places,” Mr. Migayrou said.

He also chose models and original drawings to show the evolution of Mr. Gehry’s ideas leading up to the Vuitton Foundation. Other shows, Mr. Migayrou said, “have portrayed Gehry’s buildings as an object, a shape.”

“I tried to do the reverse,” he said, “going through all the works to define the evolution of the language, the continuities, the idea of dynamic movement, how he opens form so that they interact with the city and provoke the movement of the body around the building.”

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "London Caps a Busy Art Week" @wsj by Mary M Lane

LONDON—Christie’s bested rival Sotheby’s and boutique house Phillips during a round of evening auctions last week that tested the contemporary art market before New York’s major November sales.

All three houses logged solid results overall, but critical tests of deceased or older artists for whom the auction houses are trying to develop markets were mixed.

The auction market during Frieze Art Week, the European art world’s most frantic week of buying held each October, was further boosted by a sale of 43 museum-quality works from the collection of Karlheinz Essl, an Austrian owner of DIY stores whose failed expansion into Turkey and Eastern Europe triggered the sale.

Mr. Essl’s auctioned works last Monday totaled $75 million, between the $64 million and $96 million pre-sale estimate. It burnished Christie’sgrowing reputation as the leader in liquidating large single-owner collections, a reputation that first drove Mr. Essl’s interest in having them handle the “painful process,” he says.

German painter Gerhard Richter fetched the top price but also suffered the most awkward moment in that sale: his four-paneled painting “Clouds (Window)” sold for $10 million but “Net,” a major abstract painting expected to sell easily, failed to reach its $12 million low estimate, prompting a funereal moment of silence from the audience.

Mr. Richter, 82 years old, was the world’s most expensive living artist at auction before Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Dog” sold last year for $58 million. Specialists expected demand for Richters to be boosted by his show at Marian Goodman’s new London gallery that opened last week with sold-out works priced between $76,000 and $4.4 million.

But buyers are establishing a pecking order for Mr. Richter’s older works, auction specialists and private dealers acknowledged after the auctions.

Though “Net” is an excellent example of Mr. Richter’s transition between blurring paint and using a squeegee, buyers shunned it because it wasn’t a “typical” Richter, says Christie’s specialist Francis Outred.

“The aesthetic wasn’t fashionable,” he said.

Mr. Richter’s drab camouflage-colored 1971 “Jungle Painting” stalled at Sotheby’s on Friday night under its $3 million low estimate.

The overall contemporary sale at Sotheby’s totaled $45 million, just above the pre-sale low estimate and below Christie’s’ $64 million total for its competing sale held on Thursday. Sotheby’s enjoyed a surprise hit in its side Italian sale on Friday when a private European collector paid $20 million for Piero Manzoni’s “Achrome,” a blindingly white 1958-1959 canvas.

Attempts to drum up market demand for two artists academically revered but ignored by buyers were lackluster, particularly for Cy Twombly and Anselm Kiefer.

Mr. Kiefer, 69, has always been a tricky sell given his heavily Nazi-themed works that frequently depict him giving the “Heil, Hitler” salute in a Nazi uniform. One of two Kiefers at Christie’s stalled at $563,000, far below its $660,000 low estimate. A Mandarin speaker paid $1.9 million for his 1999 work “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!,” a $981,000 loss on the work’s previous value but reflective of a trend amid Chinese millionaires to buy works confronting Maoist thought. A buyer at Phillips paid $1.3 million for “For Paul Celan,” Mr. Kiefer’s homage to the Nazi-persecuted Jewish poet.

Mr. Kiefer’s London dealer Jay Jopling also has taken an unorthodox step to bolster his artist’s soft market by involving an academic institution in a business deal, according to people familiar with the situation. In a move many art insiders would consider anathema, Mr. Jopling himself joined as a main sponsor, along with BNP Paribas, of London’s ongoing Royal Academy exhibition on Mr. Kiefer. Having works in a prestigious exhibition increases an artist’s public profile—and the value of the works.

Mr. Jopling has been quietly selling around seven of the works currently on loan in the show for approximately $750,000 each, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Jopling’s former employee Tim Marlow joined the Royal Academy as director of artistic programs, a newly created position, five months before the show opened. The Royal Academy denied that Mr. Marlow’s transition influenced the show or the sales, of which it says it is unaware.

When asked to comment on the Royal Academy deal and his continued purchases at auction of expensive works by other artists he controls who suffer from soft high-end markets including Tracey Emin, 51, Mr. Jopling said he was “not in the mood” to discuss the matter.

Christie’s next month wants between $35 million and $55 million for a major Twombly abstract but a $24 million Twombly painting offered by Van De Weghe Fine Art at Frieze art fair failed to sell.

The Manhattan auctions begin Nov. 11 at Sotheby’s.

