George Lindemann Journal - "Sotheby's Strong Sale Anchored by $50 Million Giacometti Bronze" @wsj -by @KellyCrowWSJ

George Lindemann Journal

After Christie's bumpy lead-in to the New York fall auctions, Sotheby's held a robust sale of Impressionist and modern art on Wednesday that could reassure collectors about the trajectory of the market overall.

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Alberto Giacometti's "Large Thin Head (Large Head of Diego)" sold for $50 million at auction in New York Wednesday. Reuters

Earlier this week, Christie's three-day series of Impressionist and modern art sales totaled $293.7 million. On Wednesday, Sotheby's got nearly that much from its evening sale alone. Its $290.2 million total represented one of the highest in the company's history, thanks to a trio of pieces that each topped $30 million.

New York dealer Bill Acquavella, who buys for American billionaires, paid $50 million for Alberto Giacometti's "Large Thin Head (Large Head of Diego)," a 2-foot-tall, spindly bronze bust of the artist's brother that was priced to sell for $35 million to $50 million. An anonymous telephone bidder also paid $39.9 million for Pablo Picasso's colorful 1935 portrait of his mistress sporting a purple beret, "Head of a Woman." That painting was only expected to sell for up to $30 million.

Picasso's cherry-red, 1969 portrait of a swashbuckling musketeer, "Musketeer with a Pipe," also sold for $30.9 million, exceeding its $18 million high estimate and resetting the high bar for a late-era work by the artist. The buyer was Monte Carlo dealer David Nahmad, whose son Helly was recently accused by federal prosecutors in Manhattan of participating in an illegal gambling ring. The Nahmads have denied any wrongdoing.

The art market is a high-stakes table all its own, and Sotheby's said collectors from 13 countries anted up on Wednesday—notably those hailing from the U.S., Switzerland and Latin America. Collectors from the last group, including Brazilians, took home Francis Picabia's $8.8 million "Volucelle II," a confection of black-and-white stripes dotted with colorful, bowling ball-shaped orbs, as well as works by Marc Chagall. Chinese collectors also underbid heavily for classic examples of Impressionists like Camille Pissarro and Claude Monet.

At least five bidders chased after Monet's shivery "Icicles," and a telephone bidder won it—after a protracted bidding war—for $16.1 million, over its $14 million high estimate.

Dealers said Sotheby's won out this week in part by offering works that hadn't been traded lately in the marketplace, which gave the works a where's-that-been freshness that collectors crave. Only a dozen of its 64 offerings had even turned up at auction in the past two decades and several of the priciest offerings, like the Giacometti bronze, were auction first-timers. After Christie's saw some of its most expensive examples by Picasso fail to find takers earlier this week, Sotheby's also had the luxury of time to go back to its sellers and adjust their reserves, or minimum asking prices, downward. Bidding for some of Sotheby's works, like a Juan Gris that sold for $8.8 million, started at $4.7 million—well below a typical starting price.

But bidders at Sotheby's also exuded more exuberance, a sign they may have simply preferred the house's offerings over its rival this time around. The telephone buyer of the Gris also picked up a $1.9 million Giorgio de Chirico, a $2.6 million Jacques Lipschitz, and a $1.4 million Auguste Rodin.

Overall, 52 of Sotheby's 64 pieces found buyers, helping the sale achieve a strong 92.3% of its potential presale value. Records were broken for artists like Picabia, Lipschitz, Jean Arp, and Gustave Courbet.

After the sale, Sotheby's specialist Simon Shaw said collectors are still willing to shop, but they no longer want to overpay. "The market sorts out what's truly great."

George Lindemann Journal - "2 Founders of Dia Sue to Stop Art Auction" @nytimes by @randykennedy

George Lindemann Journal

Two founders of the Dia Art Foundation have taken the unusual step of going to court to try to stop the art organization from auctioning off as much as $20 million in works from its world-class holdings next week at Sotheby’s.

 

The foundation has come under fire from many parts of the art world over its decision to sell the works and has defended itself by saying that it needed the money to continue to grow and to buy new artworks.       

Heiner Friedrich and Fariha de Menil Friedrich, who formed Dia in 1974 to support contemporary artists doing challenging work, filed suit in state court in Manhattan on Thursday, seeking an injunction against the foundation and Sotheby’s, which is planning to auction Dia works by luminaries like Cy Twombly, John Chamberlain and Barnett Newman on Wednesday. Many of the works named in the lawsuit were donated by Mr. and Ms. Friedrich when they created the foundation with the art historian Helen Winkler. The lawsuit claims that selling the works to private collectors would remove them “from public access and viewing in direct contravention of Dia’s entire intent and purpose.” The auction would be a breach of an “implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing” with the Friedrichs and the artists who made the works, the suit states.

In a phone interview, Mr. Friedrich, who last served on the foundation’s board in the mid-1980s, said: “The foundation must raise funds differently than through selling works of art, selling its heritage.”

Officials at Sotheby’s and Dia said they were reviewing the papers and had no comment.

Mr. and Ms. Friedrich and other opponents of the sale have met over the last several months with Dia’s director, Philippe Vergne, to try to dissuade the foundation from selling the works. Mr. Vergne has said he believes the sale to be crucial for helping the foundation evolve as it embarks on building a new Manhattan home in Chelsea. In 2004, Dia closed its two Chelsea galleries, saying it had outgrown the buildings. Its permanent collection — a huge array of works from the 1960s to the present — is now displayed in the foundation’s outpost in Beacon, N.Y.

“Dia cannot be a mausoleum,” Mr. Vergne said in June, in announcing the planned sale. “It needs to grow and develop.”

Shortly after that announcement, Paul Winkler, the former director of the Menil Collection in Houston, which has one of the best Twombly collections in the world, wrote to the foundation urging it to rethink the sale, which includes Twombly’s “Poems to the Sea,” a suite of 24 drawings from 1959, and Newman’s “Genesis — The Break,” a 1946 abstract canvas. “Poems” is expected to sell at Sotheby’s contemporary art auction next week for $6 million to $8 million.

“Cy Twombly considered ‘Poems by the Sea’ to be one of the greatest sets of drawings,” wrote Mr. Winkler, brother of Ms. Winkler. “It is a masterwork, not a minor piece to be sold to beef up an acquisition fund. The same can be said of the exceptional Chamberlain work in your care and Newman’s ‘Genesis — The Break.’ ” The Friedrichs, who were once married but have since divorced, acknowledge in the lawsuit that terms under which these works passed to the foundation may not be clear. An original statement of purpose, saying that “works of art purchased by plaintiffs through Dia or donated by them to Dia were to form permanent collections for the public” cannot be located in Mr. and Ms. Friedrich’s documents, the suit says.

But the court papers also raise the possibility that Twombly’s “Poems,” as well as some Chamberlain works and other Twomblys, might not be legally owned by Dia but might be long-term loans from the Friedrichs. The suit claims that a museum, possibly the Menil, was in discussions to buy “Poems” but that Dia rejected the offer.

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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 8, 2013

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Helen Winkler. She is an art historian, not an artist-historian.

George Lindemann Journal - "Documents Reveal How Looted Nazi Art Was Restored to Dealer" @nytimes by @PatcohenNYT

George Lindemann Journal

Throughout the waning years of World War II, a band of Allied soldiers, art historians, curators and scholars labored to safeguard Europe’s cultural heritage and recover the millions of artworks and other treasures plundered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Nicknamed the Monuments Men, this group set up a string of temporary collection points for the valuables.

Among the art in their care was a cache of 115 paintings, 19 drawings and a half-dozen crates of objects that the British had found in Hamburg in 1945. The works were registered under the name of Hildebrand Gurlitt, according to documents unearthed this week in the National Archives in College Park, Md., by Marc Masurovsky, the founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project.

