"Ruling on Artistic Authenticity: The Market vs. the Law" in @nytimes

This painting attributed to Jackson Pollock is the focus of a lawsuit against the Knoedler gallery.

By
Published: August 5, 2012

Federal District Court Judge Paul G. Gardephe’s résumé includes many impressive accomplishments but not an art history degree. Nonetheless he has been asked to answer a question on which even pre-eminent art experts cannot agree: Are three reputed masterworks of Modernism genuine or fake.

Judge Gardephe’s situation is not unique. Although there are no statistics on whether such cases are increasing, lawyers agree that as art prices rise, so does the temptation to turn to the courts to settle disputes over authenticity. One result is that judges and juries with no background in art can frequently be asked to arbitrate among experts who have devoted their lives to parsing a brush stroke.

The three art cases on Judge Gardephe’s docket in Manhattan were brought by patrons of the now-defunct Knoedler & Company who charge that the Upper East Side gallery and its former president Ann Freedman duped them into spending millions of dollars on forgeries.

The judge’s rulings may ultimately rely more on the intricacies of contract law than on determinations of authenticity. But the defendants and plaintiffs are busily assembling impressive rosters of artistic and forensic experts who hope to convince the judge that the works — purportedly by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko — are clearly originals or obvious fakes.

Of course judges and juries routinely decide between competing experts. As Ronald D. Spencer, an art law specialist, put it, “A judge will rule on medical malpractice even if he doesn’t know how to take out a gallstone.” When it comes to questions of authenticity, however, lawyers note that the courts and the art world weigh evidence differently.

Judges and juries have been thrust into the role of courtroom connoisseur. Legal experts say that, in general, litigants seek a ruling from the bench when the arguments primarily concern matters of law; juries are more apt to be requested when facts are in dispute.

In a seminal 1929 case involving the authenticity of a painting purportedly by Leonardo da Vinci, both a judge and jury got the chance to weigh in. The art dealer Joseph Duveen was sued by the owners of the painting, “La Belle Ferronnière,” for publicly calling it a copy. The jury included a real estate agent, a shirt manufacturer and a furniture upholsterer. Two artists were also on the panel and ended up on opposite sides of a hung jury.

With a deadlock on his hands, the New York State Supreme Court judge took the case back. He rejected Duveen’s argument that artistic attribution was not a question of fact that could be decided in a court of law but purely a matter of opinion, and ordered a second trial. Duveen ultimately settled with the owner.

Legal thinking on questions of authenticity has evolved since. Judges now recognize that while their word is law in the courtroom, in the art world their verdicts can be overturned by a higher authority: the market. “A decision by a court in the United States that a work is authentic may or may not have any value,” said the lawyer Peter R. Stern. “It’s totally up to the market.”

The court settlement in the Duveen case did little to alter the market’s opinion of “La Belle Ferronnière,” which remained unsold until 2010, when Sotheby’s attributed the painting to a follower of Leonardo’s and auctioned it for $1.5 million. (The New York Evening Post understood the court’s limitations back in 1929, when it asked in an editorial on the Duveen case: “How can anyone outside of a comic opera expect the authenticity of an old painting to be settled by a lawsuit?”)


Ruby Washington/The New York Times
“La Belle Ferronnière” was at the center of a legal case over its attribution to Leonardo da Vinci.

Mr. Spencer, who edited the book “The Expert Versus the Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts,” explained the disconnect between the culture of commerce and the courts. “In civil litigation the standard of proof is ‘more likely than not.’ Now picture yourself walking into a gallery and seeing a Picasso. You ask, ‘Did Picasso paint that?,’ and the dealer says, ‘Yes, more likely than not.’ You wouldn’t buy that.”

Just as a woman can’t be a little bit pregnant, a work of art can’t be a little bit real.

The classic example is a 1993 ruling by a federal judge that “Rio Nero,” a mobile ostensibly by Alexander Calder, was the real thing. Despite the decision the owners of this “genuine” Calder could not sell it because the recognized expert, Klaus Perls, had declared it a copy. Nineteen years later it remains unsold.