Write to Mary M. Lane at mary.lane@wsj.com

Inside the SculptureCenter in Long Island City, Queens, with Mary Ceruti, left, the center’s executive director and chief curator, and Ruba Katrib, the curator of the upcoming exhibit "Puddle, pothole, portal." Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Visiting the SculptureCenter on its dead-end street in Long Island City, Queens, feels like stumbling onto a loner artist’s studio. The two-story brick building, a former trolley repair shop with the words “Derrick and Hoist Co. Inc.” fading beneath the cornice, has worn its institutional identity so lightly that the center has existed for years as a kind of art-world secret, attracting only 13,000 visitors in 2013, despite being highly regarded by critics and artists.

But now, 86 years into one of the stranger vagabond histories of any New York City art institution, the nonprofit center is beginning to look — if not act — more like a museum. On Sunday, it will open its expanded and renovated building to the public, after a 14-month, $4.5 million project that used the raw materials of contemporary sculpture — Cor-Ten steel plates, concrete slab and plywood — to alter subtly the building’s exterior and interior.

The center, at 44-19 Purves Street, just off Jackson Avenue, will have a new courtyard entrance that leads to its first substantial front desk and a bookshop, across from which visitors will be able to see beyond a floating wall into the cavernous main exhibition space. A roll-up gate that was once the way inside for many of the largest sculptural pieces has been replaced by castle-sized steel doors that look as if they were conceived by Richard Serra. But most of the building remains defiantly garage-like, down to old ceramic electrical insulators jutting from the basement walls.

“There are plenty of white boxes in New York, and we don’t want to be another one,” said Mary Ceruti, the center’s executive director and chief curator, who added that though the center is only blocks from several subway stops and a five-minute walk from MoMA PS1, it has been a place whose location has long defined whom it attracts.

“People come here ready to see art because they’ve made the effort, and that’s a good thing,” Ms. Ceruti said. “Would I like more people to make that effort? Yes, and that’s part of why we did this.”

In some ways, the renovation — while exceedingly modest, compared with those at many other American art institutions — is an indication of the SculptureCenter’s success in a contentious bet it made 13 years ago. Founded in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1928 as the Clay Club, the center soon moved to the West Village and then, in 1948, to a carriage house on the Upper East Side, where it operated a beloved school with artists’ studios.

But in 2001, its board, deciding that the institution was mired in outdated figurative ideas and was out of touch with contemporary artists, upended everything, closing the school and the studios, selling the carriage house and reinventing the center in Queens as a European-style kunsthalle, a noncollecting museum whose mission was to nurture the work of emerging and underappreciated artists.

The move left anger and disappointment in its wake, but by several measures, the center has thrived since. It has shown, early on, the work of many younger artists who have gone on to substantial careers, like Monika Sosnowska, a Polish artist with a show of new work at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Chelsea; Gedi Sibony; Seth Price; Jessica Jackson Hutchins; and Rashid Johnson, whose first solo museum show was there.

It sometimes seems that little of the subsequent attention the artists receive rubs off on the center. But by showing such work, it has solidified a reputation as a place where artists can develop somewhat insulated from the growing pressures of the art market.

“Sometimes, even now,” Ms. Ceruti recalled, “I have a trustee who says, ‘Mary, what do you think of this artist?’ And I say, ‘Well, when we showed her five years ago. ...’ And then I tell the trustee, ‘You were at that show!’ ”

She added, “We have to find better ways to help people remember what we’ve done.”

Andrew Berman, whose architecture firm designed the expansion (the initial design in 2002 was by Maya Lin) said he had sought mostly to create “a measured process of arrival,” an entryway that fostered more anticipation than the center’s previous setup, where visitors entered almost smack-dab into exhibition space.

“The thought was to not in any way iron out its character or even remove the more rough and insistent edges,” Mr. Berman said of the space, which grew 2,000 square feet, to 6,500 square feet. “To me, it speaks of a place where things were made. And that’s sort of perfect as an art space.”

(The exhibition inaugurating the space, “Puddle, pothole, portal,” organized by the curator Ruba Katrib and the artist Camille Henrot, will be a characteristically eccentric, group-show exploration of 20th-century industrial space, using the art of Saul Steinberg and the 1988 movie “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” as unlikely compasses.)

The project — half of its cost was provided by the city, and the rest by private donors — will make the center more approachable, as the neighborhood around it is rapidly transforming from industrial to residential. Not so long ago, the neighbors were a vacant lot and an auto shop; a nearby lumberyard used to lend its forklift for moving sculptures. Now the center is flanked by two tall, shiny new condominium buildings, and there are rumors that a boutique hotel is coming to the block.

“It’s not the Wild West anymore,” Ms. Ceruti said. “There’s a kind of ‘We can’t do anything we want, make all the noise we want, the way we used to’ feeling in the last few years. But the flip side is that people are much more comfortable coming here now. They know people who live here.”      