Now, six decades later, restitution experts said it is possible that this collection, once entrusted to the Monuments Men, is part of the astonishing stash of more than 1,400 works seized in 2012 by German investigators from the apartment of Gurlitt’s son Cornelius and brought to light this week. It is considered to be the largest trove of missing European art to have been discovered since the end of World War II.

For five years, the elder Gurlitt, one of a handful of German dealers whom the Nazis had anointed to sell art confiscated from Jews and museums and sold abroad for foreign currency, had insisted these works were rightfully his. With the European recovery effort finally winding down, officials at a collection center in Wiesbaden agreed to return the cache to Gurlitt.

On Dec. 15, 1950, the leader of the Allied unit, Theodore Heinrich, an American, signed the papers releasing the art to Gurlitt. The names and descriptions of a handful of paintings in the cache returned to Hildebrand Gurlitt — including gems by Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and Marc Chagall — appear to match those once hidden in the cluttered apartment of his son.

The State Department in Washington says it is pushing the German authorities to make public a list of the seized works. Without the list, it is impossible to confirm with certainty that any of the pieces returned in 1950 to Hildebrand Gurlitt are the same as those seized last year. Mr. Masurovsky, however, said he believes that at least some of the works returned by the Allies in 1950 are the same.

What can be confirmed is that at least eight of the paintings that were returned in 1950, and that the elder Gurlitt maintained he had legitimately acquired were, in fact, stolen by the Nazis. These eight are currently listed in a database of looted art that the Nazis had stored at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris after they occupied France. Those works are all by the French painter Michel Georges-Michel, whose apartment and studio were ransacked by Nazi agents in 1941.

Mr. Masurovsky and other restitution experts said the 1950 list might help with the identification of works that the Germans recently took from Cornelius Gurlitt’s apartment.

Among the other items returned to Hildebrand Gurlitt 63 years ago were dozens of works by German Expressionists including Dix, Georg Grosz (“Two Women and a Man Walking”); Erich Heckel; Max Beckmann (“Lion Tamer” and “Woodcutters”); Christian Rohlfs (“Yellow Flowers” and “White Flowers”); and Franz Lenk. Italian, French and Dutch masters were on the Allied list, as well, including Guardi’s “Entrance to a Monastery,” Fragonard’s “Anna and the Holy Family,” Caspar Netscher’s “Boys Blowing Bubbles,” and landscapes attributed to Ruysdael and Rombouts. The collection included Gustave Courbet’s “The Father” and “Landscape With Rocks”; and Max Liebermann’s “Wagon in the Dunes” and “Two Riders on a Beach.”

Mr. Masurovsky pointed to the return as an instance when the Monuments Men let looted art slip through their hands.

Historians have pointed out, however, that finding the legal owner in the confusion of postwar Europe, without the aid of computerized databases and, often, documentation, was extremely difficult. France, for example, still has nearly 2,000 works in its museums that it knows were looted, but cannot properly identify owners.

Hildebrand Gurlitt was an art historian who had twice been stripped of posts because he had a Jewish grandparent; nonetheless, he had the expertise and international connections the Germans needed to move plundered works to market. He also crisscrossed Nazi-occupied territory during the war looking for treasures to fill Hitler’s grand plans for a museum in Linz, Austria. German and American investigators had questioned Gurlitt about his dealings after the war, archival documents show, but he insisted that all of the art that remained was his own. Other works that he had gathered for the Nazis, he said, as well as his records were destroyed in the firebombing of Dresden in 1945.

As for the Modern works, which the Nazis labeled degenerate, many had been discarded or sold off from museums by the Third Reich and could have been legally acquired by Gurlitt and other collectors — even for a pittance.

So far only one among the more than 1,400 works that were taken from Cornelius Gurlitt’s squalid Munich apartment has been positively identified. Marianne Rosenberg, the granddaughter of the renowned French dealer Paul Rosenberg, confirmed that a photograph of a Matisse portrait of a woman wearing pearls that was released by German officials this week matches one owned by her family. (German authorities had previously said that at least one painting used to belong to Rosenberg, who imprinted his gallery’s stamp on the back of all his works.) 

“The Rosenberg family is, of course, delighted to see a color reproduction of the beautiful Matisse which until now had only existed for them as a black and white photograph in their archives of looted art,” Ms. Rosenberg said in an email, adding that the family “is proceeding diligently and carefully with a claim for restitution. The Rosenberg family still insists, however, that the German authorities must promptly do the right thing and provide photographs and lists of all the other items.”

George Lindemann Journal - German Officials Provide Details on Looted Art @nytimes -By @MELISSAEDDY

George Lindemann Journal

Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Paintings Discovered in Germany: Hundreds of forgotten art works were found hidden in a Munich apartment.

By MELISSA EDDY, ALISON SMALE, PATRICIA COHEN and RANDY KENNEDY 

It is almost certainly the biggest trove of missing 20th-century European art discovered since the end of World War II, and the first glimpse of it on Tuesday brought astonishment but also anger and the early stirrings of what will likely be a prolonged battle over who owns the works.

For the first time, German authorities described how they discovered 1,400 or so works during a routine tax investigation, including ones by Matisse, Chagall, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso and a host of other masters. Some were previously not known to have existed. Others appear to have disappeared around the time the Nazis raided German museums and public collections in the late 1930s to confiscate works they classified as “degenerate.”

Meike Hoffmann, an art historian called in to evaluate the discoveries in the spring of 2012, said she could not believe her eyes, realizing that “we are missing a part of our culture” that the Nazis had tried to destroy and that had now miraculously reappeared.

“These are truly museum-quality works, and you simply do not find these on the market anymore,” she said.

But she and German officials offered only a peek — pictures of a mere handful of the works and a short list of artists — at a packed news conference on Tuesday in Augsburg, an old Bavarian town, leaving many unanswered questions and provoking mounting criticism of officials’ slow and perhaps overly discreet handling of the trove.

Fully aware that the discovery is bound to set off a storm of claims — already being mobilized — officials in Augsburg would not release a complete inventory of what they know so far about their discovery, citing privacy rights and concerns that tracing the provenance of the works will be a costly labor that could take years. Officials would not say where the works are stored. They would not even confirm the name of the man who is believed to have kept the art hidden for decades in his Munich apartment. Nor, they said, do they know where that man is now.

The discovery of the works was first reported by Focus magazine on Sunday. They were thought to have been found in the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, 79 or 80, the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, who was stripped of two museum posts by the Nazis after it was determined that he had a Jewish grandparent. Nonetheless, the elder Mr. Gurlitt later became one of the few art dealers selected by Joseph Goebbels to sell to buyers abroad the Modernist works banned by the Nazis.

Some of the works seized in the apartment appear to resemble the titles of works that were in the custody of American and German investigators sent to safeguard cultural treasures in the late 1940s, said Marc Masurovsky, founder of the Holocaust Art Research Project. In 1950 that unit ultimately returned 115 works to the elder Mr. Gurlitt because he convinced the unit that the works were not illegally acquired, said Mr. Masurovsky, whose organization recently joined with the Paris-based dealer and restitutions expert Elizabeth Royer. For example, American cultural advisers returned “Self-Portrait,” by Otto Dix, and “Lion Tamer,” by Max Beckmann, both names of works that have been identified as being in Mr. Gurlitt’s possession.

The heirs of Jewish and other German collectors whose missing artworks may be among those discovered minced few words, accusing the Germans of failing to live up to the spirit of the 1998 Washington accords on restituting confiscated art or works that sellers were forced to give up for rock-bottom prices in order to flee Nazi Germany.

One of the only former owners to be publicly identified is Paul Rosenberg, a French dealer whose family has spent decades searching for hundreds of confiscated works. His granddaughter Marianne Rosenberg said she was angry that her family members had not been contacted and that they were still unable to get more information about a Matisse that reports have identified as belonging to her grandfather.