The judge recognized the problem at the time, noting that Mr. Perls’s pronouncement would make “Rio Nero” unsellable, but concluded: “This is not the market, however, but a court of law, in which the trier of fact must make a decision based upon a preponderance of the evidence,” or what is known as the 51 percent standard.

A 2009 opinion also involving a Calder stated the divide between the court and the market more bluntly. At issue were a couple of stage sets that Calder had designed but did not live to see completed. When the owner, Joel Thome, tried to get the Calder Foundation to authenticate the works so he could sell them, it refused. Mr. Thome sued and lost. The Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court explained its rejection of Mr. Thome’s appeal by referring to “Rio Nero.” The fate of that artwork, Justice David B. Saxe wrote in his opinion, illustrates “the inability of our legal system to provide a definitive determination of authenticity such as is sought by plaintiff.” Having the court declare the sets to be authentic is meaningless, he told Mr. Thome, “because his inability to sell the sets is a function of the marketplace.”

Neither Justice Saxe nor Judge Gardephe would discuss their cases or the issue. What previous rulings show, however, is that while judges and experts consider the same evidence — provenance, connoisseurship and forensic analyses — they tend to value it differently. For example judges tend to give added weight to the signature of an artist on the work, Mr. Spencer said, whereas experts rely more heavily on the connoisseur’s eye.

Juries have also gone their own way. In deciding the Duveen case in 1929, The New York Times reported, jurors reacted to the expert testimony by concluding that “the connoisseurs had given them little but an exotic vocabulary and a distrust for connoisseurs.”

Even an artist’s own word can be overruled by the court. In a case involving a painting by the French painter Balthus, he denied that he created a work sold by a former wife. The case made its way up to the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court and in 1995 the judges ruled that despite Balthus’s fervent disavowals, the painting, “Colette in Profile,” was authentic. In its opinion the court cited testimony that he had previously repudiated some of his works “to punish former lovers or dealers with which he has had disagreements.” It concluded that he seemed to be “acting from personal animus against his former wife.”

In the court’s view both the painting and the desire for revenge were authentic.

A version of this article appeared in print on August 6, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Ruling on Artistic Authenticity: The Market vs. the Law.

"At MoMA a Substitute for Pollock’s ‘One’" in @nytimes via Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr,

Erik Lasalle, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

El Anatsui’s “Broken Bridge,” shown installed in Paris, will be on display at the High Line later this year.

By 
Published: July 26, 2012

Every museum has a few paintings or sculptures so popular that art lovers think of them as old friends. When one disappears, its absence is noticed.

“Our viewers let us know what they miss,” said Ann Temkin, the Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator of painting and sculpture. “If a certain Warhol or Picasso is not on view, people are very vocal.”

Last week “One: Number 31, 1950,” one of Jackson Pollock’s mystical drip paintings, was removed from the walls of the fourth-floor painting and sculptures galleries and taken to the Modern’s conservation lab for a few months for study and cleaning as part of a larger research project. So Ms. Temkin had a considerable hole to fill. “I did feel we had to put up another major Pollock in its place,” she said.

MoMA has a few drip Pollocks from which to choose. The issue, though, was size. “One: Number 31, 1950” is almost 18 feet long, a length Pollock worked with knowing the dimensions of the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, where it was first shown. None of MoMA’s other drip Pollocks are anywhere near as big.

“We do have an equally great, though not as gigantic, Pollock,” Ms. Temkin said, referring to “Number 1 A, 1948,” which has just been hung in place of “One.” “It’s the painting where Pollock’s hand prints are visible in the upper right-hand corner,” she said, “and it was made a year and a half earlier at that very moment when all of the Abstract Expressionist painters were at that breakthrough moment.”

A canvas of delicate layered webs, globs and pools of paint, “Number 1 A, 1948” is just shy of nine feet long. But when she hung it on the wall, Ms. Temkin was surprised. “It has the amazing capacity for its presence to expand far behind the boundaries of the canvas itself,” she said.