"Reality Skewed and Skewered (Gushing, Too)" @nytimes by  ROBERTA SMITH

The brooding realism of Robert Gober, which will be haunting 13 galleries at the Museum of Modern Art beginning Saturday, is as American as apple pie — with the sugar left out. The sharpness of his tenderly handmade sculptures and installations — a repertory of familiar yet startlingly altered playpens, sinks and easy chairs and truncated human limbs and bodies — brings us up short.

Mr. Gober’s artwork is often called Surrealist, but it’s too real and full of barbs to comfortably fit that label. One of the first galleries displays five of the stark white bathroom, kitchen and laundry sinks with which Mr. Gober, now 60, first announced his presence to the New York art world in the mid-1980s and separated himself from the overheated bravura of Neo-Expressionist painting and the industrial cool of Minimalism. Symbolism is rife in all his objects, which are also subtly touched all over and full of imperfections.

Lacking faucets or other plumbing, each sink has a ghostly yet resonant visage. The empty faucet holes also evoke the nipples on a headless male torso, pure yet lifeless, like a figure on a cross. In one gallery, a playpen slants precariously; while in another, a playpen is twisted into an X: both visibly hostile to their usual occupants. And in the next, seemingly benign wallpaper repeats hand-drawn images of a black man hanging from a noose and a white man safe and asleep in his bed, while signs of filth and purity — sculptured bags of kitty litter and an ivory satin bridal gown — hold the floor.

Later on, the waxen lower half of a man’s body, hyper-real down to the hairy legs and jammed against the wall as if crushed, is dotted with pale drains absent from the sinks. The implicit obsession with cleanliness expands here and the nine drains also echo AIDS-related Kaposi’s sarcoma. Still later in the show, a slipcovered easy chair is run through with an enormous twisted culvert, a shocking collision of lulling comfort and backbreaking roadwork and a form of penetration so violent rape comes to mind.

The exhibition forms a partial, often painful portrait of a nation, while also suggesting a culmination of restrained American realisms that run from Homer and Eakins to Johns and Vija Celmins, and include Duane Hanson, Walker Evans and Edward Hopper.

It highlights some of the conditions of Americanness: the country’s triumphs and tragedies, its amazing grace and falls from same, its faith in a spirit unseen and preoccupation with sin, and its forgotten respect for manual labor and craft. (In addition to wallpaper, less traditional mediums used here include basket weaving and leather working.)

It also offers sobering reacquaintance with recent history and unfathomable loss: the implacable legacy of slavery, the talent destroyed by the AIDS crisis, the shattering that was Sept. 11. And always at the center — of the show and of art — and in the silence and vulnerability of so much that Mr. Gober has done, dwells the theme of redemptive love and the all too real effect of its absence, which is poisonous hate. This much is stated up front, in the show’s title: “Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor.”

The show’s national portrait is rendered by an artist who is at once a moralist and an aesthete and an anthropologist of his own childhood and psyche, which were shaped by growing up gay and Roman Catholic in mostly Protestant New England. He is also a modest poet who all but disappears behind the mirroring familiarity of his work. Discussing the meaning of his art in The New York Times in 1997, Mr. Gober told Steven Henry Madoff: “It’s kind of hovering, with you in front of it. That’s who I want to stand in front of the work,” he said. “You. Not me.”

As deeply as I’ve been affected by Mr. Gober’s art over the years, I wasn’t sure how a full-dress treatment at the Modern would turn out. A little Gober goes a long way, and it tends toward dour, short on humor and color. It can also seem repetitious. (In the mid-1980s, he made more than 50 increasingly eccentric sinks.)

But the show clarifies his development, revealing its pace with abundant visual jolts. Organized by Ann Temkin, chief curator, and Paulina Pobocha, assistant curator in the museum’s painting and sculpture department, it is full of felicitous signs that Mr. Gober had free rein but overdid nothing, thanks in part to good curatorial instincts and a keen appreciation of empty space. He even pauses to devote two galleries to works by other artists that appeared in group shows he organized, demonstrating a characteristic generosity and illuminating his own work with inspirations or influences. At the same time, the museum seems to have met his every wish, drilling through floors and inserting plumbing where there was none.

The opening gallery introduces a lexicon of themes: the body (a man’s leg protruding from the wall); the insistence on hand-forming, whether difficult or nearly invisible (a seemingly real dented can of paint, made of cast glass); the natural world (a study for the flowering plants painted on the slipcover of his first easy chair) and language (a print of a handwritten card advertising cat-sitting services). Most arresting is “Untitled Closet” (1989), a quaint door frame revealing a shallow, dead-end space. A symbol of family secrets, punishment and the love that sometimes still dares not speak its name, the closet foreshadows Mr. Gober’s preoccupation with architectural detail, while also reflecting his family home, built by his father. But the installation has, foremost, an uncanny beauty that typifies the stillness and quiet of Mr. Gober’s best efforts.