“We were aware of the name Gurlitt,” she said. “We are trying to track down things ourselves and fail to understand why the German authorities have said nothing to date.”

Renée Price, director of the Neue Galerie in New York, which specializes in German Modernism, said that the discovery was a bombshell. “I think many people thought that works like these were never going to be found,” she said.

Jonathan Petropoulos, a professor of history at Claremont McKenna College in California and the author of “The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany,” called the trove “the most important discovery of Nazi-looted art since the Allies discovered the hoards in the salt mines and the castles.” The only comparable revelation in terms of numbers of works that disappeared from Nazi-era Germany was the public display at the Hermitage in 1995 of Impressionist and Post Impressionist works, mostly from private collections, looted by the Red Army at the end of World War II.

Mr. Petropoulos added that one reason the younger Mr. Gurlitt might not have been on the radar of those looking for missing art was that his father died relatively soon after World War II, in a car crash in 1956, and had said that his papers about art transactions had been destroyed.

The son, Cornelius Gurlitt, is assumed to be the man German officials have said was searched by customs officials on Sept. 22, 2010, on a train from Zurich to Munich, and whose conduct, or possessions, prompted suspicion that led the police and customs officials to raid his Munich apartment 17 months later, on Feb. 28, 2012.

There they uncovered 1,258 artworks that were unframed and 121 more framed works, said Reinhard Nemetz, head of the state prosecutors’ office in Augsburg, in whose jurisdiction the initial encounter on the train occurred. It is unclear how many of the works are paintings and how many are drawings, prints and other works on paper.

Evidently stunned by their find, the authorities took three days to pack up the works and take them to a special storage facility. In March 2012, Ms. Hoffmann was summoned to start evaluating the collection, which she said included drawings, lithographs, prints and watercolors.

Many of the works cited by Ms. Hoffman on Tuesday were by German artists of the Expressionist period that is her specialty, including Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde. A previously unknown Chagall painting and a previously unknown Dix self-portrait, thought to have been painted in 1919, just after his service in battle in World War I, were among the few images of works shown.

The descendants of Alfred Flechtheim, a Jewish gallery owner and dealer forced to flee Germany before dying penniless in London in 1937, called for the results of research done so far to be made public, in keeping with the Washington accords, which stress that speedy release of information can be crucial for aging heirs.

David Rowland, a lawyer representing several families and heirs trying to find and reclaim art, said: “They should publish a photo of each artwork, front and back, and any and all provenance information that they have.”

Ms. Hoffmann said the decision not to disclose a list of the findings was due partly to the difficulty of researching each work, made harder because there are no records to build on. “This was not about keeping something secret,” she said. “We had, of course, to reach a certain level of knowledge about this collection to understand what we had.”

Charles Goldstein, counsel for Commission for Art Recovery, which is based in New York and was founded by Ronald S. Lauder, said his group had heard a few months ago “that a cache had been found,” and that it had belonged to “one of Hitler’s dealers.”

He expressed some understanding for the Germans’ difficulty in proceeding. “They’ve got a hot potato,” he said. “This stuff belongs to Gurlitt, and they have no proof that it’s not his. In order to determine that it’s not his, they have to make a determination that it was stolen or taken from the museums.”

He added that it was not clear that some or even most of the art can be restituted because of the statute of limitations and problems proving ownership.

Focus cited as just one example the case of Henri Hinrichsen, a Leipzig collector who was said to have died in Auschwitz in 1942. His two granddaughters are still looking for the works taken from him, Markus Krischer, one of the two Focus journalists who broke the story, said in a telephone interview.

A copy of a letter, obtained by The Times from the state archives in Berlin, sheds light on the matter. It is a copy of correspondence dated Dec. 5, 1966, sent to Helene Gurlitt, the widow of Hildebrand and mother of Cornelius.

She was asked if she knew anything about the whereabouts of four pictures said to have belonged to Mr. Hinrichsen, by the French artist Camille Pissarro and three German artists. She replied that her husband’s entire collection had been destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945.

“Dear Sirs!

“Regarding your inquiry from December 5, 1966, which according to the enclosed envelope was received on January 1, 1967, I can only tell you that all business records and inventories of our company were incinerated on February 13, 1945 — during the major attack on Dresden, where we had moved to from Hamburg.

“My husband died on November 9, 1956 in Düsseldorf. The art gallery Dr. H. Gurlitt hasn’t opened since 1945.

“Sincerely,

“Helene Gurlitt”

George Lindemann Journal - Report of #Nazi-Looted Trove Puts Art World in an Uproar @nytimes - By @ALISONSMALE

The George Lindemann Journal

   

Lennart Preiss/Getty Images

The Munich apartment building where the authorities were said to have found about 1,400 works of art that were confiscated under the Nazis or sold cheaply by owners trying to flee Hitler.

BERLIN — There was no hint that the older man who called a couple of years back about selling a picture could be sitting on an unimaginable trove of art confiscated or banned by the Nazis. When the proffered work, “Lion Tamer” by the German artist Max Beckmann, was collected, the seller seemed to be a proper gentleman in Munich dispensing with a lone, dusty art gem at the end of his life.

It was a “fantastic picture,” recalled Karl-Sax Feddersen of the Cologne auction house Lempertz, who noted how pleased the auction house team was with the auction price: 864,000 euros, or $1.17 million.

When he learned on Monday that the Beckmann seller, Cornelius Gurlitt, now 80, had reportedly sat on hundreds of works, including art by Picasso and Matisse, that were confiscated under the Nazis or sold cheaply by owners desperate to flee Hitler, Mr. Feddersen was amazed. “Imagine!” he said, envisaging seeing and selling such a collection.

But even before the Beckmann was sold, the Bavarian authorities swooped in on Mr. Gurlitt’s home to seize the rest of his treasure, according to the newsmagazine Focus: about 1,500 works estimated to be worth $1.4 billion. Focus said the works were seized after the police and customs officials entered Mr. Gurlitt’s home in Munich in spring 2011.

If confirmed, the discovery would be one of the biggest finds of vanished art in years. But word of it left almost equally big questions unanswered: Why did the German authorities let more than two years pass before such a sizable find was disclosed? What will become of the recovered works of art? Did Mr. Gurlitt continue to make sales even after the raid? And where is he today?

There are no reports that Mr. Gurlitt has been detained or charged, and questions about the history of the artworks, including whether they were confiscated or subject to a forced or voluntary sale, would determine whether a current sale or auction would be judged legitimate.

Since news of the find was first reported Sunday, the German authorities have come under fierce criticism in the art world as to why they did not make the discovery public.

Even on Monday, Bavarian and federal German officials who knew of the spectacular 2011 raid remained quiet. The German government’s only comment, from a spokesman, Steffen Seibert, was that it was aware of the case. However, the German authorities scheduled a news conference for Tuesday.

“They should have come out with this list pronto,” said Jonathan Petropoulos, the author of “The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany.”

“That’s the way that restitution works,” Mr. Petropoulos added, calling it “unconscionable” that the authorities “sat on the trove for two and a half years,” particularly because it appeared to be an exceptionally large find.

The trail to the artworks, the magazine said, stemmed from an incident in September 2010, when Bavarian customs officials on a train to Germany from Switzerland became suspicious after finding Mr. Gurlitt carrying €9,000, or about $12,150, in crisp €500 notes.

The inquiries spurred by the money eventually led investigators to the apartment in Munich, the magazine said, reporting that Mr. Gurlitt had apparently lived there for decades, selling off pictures as needed over the years, to judge by empty frames found in his home. Emma Bahlmann, an employee of the Cologne auction house that sold the Beckmann work, said she went to an apartment with Mr. Gurlitt but saw no evidence of other artworks as she took the Beckmann off the wall.