TIN DRAPERY FOR HIGH LINE

The High Line attracts nearly four million visitors a year, and it had 500,000 last month alone. It has become a phenomenon, not simply as a place to walk above the dense city streets and enjoy views of the Hudson River, but also as a serious art destination. Year by year its arts programming grows. Now it includes films and performances as well as projects by fine artists.

A star in the fall lineup will be a site-specific installation by El Anatsui. This artist, who was born in Ghana and lives in Nigeria, is known for his shimmering, almost painterly tapestries fashioned from discarded bottle caps that are woven together with copper wire. On an outdoor wall adjacent to the park, between 21st and 22nd Streets, he will be creating “Broken Bridge,” a monumental drapery made from pressed tin and mirrors.

“He hasn’t shown here much except in galleries,” said Cecilia Alemani, the curator and director of High Line Art. “We’re particularly excited because this piece is slightly different than others he has made in the past, since it includes mirrors that will reflect the surrounding landscape.”

“Broken Bridge,” his first outdoor installation in the United States, is to be installed in early October and be on view through the spring of 2013.

NEW MUSEUM EXPANSION

In 2009 the New Museum bought 231 Bowery, the building next door to its current home on the Lower East Side. While it has yet to undergo extensive renovations, the building is being used for artist residencies and additional ground-floor exhibition space, which the museum calls “Studio 231.” At the same time it has been working on an expansion that does not have the construction headaches of bricks and mortar.

The museum has recently raised about $1 million to expand virtually, redesigning its five-year-old Web site. The new site, four years in the making, is to go live on Friday. “We hope it will be a destination location,” Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum, said in a telephone interview. “We have a fast-growing online audience that is already three times the size of our on-site audience, which is about 350,000 visitors a year.”

These are among the Web site’s new features:

¶The Art Spaces Directory, an international guide with an interactive map to more than 400 independent art spaces in 96 nations.

¶A digital archive of the museum’s 35 years, including images, videos and publications.

¶“First Look,” a series organized by the curator Lauren Cornell, featuring a new digital artwork every month. “It will be a combination of either works that are not familiar to a wide audience or commissions,” Ms. Phillips said. She explained that the museum plans to tap artists who already work in the digital realm. It also intends to ask artists who have not created digital works before to contribute. For the Web site’s start Taryn Simon, an artist, and Aaron Swartz, a Web programmer and political activist, have teamed up to create “Image Atlas,” which invites viewers to enter a key word: what pops up will be top results from search engines around the world.

¶A blog called Six Degrees will have weekly interviews, photographic essays, short videos, reviews and curators’ recommendations. Running alongside it will be social-media platforms inviting public participation.

THE STAMPS OF DANCERS

While the financially troubled United States Postal Service may be streamlining operations, it continues to commission artists for new stamps. On Saturday it introduces “Innovative Choreographers,” four first-class stamps depicting the dance giants Isadora Duncan, José Limón, Katherine Dunham and Bob Fosse.

James McMullan, best known for the posters he has created for the Lincoln Center Theater, illustrated the stamps. Working primarily from archival photographs, Mr. McMullan said he wanted his stamps to be different from the rest. “I love dance, and I love gesture,” he said in a telephone interview from his home and studio in Sag Harbor, on Long Island. “This was the opportunity to make something unusual, something with movement rather than a static portrait.” Each choreographer is depicted in a move identifiable with his or her work.

In addition to the stamp project Mr. McMullan has also been looking through his archives in preparation for a retrospective of his work that opens on Nov. 21 at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where he teaches. “There will be materials besides the theater posters,” he said, explaining that the show will include life drawings — both pencil and gouache — that he has been making for more than 30 years.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 27, 2012, on page C22 of the New York edition with the headline: At MoMA a Substitute for Pollock’s ‘One’.
via bassmuseumpres.tumblr.com

"At MoMA a Substitute for Pollock’s ‘One’" in @nytimes via Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr,

Erik Lasalle, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

El Anatsui’s “Broken Bridge,” shown installed in Paris, will be on display at the High Line later this year.