He arrived in New York in 1976 with his art bags pretty much packed. He was not yet 22, had a bachelor’s in fine arts from Middlebury College and was soon making big, detailed dollhouses that he was unsure he could call art. Yet in 1982-83 Mr. Gober created “Slides of a Changing Painting”: 89 images of paintings made on a small piece of plywood in his storefront studio in the East Village. He made a slide of each motif, then scraped off the paint and began again. It is stunning to see how much of his art this work foretells.

Second, and perhaps more shocking, the sinks finally function, acquiring faucets, plumbing and audibly running water. A cacophonous symphony of sights and sounds contrast control and freedom: barred prison windows versus open forests, faucets that gush like waterfalls versus boxes of rat poison. These oppositions, unveiled at the Dia Art Foundation in 1992, turn subtle in bundles of old newspapers full of reports of power and its discontents. Several have ads featuring Mr. Gober in the bridal gown: a gay man forbidden to marry.

The show culminates in Mr. Gober’s memorial to Sept. 11, first seen at the Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea in 2005. It makes an even stronger impression here, in tighter quarters, its resonances heartbreakingly intensified. Spreads from The Times’s Sept. 12, 2001, report about the terrorist attacks approximate stained-glass windows. They are drawn with glimpses of embracing bodies, a combination that powerfully contrasts public and private loss. The pews are apparently palettes of scruffy plastic foam (actually painted bronze), displaying objects that evoke fecundity, birth and the Crucifixion. On the altar wall, a headless body hangs as if on a cross, water sprouting from his nipples, recalls the first sinks. A spring robin perches on his arm. There are more layers of history and meaning to be explored here, but Mr. Gober’s great subjects are autonomy and self-knowledge, which this exhibition demonstrates at nearly every turn. As he said: “You. Not me.”

"Oops! UK council destroys Banksy immigration mural " @miamiherald by DANICA KIRKA

   

After 17 often tumultuous years as director of the Brooklyn Museum, Arnold L. Lehman announced on Tuesday that he is planning to retire around June of next year.

“This has been something I have been thinking about for a while,” Mr. Lehman said by telephone. “I turned three score and 10 this summer. It’s time.”

Mr. Lehman explained that the museum was about to embark on a major capital campaign drive aimed at beefing up its endowment. It is also planning further substantial renovations to the infrastructure of its Beaux-Arts building, which include redesigning more galleries and upgrading them. “Both of these projects could go on for at least five or six years,” he said. “A new pair of hands and a new brain will be good for the museum.”

Elizabeth A. Sackler, chairwoman of the board, said a committee is being formed to find a successor. “Arnold has had a tremendous run,” Ms. Sackler said by telephone. “He had a vision for our collection and our community and he bridged both those things beautifully.”

Mr. Lehman made many attempts to reinvigorate the museum. But he will most likely be remembered for being at the center of one of the most bitter public fights in recent museum history when, in 1999, he presented “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection,” a show of art from the holdings of Charles Saatchi, the British advertising magnate. Although the show was widely popular and attracted some 170,000 visitors, Mr. Lehman was attacked by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Roman Catholic leaders for including an artwork by Chris Ofili depicting the Virgin Mary, decorated with elephant dung.

The mayor threatened to cut the city’s funding to the museum and accused it of colluding with Mr. Saatchi to inflate the value of his art. The museum faced scrutiny for financing the exhibition largely with donations from those who stood to profit from it. Adding to the protests was the revelation that Mr. Lehman had lied about having seen the show himself in London. Still, it was the first time many Americans had seen the work of a generation of British artists, of whom many, like Damien Hirst, Mr. Ofili and Tracey Emin, have gone on to be superstars.

“It was through that show that all those artists were introduced to an American museumgoing public,” Mr. Lehman recalled.

The “Sensation” brouhaha was just one of his struggles. Shortly after he arrived in Brooklyn from the Baltimore Museum of Art, where he had been director for 18 years, Mr. Lehman started making what at the time were considered audacious managerial decisions, ones that made him a kind of lightning rod. In 2006 he shook up the curatorial staff by replacing traditional departments like Egyptian art and European paintings and created two teams, one for collections and one for exhibitions — prompting the resignations of three longtime curators and two board members.

Still, over the years, Mr. Lehman increased the museum’s annual attendance to 558,788 visitors from 247,000. He also more than doubled the institution’s endowment, which is now $123 million, but was $55 million when he arrived in 1997. Since 1998, with the introduction of programs like First Saturdays, when the museum is open free until 11 p.m. on the first Saturday of almost every month, he has transformed the place into a kind of nightclub, with food, wine and live music. This popular event has helped turn the place into a hangout for Brooklyn residents and attract a significantly younger crowd.

“The average age of visitors in 1997 was around 58,” Mr. Lehman said. “A couple of years ago, it was about 35. Now, when I look around, I feel like everybody’s great-grandfather.”