The hundreds of works found in the Munich apartment reported to have been raided by authorities — including paintings but also many graphics and even an engraving by Albrecht Dürer, the German Renaissance artist — were taken to a customs facility near Munich for storage, Focus said. Meike Hoffmann, an art historian at an institute specializing in Nazi-confiscated art at the Free University in Berlin, was engaged to go through the discovered works.

Ms. Hoffmann declined to talk to reporters on Sunday or Monday about what she described in an email as “this case.”

But a video of a conference in September, posted on the institute’s website, showed her saying that her institute would soon be doing more work associated with Hildebrand Gurlitt, Cornelius Gurlitt’s father. The elder Mr. Gurlitt had trouble with the Nazis because he was deemed a quarter Jewish under the Nuremberg race laws, and he was dismissed from two museum posts. Yet he was also one of the few Germans granted permission by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, to sell confiscated art. Sales to foreign buyers were meant to fill Nazi coffers, but art historians have documented many sales in Germany, as well as proceeds pocketed by the dealers involved.

“The research institute has had comprehensive material from private ownership put at its disposal,” Ms. Hoffmann said at the meeting. The materials “were completely unknown till now and will bring much to light.”

Hildebrand Gurlitt was detained and questioned by Americans investigating art looting just after the war ended in May 1945, Mr. Petropoulos said. The elder Mr. Gurlitt, who had an apartment in Dresden during the war, is said to have told the authorities that his collection burned in the bombing of that city in February 1945.

The German authorities have established several offices aimed at assisting in finding out the complex provenance of artworks that were seized by the Nazis or by invading Soviet troops at the end of World War II, and that were then sold off cheaply but according to legal formalities, or that simply disappeared in the chaos.

Any claims that do arise from the Gurlitt case are likely to take years to sort out. German museums whose collections were ravaged by the Nazis are as likely to submit claims as the heirs of Jewish collectors and dealers whose work was confiscated by the Nazis. The sale of the Beckmann painting by the Cologne auction house represented what Mr. Feddersen characterized as a relatively rare occasion in which Jewish heirs — in this case the heirs to Alfred Flechtheim, a gallery owner and dealer forced to flee Nazi Germany who died poor in London in 1937 — were able to share proceeds with the owner, Mr. Gurlitt.

The Galerie Kornfeld, a gallery in Bern, Switzerland, reported by Focus to have been the source of the cash found on Mr. Gurlitt on the train in 2010, denied having any dealings with him since 1990. Back then, the Galerie Kornfeld said in a statement, Mr. Gurlitt got 38,250 Swiss francs from selling works on paper by artists whose work was confiscated by the Nazis in 1937 as “degenerate.”

Hildebrand Gurlitt had acquired the works his son sold in 1990 “for cheap money in the years after 1938,” the Kornfeld gallery’s statement said. Cornelius Gurlitt never declared that he inherited the works upon the death of his mother, Helene, in 1967, the gallery said. (Hildebrand Gurlitt died in a traffic accident in 1956.)

The Bern gallery said Eberhard Kornfeld, who runs the gallery, was not available to speak to a reporter by phone. His gallery’s statement did not provide details of past dealings with Mr. Gurlitt, but emphasized how carefully one must distinguish between confiscated art and art that was acquired legally, even if the acquisition now seems to have been strange or made under duress. These works “are freely available for purchase to this day,” the statement said.

Mr. Kornfeld was recently portrayed as dealing in art looted from Jews in a proceeding that made its way to the United States Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. He has denied the allegations.

His gallery’s statement said: “Cornelius Gurlitt’s statement to customs authorities in 2010 that the money came from business dealings with the Galerie Kornfeld in Bern is not accurate. The last sales date back to 1990.”

The gallery indicated, however, that its business with Mr. Gurlitt was mutually satisfying. For 16 years after those last dealings, Cornelius Gurlitt regularly received mailed catalogs from Kornfeld, sent to his Munich address. Only after 2006 were they returned, the gallery said, with a stamp indicating “Reception refused” or “Undeliverable.”

By ALISON SMALE

"So You Want to Be A World-Class Art Collector" @wsj - The George Lindemann Journal

The George Lindemann Journal

 

So you want to be the next Peggy Guggenheim. Besides wealth, what does it take to qualify as a heavyweight art collector today? Kelly Crow has answers on Lunch Break. Photo: André Klotz for The Wall Street Journal.

Last year, Brazilian collector Pedro Barbosa spotted a tumbling spiral made with hundreds of rubber tires at the Swiss fair Art Basel. The next day, Mr. Barbosa told a collector friend, Luiz Augusto Teixeira de Freitas, that he intended to buy the tires, actually a $150,000 installation by British artist Mike Nelson.

Surprised, Mr. Augusto reminded Mr. Barbosa that the artwork wouldn't fit inside Mr. Barbosa's São Paulo home. "Doesn't matter," Mr. Barbosa said. "I bet I can lend it to some museum in America." (For now, he is storing the work with a dealer in Italy).

It takes great wealth—and a little hubris—to ascend the ranks of the world's top art collectors. Mr. Barbosa, a 48-year-old former bond trader, is determined to qualify. Like many collectors of his generation, he began buying art on a whim just over a decade ago, but his pursuit has steadily grown serious. By collecting younger, hard-to-get Brazilian artists like Paulo Nazareth along with global superstars like Olafur Eliasson, he has earned a reputation as a highflying tastemaker on the international art scene. Mr. Barbosa employs a personal curator, Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, to manage his collection and allows guest curators to organize shows inside his spacious home in São Paulo's prestigious Jardins neighborhood. He also keeps an apartment around the corner where favored artists like Amalia Pica can stay to make and show their work. Friends say he is ever on the move, traveling to far-flung biennials and fairs from London to Istanbul to the United Arab Emirates. Altogether, his 500-piece collection amounts to roughly half his net worth, he said.

Mr. Barbosa is part of an emerging class of collectors springing up from all corners of the globe who are transforming the art marketplace with their willingness to splurge on art that suits their own tastes—not only the canons of New York or London. From Beijing to Bogotá, new art hubs are thriving in large part because these up-and-comers continue to amass art—in good economic times and bad. Many are investing heavily in contemporary art, the most speculative end of the spectrum, and changing the way the market functions.

Pedro Barbosa's Art Collection

Pedro Barbosa has earned a reputation as a high-flying tastemaker on the international art scene by collecting younger, hard-to-get Brazilian artists like Jonathas de Andrade, shown here. This piece is titled 'Education for Adults' (2010). Jonathas de Andrade/Galeria Vermelho

A few generations ago, collectors like Henry Tate or Peggy Guggenheim needed aristocratic ties—or robber-baron-level fortunes—to ascend the ranks of the art world elite. Today, there are no rules for assembling a group of contemporary artworks that will one day prove iconic. Newcomer collectors say they pick up clues where they can. Some, like French investment banker Edouard Carmignac, have created art prizes to ferret out fresh discoveries—which they later showcase in their own art spaces. Others such as Roman entrepreneur Pierpaulo Barzan run foundations that mount traveling museum-style shows featuring artists they also happen to buy. Plenty more, like Costa Rican real-estate developer Judko Rosenstock, give pieces by hotshot artists to major museums like the Tate—moves that could bolster the cachet of his own pieces by those artists.

Mr. Barbosa's evolution is emblematic. Early on, he said he only collected artists from Brazil, but last year he decided to "go global," and he's been "going nuts" ever since—traveling to international fairs to collect artists like Germany's Wolfgang Tillmans and Lebanon's Rayyane Tabet. These additions serve to diversify his holdings, he said, but they also put his Brazilian pieces into a broader art context. To the same end, he also recently donated pieces by two young Brazilian artists, Jonathas de Andrade and Andre Komatsu, to London's Tate Modern.