By 
Published: July 26, 2012

Every museum has a few paintings or sculptures so popular that art lovers think of them as old friends. When one disappears, its absence is noticed.

“Our viewers let us know what they miss,” said Ann Temkin, the Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator of painting and sculpture. “If a certain Warhol or Picasso is not on view, people are very vocal.”

Last week “One: Number 31, 1950,” one of Jackson Pollock’s mystical drip paintings, was removed from the walls of the fourth-floor painting and sculptures galleries and taken to the Modern’s conservation lab for a few months for study and cleaning as part of a larger research project. So Ms. Temkin had a considerable hole to fill. “I did feel we had to put up another major Pollock in its place,” she said.

MoMA has a few drip Pollocks from which to choose. The issue, though, was size. “One: Number 31, 1950” is almost 18 feet long, a length Pollock worked with knowing the dimensions of the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, where it was first shown. None of MoMA’s other drip Pollocks are anywhere near as big.

“We do have an equally great, though not as gigantic, Pollock,” Ms. Temkin said, referring to “Number 1 A, 1948,” which has just been hung in place of “One.” “It’s the painting where Pollock’s hand prints are visible in the upper right-hand corner,” she said, “and it was made a year and a half earlier at that very moment when all of the Abstract Expressionist painters were at that breakthrough moment.”

A canvas of delicate layered webs, globs and pools of paint, “Number 1 A, 1948” is just shy of nine feet long. But when she hung it on the wall, Ms. Temkin was surprised. “It has the amazing capacity for its presence to expand far behind the boundaries of the canvas itself,” she said.

TIN DRAPERY FOR HIGH LINE

The High Line attracts nearly four million visitors a year, and it had 500,000 last month alone. It has become a phenomenon, not simply as a place to walk above the dense city streets and enjoy views of the Hudson River, but also as a serious art destination. Year by year its arts programming grows. Now it includes films and performances as well as projects by fine artists.

A star in the fall lineup will be a site-specific installation by El Anatsui. This artist, who was born in Ghana and lives in Nigeria, is known for his shimmering, almost painterly tapestries fashioned from discarded bottle caps that are woven together with copper wire. On an outdoor wall adjacent to the park, between 21st and 22nd Streets, he will be creating “Broken Bridge,” a monumental drapery made from pressed tin and mirrors.

“He hasn’t shown here much except in galleries,” said Cecilia Alemani, the curator and director of High Line Art. “We’re particularly excited because this piece is slightly different than others he has made in the past, since it includes mirrors that will reflect the surrounding landscape.”

“Broken Bridge,” his first outdoor installation in the United States, is to be installed in early October and be on view through the spring of 2013.

NEW MUSEUM EXPANSION

In 2009 the New Museum bought 231 Bowery, the building next door to its current home on the Lower East Side. While it has yet to undergo extensive renovations, the building is being used for artist residencies and additional ground-floor exhibition space, which the museum calls “Studio 231.” At the same time it has been working on an expansion that does not have the construction headaches of bricks and mortar.

The museum has recently raised about $1 million to expand virtually, redesigning its five-year-old Web site. The new site, four years in the making, is to go live on Friday. “We hope it will be a destination location,” Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum, said in a telephone interview. “We have a fast-growing online audience that is already three times the size of our on-site audience, which is about 350,000 visitors a year.”

These are among the Web site’s new features:

¶The Art Spaces Directory, an international guide with an interactive map to more than 400 independent art spaces in 96 nations.

¶A digital archive of the museum’s 35 years, including images, videos and publications.

¶“First Look,” a series organized by the curator Lauren Cornell, featuring a new digital artwork every month. “It will be a combination of either works that are not familiar to a wide audience or commissions,” Ms. Phillips said. She explained that the museum plans to tap artists who already work in the digital realm. It also intends to ask artists who have not created digital works before to contribute. For the Web site’s start Taryn Simon, an artist, and Aaron Swartz, a Web programmer and political activist, have teamed up to create “Image Atlas,” which invites viewers to enter a key word: what pops up will be top results from search engines around the world.