He also made significant architectural changes to the museum’s classical McKim, Mead & White home, the most instantly visible being the redesign of its entrance, with a modern glass canopy. The design, by Polshek Partnership (now Ennead Architects LLC) included a newly conceived lobby and public plaza as well. He has also started systematically renovating the galleries to make them more coherent and climate-controlled.

Many exhibitions on view during Mr. Lehman’s tenure received significant international audiences, including “Monet and the Mediterranean,” in 1998, which drew 225,000 visitors; a show on Jean-Michel Basquiat in 2005 that attracted 184,000; and a show devoted to the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, in 2008, which drew 133,000. He also created a pioneering online presence around 2006, with crowd-sourced exhibitions that included public participation and have engaged thousands of new visitors.

But his goal, he said, was to attract “visitors from across the street as well as around the world.” To do so — often to the consternation of some curators and critics, who thought the institution was presenting too many lightweight shows rather than scholarly ones — he presented populist exhibitions like “Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes and Rage,” in 2000, and “Star Wars: The Magic of Myth,” a 2002 show of costumes and drawings from the movies.

“For me, those Brooklyn shows fell under the category of material culture, a legitimate candidate for art museum display, though not necessarily approachable by traditional formalist critical standards,” Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times in 2009. “I saw the hip-hop show twice. It was packed. Being a greenhorn, I asked my fellow viewers questions — who’s this, what’s that — and learned a lot. It was a great museum experience.”

It was also one that slowly started changing the demographics of the institution’s visitors. An audience survey conducted this year showed that members of minority groups made up more than 40 percent of the museum’s visitors. Seventeen years ago, it was a little more than half that figure, Mr. Lehman said.

Although some critics have said he has not taken advantage of the institution’s world-class permanent collection, which includes extraordinary Egyptian and American art, Mr. Lehman has presented more than 200 shows since 1997 that focused on museum holdings. He has also emphasized the work of local artists and feminist art. And, in 2007, he opened the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the only center of its kind in America.

Mr. Lehman informed the institution’s board of trustees at a meeting on Tuesday afternoon that he intended to leave around June 2015. When asked what he plans to do next, he paused and said: “Having time to read the piles of books and journals at home would be a great luxury. But really, I’m not going to think about it yet.”

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "A Conflict of Minimalist Interests" @wsj by Lance Esplund

'Breda' (1986) Bill Jacobson Studio

Beacon, N.Y.

Retired New York artist Carl Andre is a founding father of American Minimalism—a postwar movement of utopian abstraction so spare, clean and reductive that you could mistake its paintings for blank white canvases and its sculptures for empty packing crates. He's also among the contemporary art world's greatest living conundrums.

His austere, human-scaled sculptures usually comprise numerous pieces of unaltered industrial building supplies such as bricks, stones, two-by-fours, lead pipes, square metal plates and blocks of concrete or rough-hewn timber. Specified numbers of these nearly identical units are usually laid flat on the floor or ground and lined up end-to-end, back-to-back or stacked and combined in various permutations. Unjoined and untransformed, they are arranged with mathematical precision, by human hands, with only gravity to hold them in place.

At Dia:Beacon—Minimalism's mecca on the Hudson—you may not immediately recognize some of Mr. Andre's works as sculptures, as in his signature flat-plate, metal-grid carpets such as "46 Roaring Forties" (1988). A rectangular floor arrangement of 46 one-foot-square steel plates, it's literally a pathway, and the only place in Dia where visitors are encouraged—challenged—to walk on art. "Actually," Mr. Andre has repeatedly stated since the 1960s, "my ideal piece of sculpture is a road."

Born in Quincy, Mass., in 1935, Mr. Andre lives in Manhattan, where his work has been shown at the Paula Cooper Gallery since 1968. He stopped making art in 2010. Although Mr. Andre has been widely exhibited and collected in Europe, he hasn't had a retrospective in the U.S. since 1978-80.

Curiosity stirred, then, when the comprehensive retrospective "Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010" was scheduled to open at Dia. Co-curated by Yasmil Raymond and Philippe Vergne, the show will travel to Madrid, Berlin and then Paris. At Dia, it promised to be definitive—especially when the reclusive Mr. Andre temporarily came out of retirement to help install it.

Commanding a battery of enormous sun-washed galleries and bolstered by Dia's superb permanent collection of sculptures by Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson and Richard Serra, the Andre retrospective is methodical, handsome and perplexing—verging on clinical. In its blatant simplicity and transparency, it's among the most agreeable and undemanding assortments of objects I've ever encountered in a museum. But few major exhibitions have left me feeling as ambivalent. If you believed that a five-decade survey would finally illuminate Mr. Andre's oeuvre as either poetic or prosaic, you may discover, as I did, that it plays cagily in the margins. At times this show inspired keen sensitivity and Zen-like calm; at others it left me cold, bored as a stump—often within the same sculpture.