It helps that his growing ambitions also coincide with his country's emergence as a global art hub. Until a few years ago, Brazil's art market was steady but relatively insular, anchored by South American collectors who were willing to pay as much as $50,000 for Lygia Clark's foldable aluminum sculptures or $15,000 for Beatriz Milhazes's flowery abstracts. But as Brazil's economy has expanded, local collectors have found themselves increasingly competing for their hometown favorites with buyers from around the globe—and prices have spiked as a result.

Even now as Brazil confronts higher inflation and signs of tapering growth, collectors keep bidding record sums for Brazilian modern and contemporary art. In May, Phillips in New York sold Ms. Clark's 1959 black-and white abstract, "Against Relief (Object No. 7)," for $2.2 million, the most ever paid for a work of Brazilian art.

Pedro Barbosa's collection includes 'Fine Tapestry' by Adriano Costa Adriano Costa/Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paulo

The auction record still represents a fraction of what China's counterpart collectors have paid lately for their own masterpieces, so market-watchers say Brazilian art still has plenty of room to grow, price-wise.

All this attention is pointing a bigger spotlight on the handful of Brazilian contemporary collectors who have positioned themselves as regional kingmakers, such as Mr. Barbosa. "The galleries look at everything Pedro is buying," said Mr. Freitas, the collector who saw the tires with him in Basel.

One of Mr. Barbosa's latest moves is telling. In September, he invited a curator from London's nonprofit Chisenhale Gallery, Polly Staple, to visit Brazil. He helped pay for her stay, and one morning he picked her up from her hotel for a tour of a few nonprofit art spaces and galleries. He had borrowed his wife Patricia Moraes ' black SUV for the occasion: "Welcome to an armored, bulletproof car," he said, chuckling, as Ms. Staple climbed in.

First up was Pivô, a nonprofit art incubator that opened last year in a former dentist's office inside architect Oscar Niemayer's undulating Copan building in downtown São Paulo. Next, they stopped by Galeria Vermelho—vermelho means "red" in Portuguese—to see a group show with artists like Cildo Meireles exploring issues of crime. The gallery had been robbed the week before, but the thief only took a CD player, so Vermelho didn't press charges. "The guy didn't think to steal the art," said dealer Akio Aoki.

An untitled work by Francesca Woodman Francesca Woodman/Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo

Mr. Barbosa also took Ms. Staple to meet Jaqueline Martins, a new dealer who specializes in selling São Paulo artists from the 1970s who have since been "overlooked" by the market, Mr. Barbosa said. Ms. Martins' roster includes Genilson Soares, a conceptual artist in his 70s who was once hailed for making large geometric installations often employing colored lighting and optical illusions. A few weeks after Mr. Barbosa's guided tour with Ms. Staple, Ms. Martins displayed one of Mr. Soares's oversize triangle works from 1973 at London's Frieze Art Fair—even though it wasn't technically for sale. "I bought that a month ago," Mr. Barbosa said. (He paid around $20,000.)

In São Paulo, Mr. Barbosa is well known for scouting Brazilian art schools and often buys pieces from promising students—a collecting tactic that's commonplace in New York but still relatively rare in São Paulo, dealers say. Local gallery Mendes Wood DM recently signed up one of his latest discoveries, sculptor Michael Dean. When Mr. Barbosa created an artist residency, one of the first artists he invited was Ms. Pica, another early find who just had her first U.S. solo museum show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Next up: New Yorkers Ken Okiishi and Nick Mauss.

Mr. Barbosa doesn't move through art circles with the panache of some of his countrymen, though. He is a millionaire, but he can't spend apace with Brazil's best-known collector, Bernardo Paz, a billionaire mining magnate from the Belo Horizonte region who reportedly spends $60 million a year commissioning and installing artworks throughout his vast jungle compound called Inhotim. Mr. Barbosa said he usually spends between $8,000 and $250,000 apiece on his art purchases. Still, he has found other ways to stand out.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Barbosa attended the opening party for the Mercosul Biennial in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. The event was held at the hilltop mansion of the biennial's president Patricia Fossati Druck, with partygoers like steel titan Jorge Gerdau Johannpeter dressed in designer suits. By contrast, Mr. Barbosa showed up wearing bluejeans, a baby-blue gingham shirt and Pac-Man cuff links. Shunning the glowing swimming pool and bar set up nearby to serve Brazil's favorite sugary cocktail, the caipirinha, Mr. Barbosa spent the night huddled on the lawn with artists like Mario Garcia Torres and Inhotim director Eungie Joo.

Ms. Joo mentioned her favorite piece in the biennial was a rusty landscape installation by Brazilian artist Cinthia Marcelle —at which point Mr. Barbosa leaned toward her and whispered, "I might have the best collection of Cinthia's work." Ms. Joo's eyes widened, and she grinned her approval.

Half of São Paulo's 40-odd contemporary-art galleries are less than five years old. Mr. Barbosa knows the strengths and weaknesses of their rosters better than anyone, said Buenos Aires collector Mauro Herlitzka. This market intelligence gives Mr. Barbosa's collection a competitive edge. But as Mr. Barbosa's collection takes in more artworks from beyond Brazil, his ancillary costs have also mounted. Because of Brazil's punishing import-tax laws, he must pay up to 50% above a foreign artwork's sale price just to bring it into his country—a markup he may not be able to recoup unless the art's value appreciates significantly over time. Dealers say some Brazilian collectors have found ways to avoid these import taxes by buying and storing pieces abroad or smuggling them into their luggage. Mr. Barbosa said he buys from the local SP-Arte fair, where taxes are typically discounted by the government. He said he also has proof he has paid the appropriate fees for everything displayed in his house.

Mr. Barbosa and his wife Patricia, who is head of investment banking for JP Morgan in Brazil, and their two children live in a cream-colored, two-story house on a leafy block in the wealthy São Paulo district of Jardins. Throughout their home, they have arranged a mix of sleek, geometric pieces by contemporary classics like Sérgio de Camargo and Jesús Rafael Soto alongside newer sculptures made from ordinary materials like hair curlers. In their backyard, a pair of conjoined shopping carts by Marcelo Cidade stands sentry beside the pool. On a bench in their living room sits a row of handbags that were dipped in concrete like candlesticks by Mr. Tabet, the artist from Lebanon. Even the walls of the children's bedrooms have been commandeered for art: "Sometimes my son complains, but I run a dictatorship," Mr. Barbosa said, grinning.

His own introduction to art was considerably less in-your-face. His father was a high-school gym teacher who only wanted his three children to get a solid education, which they did. Mr. Barbosa's first cousin was a major art dealer, Raquel Arnaud, but he said he rarely hung out in her gallery growing up—he preferred to hang out in nearby Ibirapuera Park and sell ballpoint pens to his friends for a profit. (He stuffed the clear pen cases with shredded currency to add cachet.) After he married in 1999 and settled into a life as a banker specializing in emerging markets and depressed bonds, he started buying art.

His first piece was a $20,000 Soto that he bought from his cousin, but he later switched to buying cheaper pieces by younger living artists, and he's largely stuck to that pattern ever since. When he finds an artist with potential, he tells them he likes to buy several works at a time, but he warns them he will likely stop collecting their work after they turn 40. He said he does this because it compels him to keep seeking fresh talent rather than pay ever-higher premiums for examples by artists he already owns.

Increasingly, Mr. Barbosa is looking farther afield for his art. The shift started in 2008 when he went to Frieze in London for the first time and marveled at how few collectors had turned up in the wake of the Lehman Bros. closure weeks earlier. Walking around the fair's vacant aisles, he realized he could ask galleries for steep discounts if he was willing to broaden the scope of his collection beyond Brazil. He took home pieces by Mr. Eliasson and Tomas Saraceno.