¶A blog called Six Degrees will have weekly interviews, photographic essays, short videos, reviews and curators’ recommendations. Running alongside it will be social-media platforms inviting public participation.

THE STAMPS OF DANCERS

While the financially troubled United States Postal Service may be streamlining operations, it continues to commission artists for new stamps. On Saturday it introduces “Innovative Choreographers,” four first-class stamps depicting the dance giants Isadora Duncan, José Limón, Katherine Dunham and Bob Fosse.

James McMullan, best known for the posters he has created for the Lincoln Center Theater, illustrated the stamps. Working primarily from archival photographs, Mr. McMullan said he wanted his stamps to be different from the rest. “I love dance, and I love gesture,” he said in a telephone interview from his home and studio in Sag Harbor, on Long Island. “This was the opportunity to make something unusual, something with movement rather than a static portrait.” Each choreographer is depicted in a move identifiable with his or her work.

In addition to the stamp project Mr. McMullan has also been looking through his archives in preparation for a retrospective of his work that opens on Nov. 21 at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where he teaches. “There will be materials besides the theater posters,” he said, explaining that the show will include life drawings — both pencil and gouache — that he has been making for more than 30 years.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 27, 2012, on page C22 of the New York edition with the headline: At MoMA a Substitute for Pollock’s ‘One’.
via bassmuseumpres.tumblr.com

"Becoming Jackson Pollock: Men of Fire" @ Hood Museum By Lee Rosenbaum - WSJ.com

By LEE ROSENBAUM[pollock2]University of Iowa Museum of Art, Gift of Peggy Guggenheim

"Mural" (1943) by Jackson Pollock

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

Hanover, N.H.

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

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

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

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

Gallery: 'Men of Fire'

View Slideshow

[SB10001424052702304050304577378242567263440]
2012 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can see the truth of that in Hanover.

via online.wsj.com

 

"Sending American Artwork Abroad" in @wsj Magazine

By SARA RUFFIN COSTELLO

[mag0512abroad]Jack Shear

Ellsworth Kelly, Beijing Panels, 2003

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

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

Photos: Americans Abroad

Photo by Tony Floyd

Odili Donald Odita, Light and Vision, 2010

 

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

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

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

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

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

mag0512abroad
Portrait by Alex Majoli and Daria Birang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

via online.wsj.com

 

Rothko, Warhol and Pollock Works Headed to Auction - "Personal Connections Lead to a Special Auction" @nytimes

Eager to surprise her new husband, Mrs. Pincus said, she sweet-talked a concierge at the hotel to tell her everything he could about Moore. She learned that the artist had tea delivered to his room early every morning. That night she slipped the concierge a note to go on Moore’s tea tray telling him what fans she and her husband were and asking him if they could possibly meet.

“The next morning the phone rang,” Mrs. Pincus went on. “David answered it and said, ‘It’s a man, and it’s for you.’ He wasn’t happy.” The caller was Moore, who invited the couple to breakfast.

For David Pincus, a clothing manufacturer, and his wife, that meeting — followed by countless visits to Moore’s home and studio in England — began a lifelong passion for artists and for collecting. Over a 50-year marriage the couple got to know many of the biggest talents of their day: Andy Warhol, John Chamberlain, Mark di Suvero, Claes Oldenburg, Anselm Kiefer and Jeff Wall.

The couple also became involved with museums like the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where they served on boards, gave money and donated as well as loaned these institutions countless works of art.

Mr. Pincus died in December, and now Mrs. Pincus is selling a significant portion of her collection at Christie’s in New York on May 8 and 9, including seminal examples of paintings by Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning: Abstract artists who are all the rage now. The collection is expected to bring a total of about $100 million.

Mrs. Pincus said the decision to hold an auction has been difficult. “Our foundation needs money,” she explained, referring to the Pincus Family Foundation, which supports various causes including pediatric AIDS initiatives, museums and hospitals.