Without question, Mr. Andre is serious. A suite of videos at Dia show him waxing philosophically about art and painstakingly arranging his stripped-to-the-bone sculptures. He obviously cares. Or does he? Mr. Andre considers himself the first "poststudio" artist. Many of his sculptures' mundane materials can be factory ordered and installed by curators and collectors, and then disassembled and stored when not on view. (If you were so inclined, you could re-create your own Andres at home.)

One of his early assemblages, the unassuming and ephemeral earthwork "Joint" (1968/2014), can be seen slumping and decaying in the middle-distance from Dia's panoramic windows. Offhand, even charming, "Joint" consists of an uninterrupted 252-foot-long tawny column of 126 hay bales laid side-to-side, bisecting Dia's south field. Though stationary, "Joint" seemingly creeps up a gently sloping grassy hill, hugging the ground like a single-file exodus of grazing yellow sheep.

Inside Dia, "Sculpture as Place," self-effacing yet passive-aggressive, is not chronological but, rather, beautifully scattershot. We get walloped with understatement in near-gymnasium-scale galleries that offer a whole lot of not much at all. Mega-Minimalist sculptures waddle among ancient temple ruins, primitive dwellings, monuments and totems; graveyard, loading dock and lumberyard.

In "12 Mixed Pipe & Track Run" (1969), a forlorn line of slightly bent, rusty steel pipes suggests a giant whip or the massive severed tail of the nearby corner-hugging sculpture "9th Cedar Corner" (2007)—a tightly packed triangular grouping of 45 36-inch-tall, 12-by-12-inch blocks of Western red cedar. Elsewhere, waist-high solid-timber walls nearly barricade passage through the museum. In the 91-unit ziggurat "Triskaidek" (1979), similar timbers are stepped high against Dia's wall, suggesting flying buttresses or a pyramid face. And coiled across Dia's floors are wide bands of copper, lead, magnesium, tin and zinc. Luminous, they interrupt expanses of worn, warm-wood floors like whirlpools or mammoth snakes. Likewise, Mr. Andre's flat-plate-metal grid sculptures conjure reflecting pools.

But Mr. Andre's art eschews analogies. I sense he wants each abstraction to be what it is: nothing less; nothing more—even in "Breda" (1986), which refers to the 1624-25 siege and fall of the Dutch fortified city during the Eighty Years' War. "Breda" comprises 97 bricks of Belgian chalky-bone-blue limestone arranged in a column of crosses. It suggests a machine-tooled dinosaur spine, crenellated parapets, headstones and a long manned rowboat. But "Breda" never lets you forget the bare fact—the facelessness—of its humble materials and its modest manufacture, which brings me back to my conflicting responses to Mr. Andre's art.

Mr. Andre began as an erstwhile Dadaist and writer of Concrete Poetry. Displayed here are more than 200 of his visually dense, geometrically constructed typewritten poems, some of which resemble Dadaist graphic design or weavings, as well as several of his early, small, amusing Duchampian Readymades. Other inspirations include the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi, and Mr. Andre's employment in a factory and as a conductor for the Pennsylvania Railroad. A trip to Stonehenge cemented Mr. Andre's desire to pursue sculpture. But the irreverent Readymade—not the singular, enigmatic beauty of Stonehenge or the pared-down essences of Brancusi—is the core influence behind Mr. Andre's cool Conceptualism.

Heightening awareness, "Sculpture as Place" reminds us that the repetition of almost anything can get at the essentials of art. At Dia, I became acutely aware of distinctions among different wood grains, knots and textures; among different colorations and striations in individual bricks and stones. I compared the temperature and shimmer of various metals; the densities among pine, aluminum, concrete and hot-rolled steel. But I recalled that I've had equally expansive experiences perusing aisles of goods at the lumberyard and the hardware store.

Ultimately, Mr. Andre's store-bought, chance-based oeuvre is a gamble, if not a gambit. Provocative yet evasive, his sculptures demand too much and too little: They ask that you question what is and isn't art. But they don't do much else. En masse, their militant informality conveys distance and neglect—dumbing down sculpture to its least common denominator. Art is a dialogue among artist, artwork and viewer. In Mr. Andre's monumental Minimalism, objects are multiplied but not transformed. There's little sense of call-and-response. The artist, in absentia, leaves viewers to do most of the heavy-lifting.

Mr. Esplund writes about art for the Journal.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Recycled History" @wsj RICHARD B. WOODWARD

'A Gold Merchant/James Bond' from 'Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima)' (2010-2011) Rennie Collection

Chicago

'Metamorphology," the needlessly forbidding title of Simon Starling's midcareer retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is a well-intentioned word designed to express what a shape-shifter the British artist has been.

His engagement with transformation was first widely observed in 2005 when he won the Turner Prize, in part for "Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No. 2)." A documented performance as well as a feat of carpentry, it involved his remaking an old wooden German shed into a boat, piloting it down the Rhine River, then hammering it into a shed again once he reached Basel, Switzerland.