Last year, he ratcheted things up again by hiring his curator, Mr. Visconti, who has planned Brazil's pavilion for the Venice Biennale. Besides paying Mr. Visconti an undisclosed monthly retainer, Mr. Barbosa pays him to travel and inform him about artists to consider. The pair now invites young curators to mount shows of Mr. Barbosa's collection.

In a few more years, the plan is to publish a book about these shows—yet another way Mr. Barbosa hopes to lend lasting credibility to his collection. It's a tactic museums have been using for years, after all. "I don't want to spend too much on the parts," he said. "I'm more interested in the whole."

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

"Under Fire, Hedge-Fund Billionaire to Sell Choice Art" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

In the two decades that the hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen has collected art, he has been not only a high-profile buyer but also a high-profile seller, disposing of a painting one season, a sculpture the next.

But Mr. Cohen is now parting with about $80 million worth of blue-chip art at the important auctions that begin next week at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. It is the largest single group of artworks he has sold at one time and includes top examples of paintings and sculptures by Brice Marden, Rudolf Stingel and Cy Twombly, along with previously reported Warhols and a Gerhard Richter.

“We’re in a robust market, and we are actively managing the collection,” said Sandy Heller, his longtime art adviser.

The sales come just as Mr. Cohen’s fund, SAC Capital Advisors, has reached a deal with the government to plead guilty to securities fraud as part of the criminal prosecution of the firm, according to people briefed on the case, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the case. Prosecutors have not brought criminal charges against Mr. Cohen, but federal regulators filed a lawsuit accusing him of failing to supervise his employees and turning a blind eye to insider trading at his firm. In July, the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan brought insider trading charges against SAC, calling it “a magnet for market cheaters.” Six former SAC employees have pleaded guilty to illegal trading while at the fund.

Lawyers for SAC and federal prosecutors are putting the final touches on a settlement that, in addition to the guilty plea, will include an agreement for the fund to stop managing money for clients as well as to pay penalties of about $1.2 billion. Combined with $616 million in government fines assessed this year in two related civil cases, SAC will have paid penalties of more than $1.8 billion. Because Mr. Cohen owns 100 percent of SAC, that money will effectively come out of his pocket.

People close to Mr. Cohen, who were not authorized to speak, say that the art sales from his fabled collection are not an effort to raise money for his mounting fines and legal fees. Even after his fines are paid, Mr. Cohen will still have billions of dollars in the bank.

Ever the trader, Mr. Cohen is also taking advantage of today’s active art market where new collectors will often pay far more for artworks than they are worth.

As an opportunistic seller, he is in good company. Among this season’s high-profile sellers are the newsprint magnate Peter Brant, Eric Clapton and the New York financier Donald L. Bryant Jr.

Officials at Sotheby’s and Christie’s declined to comment about Mr. Cohen’s consignments, citing confidentiality. Jonathan Gasthalter, a spokesman for SAC and Mr. Cohen, declined to comment. But details emerged late last month that he is selling three works at Sotheby’s on Nov. 13: a 1986 abstract canvas by Gerhard Richter and two Warhols, both from 1963: “Liz #1 (Early Colored Liz)” and “5 Deaths on Turquoise” from the artist’s celebrated “Death and Disaster” series.

The Richter, which Mr. Cohen bought from the Pace Gallery in 2012 for around $20 million, is now estimated to fetch $15 million to $20 million. Both Warhols belonged to the legendary dealer Ileana Sonnabend for decades. The Warhols are expected to bring a combined total of as much as $40 million.

In addition to those marquee works, Mr. Cohen is selling about a dozen other pieces, mostly at Sotheby’s, that he acquired in recent years at art fairs and auctions. He is not parting with his most valuable paintings, like “Le Rêve” by Picasso, bought from the casino owner Stephen A. Wynn for $155 million in March, or any of his de Koonings, including “Woman III,” bought from David Geffen in 2006 for about $137.5 million. The works for sale are less expensive, representing a fraction of his holdings.

One gem coming up at Sotheby’s is “The Attended” (1996-99), by Brice Marden, a reference to pottery figures placed in Chinese tombs to accompany the dead in the afterlife. Mr. Cohen acquired the work, estimated to sell for $7 million to $10 million, from the Matthew Marks Gallery in Manhattan for an undisclosed price. Other top works include a 2010 self-portrait by Rudolf Stingel, expected to go for $3 million to $5 million, and a 2009 bronze sculpture by Cy Twombly estimated at $2 million to $3 million; both were purchased from Larry Gagosian.

“Atlantic Side,” a 1960-61 painting by Joan Mitchell bought in 2007 at Christie’s, is also for sale with an estimate of $5 million to $7 million. The Nov. 13 Sotheby’s contemporary art catalog indicates that Mr. Cohen is receiving a guarantee — an undisclosed sum of money — for some of the more expensive works, regardless of whether the auction house is able to sell them.

While Mr. Cohen has some negotiating power over auction houses competing to sell his collection, he has had little leverage in his talks with the government. An entity like SAC can be held responsible for the acts of its employees, and the six former SAC traders who pleaded guilty would likely have testified at trial that they committed insider trading while working for Mr. Cohen.

Such testimony would have made it difficult for SAC to defend itself at trial.

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A version of this article appears in print on October 31, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Under Fire, Hedge-Fund Billionaire to Sell Choice Art.

By CAROL VOGEL and PETER LATTMAN

Published: October 30, 2013

"Calder’s Heirs Accuse Trusted Dealer of Fraud" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

The George Lindemann Journal

The bond between dealer and artist can be a kind of love affair, with its attendant passions and confidences, interests and intrigues. Such was the case with the sculptor Alexander Calder and Klaus G. Perls, who represented him from 1954 until Calder’s death in 1976. The two frequently dined and traveled together, and visited each other’s families. When Calder came to Manhattan, he often stayed at Perls’s Madison Avenue townhouse.

“He trusted him completely,” said Calder’s grandson Alexander S. C. Rower, who added that he himself considered Perls and his wife, Amelia, “a dear aunt and uncle.”

But now that bond has dissolved into a bitter dispute between the families of the two men.

In a recently amended complaint filed in New York State Supreme Court, the Calder estate says the Perlses surreptitiously held on to hundreds of Calder’s works and swindled the artist’s estate out of tens of millions of dollars. Perhaps most surprising, it says that Perls, a dealer with a sterling reputation who campaigned to rid his industry of forgeries, sold dozens of fake Calders. The suit depicts Perls as a tax cheat who stashed millions of dollars in a Swiss bank account, a secret his daughter said she maintained by paying off a former gallery employee with $5 million. She added that Calder had his own hidden Swiss account.

Mr. Rower, seated in the Chelsea headquarters of the Calder Foundation, surrounded by small black-and-red maquettes made by his grandfather, reflected on the case one recent afternoon. “It’s really kind of heartbreaking that they turned out to be thieves,” he said of Klaus and Amelia Perls.

Steven W. Wolfe, a lawyer for the Perls side, declined to comment, saying a judge’s ruling on pending motions was imminent. But in court papers, he described the Calder lawsuit as a “sham and manufactured claim.” He characterized it as a fishing expedition, one that is finding only the sort of gaps in records that are normal when tracking 25-year-old transactions from a gallery that has been closed for more than 15 years. The Perls family has asked the court to dismiss the case, also arguing that the statute of limitations has expired.

That this close partnership has devolved into a lawsuit is a sorrowful development. While Calder is renowned as one of the 20th century’s most innovative artists, Perls has his own corner in the history of modern art. He was a pioneering collector of African art, and donated dozens of those pieces, as well as $60 million worth of masterworks by Modernists like Picasso and Modigliani, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When Perls died five years ago, at the age of 96, that museum’s director called him “a connoisseur and a scholar,” a “distinguished honorary trustee, donor and friend.”