Laura Paulson, a deputy chairwoman of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, knew the couple for nearly 30 years. “They had a boundless appetite for art and would go all over the world buying from artists and from galleries,” she said. “David had an intuitive eye.”

Often their purchases reflected current events, Ms. Paulson explained. For example, in 1965, when the Institute of Contemporary Art organized Warhol’s first museum retrospective, the couple ended up buying his “Sixteen Jackies” (which they sold at Christie’s in 2006 for $15.7 million).

“Responding to the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, the couple also bought eight Warhol paintings of electric chairs,” Ms. Paulson added. Over the years they sold or donated them to museums.

Top among the paintings up for sale is a 1961 Rothko, “Orange, Red, Yellow,” which the Pincuses bought from the Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1967. Measuring nearly 8 feet by 7 feet, the painting is unusually large and of vibrant orange and reds. It is estimated to sell for $35 million to $45 million.

There have not been many paintings by Pollock at auction recently, and Christie’s will be selling “No. 28,” from 1951, one of his combinations of drip and painting in shades of silvery gray with red, yellow and shots of blue and white. Its estimate is $20 million to $30 million.

The auction will also include Newman’s, “Onement V,” from 1952. The last of a series of five paintings, it is the only one that is not in an American museum. The canvas, of rich blues, is expected to bring $10 million to $15 million.

Christie’s will also be selling the Pincuses’ de Kooning paintings and sculptures. One of the paintings, “Untitled V,” from 1983, was included in the recent de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. It is expected to bring $4 million to $6 million.

Asked why she thinks there is such a craze right now for abstract art, Mrs. Pincus paused and said: “I have no idea. When we started out, our friends said: ‘Are you crazy? Why are you putting that junk in your house?’ “

WORKS ON THE WATERFRONT IN BROOKLYN

A series of rectangular modules fashioned from galvanized steel, acrylic, Douglas fir, glass and plastic currently sits in the lobby of the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of its Biennial. The work of Oscar Tuazon, born in the United States and based in Paris, “For Hire,” as the installation is called, is not just a visual environment; it has its practical uses too. On May 20 it will move to the Whitney’s fourth floor, where it will function as a runway for a fashion show by K8 Hardy, founder of the feminist art collective LTTR.

For his next act Mr. Tuazon is creating three site-specific sculptures for Pier 1 at the new Brooklyn Bridge Park. On view from July 19 through April 26, the works will incorporate local trees, and like the sculpture at the Whitney they will be functional as well as interactive. (One will serve as a passageway along the pier.)

Having site-specific installations is a first for the park, for Mr. Tuazon and for the Public Art Fund, which has organized the project.

“We know that Brooklyn is an incubator for young artistic talent, so this is especially appropriate,” said Nicholas Baume, director of the Public Art Fund. “Michael Van Valkenburgh’s vision for Brooklyn Bridge Park has created one of the most extraordinary new landscapes in the middle of New York City, and now, for the first time, one of our most exciting emerging artists has the chance to respond to it.”

Mr. Tuazon’s installation is just one of many projects on the Public Art Fund’s spring and summer schedule. Perhaps the most unusual will occupy the Doris C. Freedman Plaza, on Fifth Avenue and 60th Street, from June 20 to Aug. 26. A twin-engine airplane rotating on its own axis, called “How I Roll,” is the first public art project in America for the Italian artist Paola Pivi. “It will be one of those projects that stops people in their tracks,” Mr. Baume said.

via nytimes.com

Authenticity of several Pollocks and Rothkos challenged in court

Left, the “Elegy” painting that the dealer Julian Weissman bought from Glafira Rosales and sold to an Irish gallery that later demanded its money back; right, Motherwell’s “Spanish Elegy (Alcaraz) XV,” from 1953, which is part of the catalogue raisonné sponsored by the Dedalus Foundation.

Published: February 22, 2012

     

    Cezanne Becomes Priciest Painting Ever

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