There, in a museum, the leaky structure resides. (It hasn't made the Atlantic crossing. To plug this hole in the survey, Mr. Starling's first major U.S. museum show, the curators have substituted a more recent nautical adventure.)

As with many Conceptual artists, a lengthy wall text is required for his pieces to make sense. Some visitors may continue to feel, even after learning about all the Modernist art-history references that guided his hand, that the destination isn't worth the trip.

Not that you need a graduate degree to be impressed by Mr. Starling. Convoluted though his thinking can be, his art has evident respect for labor and skill, avoids sensationalism and mockery, and invites serious reflection, even laughter. The environmental warnings embedded in many pieces are never doctrinaire.

His primary concern is archaeological. He wants to expose, as senior curator Dieter Roelstraete puts it, "the accrued histories of things." The fewer than 20 works here—sculpture, photography, film and video installation—faithfully represent Mr. Starling's whirring, digressive mind.

Take, for instance, the five platinum prints in "One Ton II" (2005) in the first room. The scene in the photographs is a pit mine in South Africa. The weighty title, we are informed, refers to the amount of ore that must be disgorged from the earth to extract 28.3 ounces of the precious metal used to make these prints.

In other words, what we see in a work of art is, in part, the materials that compose it, and those in turn are the residue of human muscle and ingenuity, and of economic forces and industrial processes we should be more aware of.

Born in England in 1967 and living now in Copenhagen, Mr. Starling studied at the Glasgow School of Art, an institution famous for training artists to be attuned to the social context of making and exhibiting art. (During the past 15 years its graduates have dominated the annual Turner Prize. The list of others from there who have either won or been short-listed includes Douglas Gordon, Nathan Coley, Richard Wright, Martin Boyce and Karla Black.)

Mr. Starling tries to be cognizant of place when designing or installing his art. "Bird in Space" (2004), made for one of his New York gallery exhibitions, refers to a landmark legal case from 1926 when Constantin Brancusi's bronze sculpture was seized by U.S. Customs and taxed as a functional metal utensil. In 1928 a judge ruled in Brancusi's favor, a decision that opened the door to artists eventually having the right to declare almost anything a work of art.

Mr. Starling's updated version consists of a 4,900-pound slab of steel that leans against a wall. The skinny pedestal for this massive object, which could be a 1970s-era Richard Serra, is a trio of helium-filled inflatable rubber bladders. Lettering on the slab declares it came from a foundry in Romania, Brancusi's birthplace. What isn't visible is that the metal was imported into the U.S. only after years of deal-making over steel tariffs by unions, world-trade organizations and politicians, including George W. Bush and Tony Blair. By extension, probably every object found in any museum in the world is there not only to showcase artistic talent across the ages, but also because behind-the-scenes forces, including tax laws, have fostered their collection and display.

Mr. Starling often tunnels so deeply into art politics that any chance of having a more direct communion with an audience is lost. "Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima)"—an installation from 2010 combining a 30-minute narrated video projected on a screen with carved wooden masks on sticks—has more walk-on players and heavy themes than a PBS miniseries. Selected here for its relationship to local history, it alludes to Henry Moore's sculpture "Nuclear Energy" (1964-66) at the University of Chicago, installed to commemorate the site of the world's first nuclear reactor. Not content with that episode for drama, Mr. Starling braids it together with the stories of art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, Ian Fleming and James Bond, financier and art collector Joseph Hirschhorn, and Colonel Sanders. Interwoven with their biographies is a Noh drama about a 16th-century Japanese nobleman.

It's not that Mr. Starling fails to connect the dots between, say, Hirschhorn's shady uranium investments in Canada and Modern art and the atomic age; it's that the tale is better suited to an essay or a novel or a documentary film. The Japanese masks of the characters, which we see being carved in the video and which occupy one half of the room, are superfluous.

"Autoxylopyrocycloboros" (2006), among Mr. Starling's most popular works, is more effective and compact. Marking his return to the water and to reclamation, it's a 4-minute slide show that chronicles his 4-hour ride in a small wooden steamboat on Scotland's picturesque Loch Long.

He had rescued the antiquated craft from the bottom of the lake. During the course of his trip, Mr. Starling and his fellow crew member ruthlessly dismantle the boat, sawing off the gunnels and then working their way down, feeding boards into the stove that powers the engine. By the end nothing is left but the floor, and the boat sinks again to the depths of the lake.

With a title that joins Greek words for wood, fire and circularity, the piece has been read as a caution against our heedless use of the earth's resources. But it could just as easily be seen to be in favor of Cold War energy solutions; Loch Long is also home to two of Britain's nuclear submarine bases. Environmental politics aside, it's also like a silent film comedy: Laurel and Hardy go to sea.