Although many of the most surprising accusations surfaced in additional papers filed over the summer, the legal dispute began three years ago with a chance discovery. In 2010, a Canadian gallery contacted the Calder Foundation, of which Mr. Rower is chairman, about a $1.5 million wooden mobile titled “Standing Constellation.” It had been purchased from the Perls Foundation, a trust set up after the Perls Gallery closed in 1997. Mr. Rower said he was puzzled because “Standing Constellation” had not been listed on an inventory of holdings provided by the Perls Gallery after Calder’s death, nor had the Calder estate received any payment from its sale.

Mr. Rower, who has spent more than 15 years compiling the definitive catalog of Calder’s work, examined the Calder Foundation’s provenance records and said he found several other works in the Perls inventory that were later sold without the estate’s knowledge. Many were listed as being consigned by a woman in Switzerland known only as “Madame Andre.”

Mr. Rower said he was already frustrated with the dealer’s family because it had not turned over a large bundle of archives, drawings and monogramming tools used by Calder to sign his works that Amelia Perls, who died in 2002, had previously promised in a letter to give him. So in 2010, the Calder family sued the Perls estate; the dealer’s daughter, Katherine Perls; and “Madame Andre” for the archives and the works missing from the inventory.

As the estate began to dig, however, it made several discoveries.

First, “Standing Constellation” was only one of nearly 700 Calder bronze sculptures, jewelry and other works worth well in excess of $20 million that had been in the Perlses’ hands and are unaccounted for, court papers say.

The Calder estate also learned that the gallery kept at least two sets of books — a practice that the Perls side said was not unusual. Then it came out that the mysterious “Madame Andre” was not a person at all, but a nickname for the Perls Swiss bank account. As Katherine Perls acknowledged in an affidavit, “Madame Andre” was a euphemism for her father’s Swiss account, “perhaps even a humorous or shorthand reference for this account, or to avoid disclosing to others who were present that he did have this Swiss account.”

Ms. Perls added that Calder, too, kept a Swiss bank account, to which Perls regularly transferred the artist’s profits. In court papers, Mr. Wolfe, the Perls lawyer, said, “Alexander Calder and Klaus Perls were kindred spirits in that they both had an aversion to paying taxes.”

Mr. Rower said that he has found no record of such an account and that the estate has never received any assets from it.

Ms. Perls, in a deposition, dismissed the assertion that her family had hidden anything from Calder or his estate. While the original ledgers are missing, she said a copy shows that, in 1970, Calder gave “Standing Constellation” to her mother as a gift.

Ms. Perls has acknowledged that when a gallery employee, Douglas Mayhew, sued the family for severance worth $10 million in 2005, she feared he would reveal the hidden accounts in Switzerland to the I.R.S. and expose her aged father. As a result, she said, she agreed to pay Mr. Mayhew $5 million after taxes. According to court papers, she said she believed she was “being blackmailed.” Michael R. Gordon, Mr. Mayhew’s lawyer, declined to comment.

When the government instituted a tax amnesty program in 2009 for Americans who were hiding money in offshore accounts, the Perls estate applied, court papers show, and a settlement was reached.

Mr. Rower said the disturbing discoveries continued. In a deposition, Mr. Mayhew said that the Perls Gallery had sold approximately 30 fake Calders. Mr. Rower said that he is not sure whether such sales were intentional but that he knows the gallery had to settle some claims related to the sale of counterfeits in the 1980s.

“I was in there when someone walked in who had bought a fake,” Mr. Rower recalled.

But the number of these sales astounded him. By going through the foundation’s records and analyzing photographs of supposed Calder works, some of which were linked to known forgers, he said he has determined that the gallery handled at least 61 counterfeits.

Ms. Perls said in a deposition that she is convinced that her father never knowingly sold any fakes.

The Calder estate’s lawsuit contends that some illicit proceeds — from the sale of counterfeits and misappropriated Calder originals — were used to purchase the modern and African art that Perls gave to the Met, although the papers do not contain any specific evidence. The museum declined to comment.

James Goodman, a veteran dealer who was one of the founders, with Perls, of the Art Dealers Association of America, said he remains skeptical of the accusations, adding he always knew Klaus Perls to be an honorable dealer.

Mr. Rower says he came to his conclusion about Perls reluctantly. “It gives me no pleasure to talk about this,” he said, but “there is just example after example after example after example of misdeeds.”

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: October 29, 2013

"An Adolescent Adventurer in the Museum" @wsj - The George Lindemann Journal

The George Lindemann Journal

By
Peter Plagens

Oct. 28, 2013 5:47 p.m. ET
Chris Burden : Extreme Measures

New Museum Through Jan. 12

'The Big Wheel' (1979) New Museum, New York/ Benoit Pailley

New York

'This is boy art," my wife whispered to me as we began to stroll very slowly through "Chris Burden: Extreme Measures," the artist's first major museum exhibition in the U.S. in 25 years and his first ever in New York. It sure is, but it's great boy art (and near-great art, period), with all the adolescent adventurousness the term implies.

Mr. Burden was born in Boston in 1946, but he spent much of his childhood in a Swiss boarding school because his parents split up and his mother took the kids off to Europe. He might have missed, early on, those formative, impractical and sometimes dangerous things that boys do because . . . well, just because. The artist's early performance pieces—necessarily present only in photos and video in what is otherwise a succinctly handsome show—are the best examples of this Huck-Finn-noir attitude.

"Shoot" (1971), in which the young Mr. Burden had himself shot in the arm with a .22-caliber rifle from a distance of about 15 feet, is an avant-guardedly delinquent version of "playing guns." "Dead Man" (1972)—Mr. Burden lying motionless under a tarp and bracketed by highway flares on La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles's gallery row of the time—is a riskier iteration (he was arrested for concocting a false emergency) of "playing dead" in the back yard.

"The Big Wheel" (1979), fortunately present in the exhibition and the hit of the show's opening, has a smallish, 250cc motorcycle with its rear wheel lifted off the floor and making contact with an adjacent 8-foot, 6,000-pound cast-iron flywheel. When the bike is revved for a few minutes, the big wheel can get going at 200rpm and subsequently spin for an hour and a half on its own momentum—a steroidal rendering of clothespinning a playing card to a bicycle sprocket to produce the sound of a motorcycle engine.

Mr. Burden in 1971 after 'Shoot,' in which he had himself shot in the arm with a .22-caliber rifle. Chris Burden

Mr. Burden did his undergraduate study in physics, architecture and art at Pomona College in California (a local T-shirt says that Harvard is "the Pomona College of the East"), then switched exclusively to art and earned a master's degree at the University of California at Irvine, studying under that sage of light-and-space art, Robert Irwin, who recognized the kid's maverick intelligence and let him go his own way.

Mr. Burden's thesis work had him living in a locker for five days. After about 50 performances dedicated to self-discipline, endurance and not a little exhibitionism—including pieces in which Mr. Burden was crucified (yes, his hands were pierced by nails) to a Volkswagen VOW3.XE +0.34% Volkswagen AG Non-Vtg Pfd. Germany: Xetra €174.85 +0.60 +0.34% Oct. 29, 2013 5:35 pm Volume : 985,592 P/E Ratio 4.62 Market Cap€79.43 Billion Dividend Yield 2.04% Rev. per Employee €356,490 17617417210a11a12p1p2p3p4p5p 10/28/13 Consumer Reports Drops Camry F... 10/24/13 Global Car Firms Ride Profit G... 10/24/13 Daimler Earnings: Mercedes Sal... More quote details and news » VOW3.XE in Your Value Your Change Short position Beetle, and had himself kicked down some concrete stairs—he gave up the practice as too arduous.