Mr. Starling's career, according to the jargon of some curators, has been about "interrogating" Modernism. With its numerous allusions to Marcel Duchamp, Brancusi, Moore and other 20th-century artists and movements, his work is clearly well versed in the divagations of history. He has a scholar's nose for luminous facts that have been dimmed or buried by time.

But to walk through a show of his is like being assigned to read commentaries when you'd rather be spending a few hours with the original. Long before Mr. Starling and his mate burned their own boat, Buster Keaton stripped the wood off a train to power it in "The General," as did the Marx Brothers in "Go West." In the past, those who created funny bits about the paradoxical need to destroy things to survive were called entertainers, while anyone who does the same thing today, more self-consciously and less humorously, is called a Conceptual artist.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

PURCHASE, N.Y. — About halfway through the 20th century, the international postwar artists who called themselves the Zero Group tried to hit the reset button. As they saw it, modern art had been irretrievably damaged by two world wars. The only thing to do was start over.

“The Art of Zero: Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker and Friends,” at the Neuberger Museum of Art, takes us back to that clean-slate moment. Its artworks soothe and pacify with flickering lights, gentle kinetic movements and endless variations on the white-on-white monochrome.

This concise 22-piece survey also whets the appetite for the Guggenheim’s big fall exhibition “Zero: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s,” opening in early October, the latest effort by American museums and galleries to address this branch of the postwar avant-garde. (Just last year, the Guggenheim explored the Zero-related Gutai movement.) Founded in Düsseldorf in 1957 by Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker, Zero was at heart a reaction to (some might say a repression of) Germany’s role in the Second World War. The word “zero” expressed, in Piene’s words, “a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning.” It had a major impact on a slightly younger generation of German artists, such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, who looked askance at Zero’s ethos of renewal and clarity (even while taking to heart its aversion to Expressionism). But the movement was not exclusive to Germany; it crossed borders, linking up with French Nouveau Réalisme, Italian Arte Povera and American Minimalism.

More recently, Zero works have been turning up in droves at art fairs and in commercial galleries. (You suspect that this has as much to do with the clean, design-friendly look of the work as with its historical importance.)

Contemporary artists have also gravitated to Zero Group techniques, making rigorously formal abstract “paintings” with quasi-industrial materials like wood, nails and fabric. A sense of context has been lost, along with some of the more transient aspects of the movement: the manifestoes and one-day exhibitions, the use of ephemeral substances like light and smoke.

The small Neuberger show, organized by Avis Larson, the museum’s assistant curator, can’t quite recreate the Zero Group atmosphere. But it’s an unexpectedly rich, artist-driven selection. The works are drawn mainly from a subset of the Neuberger’s collection, the George and Edith Rickey Collection of Constructivist Art, assembled by Rickey, the American kinetic sculptor, and his wife. Many of the works on view were received as gifts or in exchange for artworks by Rickey; a few are personally inscribed.

Several are kinetic works powered by motors or magnets or both. (Most are timed to go off on the hour and the half-hour.) One or two need to be activated by the guard, like Hans Haacke’s “Slow Bubble” (1964-68), a small Plexiglas column containing a bubble of air trapped in a thick liquid; when the column is upended, the bubble rises.

The show has an enchanting set piece, a blue-walled gallery holding three works that twinkle, rotate and squirm. One is a newly restored light piece by Piene, which has not been seen in three decades; titled “Neon Medusa” (1969), it’s a spherical arrangement of 449 orange glow lamps (each one attached to a single gooseneck rod). The lamps, on timers, blink on and off so as to create varying impressions of sculptural volume.

It’s shown alongside a smaller light work by Piene, the pierced-brass ball “Little Light Satellite (Honolulu Model),” and Gianni Colombo’s elegant “Lo Spazio Elastico” (a suspended wire cube that becomes an animated wall projection with the help of motors and a spotlight).

Surrounding this room are paintings by Zero artists and their associates. A couple of works remind you that some “friends” of the movement are much better known today than its official founders; a Lucio Fontana “Spatial Concept” from 1968 — a pristine white canvas with three long vertical slashes — is prominently installed at the show’s entrance. (In the same firmament as Fontana, though not represented here, are Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni.)

Many other names, however, will seem relatively fresh to American viewers. One of the most astonishing works is a sensual twist on the monochrome grid painting by the Nul (Dutch for zero) artist Henk Peeters, made of cotton balls flattened by a thin veil of white silk.

Another rediscovery is the Brazilian artist Almir Mavignier, whose small, precise, optically confounding abstractions are among the few works in the show to use bright color and actual paint. Like the show’s other Latin American artists, the Venezuelan Jesús Rafael Soto and the Argentine Luis Tomasello, Mavignier became affiliated with Zero while working in Paris in the 1950s.

It will take a bigger show, like the Guggenheim’s, to map out the various global branches and offshoots of Zero. But “The Art of Zero” is an excellent primer, with enough urgency and dynamism to capture a moment compared by Piene to “the countdown when rockets take off.”