Which is where "Extreme Measures" gets good as an art exhibition. Mr. Burden's big conceptual objects (he calls them "sculpture") continue to combine a kind of guileless masculinity—he's never macho—with an ingratiating "what if?" outlook on life. Among his 2013 efforts are "Three Arch Dry Stack Bridge, 1/4 Scale" and "Porsche With Meteorite." "Bridge" is simply a model bridge, 4 feet tall and 28 feet long, made from hand-cast concrete blocks and held together by nothing more than balanced pressure on three keystones. What makes it art? It looks good and the New Museum's installation gives it room to breathe. "Porsche," on the other hand, is a cantilevering exercise right out of Design 101: a 1974 Porsche 914 (that hybrid VW that enabled lots of wannabes to say they drove a Porsche) weighing a ton or so making up a giant mobile, with a 365-pound meteorite on the other end, that's stable because the fulcrum is placed just right, much nearer the car.

What makes it boy art? The car is carefully restored, just like the 1964 Ford truck in 2009's "1 Ton Crane Truck" (an iron block of that avoirdupois hangs from the crane). Mr. Burden (who's written the show's label descriptions in a no-nonsense declarative prose that should henceforth be requisite in museums) notes: "The truck's bed and headache rest have been replaced with new oak. Six new tires, new rubber mats, new seat covers, a new headliner, and two new visors have been installed."

Perhaps surprising—to those heretofore unfamiliar with Mr. Burden's work—are his subtly sardonic political pieces. The 625 miniature cardboard submarines, each suspended in midair formation by a piece of monofilament, in "All the Submarines of the United States of America" (1987) are a visceral reminder of just how much the country spends on national defense and how globally lethal the weaponry is. The frieze of "LAPD Uniforms" (1993), tailored for apparent 8-footers, constitutes a deadpan but stinging indictment of the force's conduct in the Rodney King beating. But Mr. Burden, whose politics are hardly party-line PC, can also go against what's presumably the art-world grain: In 1979, he covered the floor of a SoHo gallery with 50,000 neatly ordered nickels, each topped with a wooden match. Every visually witty combination stood for one Soviet tank, and the work was titled "The Reason for the Neutron Bomb." I wish it were in the show.

But a work that does make an appearance on a screen in the corner of one gallery, and which, for me, is an unexpected highlight, is "The Rant" (2006)—a two-minute video excoriation of the Other ("diseased dogs," "invisible snails," and so forth) delivered by Mr. Burden in well-accented French. (The artist is inexplicably up to his chin in water and wearing swimmer's goggles.) Although he insists that he's assumed the "persona of a ranting xenophobic preacher," you can't tell me the people he's really sending up aren't pretentious art theorists who would read even more into a work like this than I do.

Not everything concerning Mr. Burden and his oeuvre, however, is praiseworthy. The two 36-foot-high "Quasi-Legal Skyscrapers" (2003), reconstructed atop the New Museum's facade and allegedly allusive to the Twin Towers, are a misfire. As was—pun intended—his cringe-inducing "747" (1973), in which he stood on a beach and fired real bullets from a small pistol at an airliner that had just taken off from Los Angeles International Airport. (No, the bullets never got close to the plane, but the show's beautiful catalog could have done without that big photo.)

The underlying premise of "Extreme Measures" is that any artist, no matter how radical, can eventually be contained and made politely intelligible by what the art-world naysayer Dave Hickey calls the "therapeutic institution." For better or worse, the New Museum makes that case. The exhibition ends, as it were, with "Pair of Namur Mortars" (2013), two fully functional re-creations of squat, antique cannons that fire cannonballs a yard in diameter. In the wrong hands, they could probably bring down the museum. But here, they're cartoonish, almost cuddly and strangely reassuring—just big toys. To tweak the old saying, you can take the artiness out of the boy, but you can't take the boy out of the art.

Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York.

"The Gang’s All There, Talking Art in Qatar" @nytimes

The Gang’s All There, Talking Art in Qatar

Eyes in Doha Are on Damien Hirsts and Warhols

Natalie Naccache for The New York Times

The Qatar Museums Authority’s Al Riwaq exhibition space in Doha is decorated as a giant Damien Hirst spot painting.

By CAROL VOGEL
Published: October 13, 2013  

DOHA, Qatar — The art-world equivalent of McDonald’s golden arches, Damien Hirst’s candy-colored spots, now covering the exterior of the exhibition space Al Riwaq, glaringly mark this Persian Gulf city as a player in the increasingly branded art world. And the exhibition inside, which includes all the touch points in the career of Mr. Hirst, 48, is just one of a constellation of openings organized to attract a who’s who in the art world (or at least a who’s afraid of being left out).

Dealers, auction house experts, museum directors, collectors and artists from around the world descended on this city last week, ostensibly to support the many artists whose exhibitions were opening here but primarily in the hopes of doing business of their own. It was as if Chelsea and Mayfair had been transplanted to this overheated city of shiny skyscrapers and waterfront promenades. There was Jeffrey Deitch, the former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and gallery owners like David Zwirner, who represents Adel Abdessemed, an Algerian-born artist who is having a show at Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Modern Art. Alberto Mugrabi, the New York dealer, came too, along with Aby Rosen, the Manhattan real estate developer and collector, and Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate in London. (The Qatar Museums Authority sponsored a retrospective of Mr. Hirst’s work at the Tate last year.) Even the artist Jeff Koons made an appearance.

The culturally engaged and deep-pocketed Qatari royal family, along with a new generation of moneyed collectors living in this oil-rich city, are making it an increasingly frequent stop on the global art tour.

Christie’s, which holds auctions in Dubai and exhibitions in Doha, reported last year that sales in the Middle East were approaching 10 percent of its annual turnover.

“Our numbers are probably similar,” said Alexander Rotter, who runs Sotheby’s contemporary art department in New York and was in Doha last week, too. Sotheby’s opened its office here in 2008 and had its first Doha auction the next year. In April it had its first auction of contemporary art here with works by artists from the United States as well as the Middle East and Asia. “There is a new breed of collector here that didn’t exist 10 years ago,” said Mr. Rotter, who organized the sale and was its auctioneer. “And they are in it to win it.”

Last week Sotheby’s took over a gallery in the Katara Art Center — a collaborative cultural village of galleries with an open-air theater — where it showed highlights from next month’s important contemporary art auctions in New York. On view were two major Warhols: “Liz #1 (Early Colored Liz),” a 1963 image of Elizabeth Taylor on a bright-yellow background that is estimated to sell for $20 million to $30 million, and “5 Deaths on Turquoise (Turquoise Disaster),” painted the same year and expected to bring $7 million to $10 million. While the seller was not named and officials at Sotheby’s declined to comment, the paintings are part of a larger group of works, which also includes an abstract canvas by Gerhard Richter, being sold by Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire, whose company, SAC Capital Advisors, is fighting criminal charges of insider trading. Sandy Heller, an art adviser who works with Mr. Cohen, declined to comment on the sale, but art experts familiar with Mr. Cohen’s collection identified the works as his.

In Doha, seminal images of Pop Art, like the Warhols, might be familiar, but most of the public sculptures, and the new art in museums and galleries is not. For the first time Middle Eastern audiences can see the breadth of Mr. Hirst’s career on their home turf. Last Monday “The Miraculous Journey,” 14 monumental bronze sculptures by the artist were unveiled in front of the Sidra Medical and Research Center on the outskirts of Doha. Charting the gestation of a fetus inside a uterus from conception to birth, the suite of bronzes includes a 46-foot-tall anatomically correct baby boy.

Three nights later, “Relics,” Mr. Hirst’s retrospective, opened at Al Riwaq. Organized by Francesco Bonami, an independent curator who lives in New York and Milan, it includes three of the artist’s giant sharks submerged in tanks of formaldehyde; two of Mr. Hirst’s human skulls encrusted with thousands of sparkly diamonds; a room of stainless-steel medicine cabinets filled with drugs; and an array of paintings.

Weeks before the show opened, the Qatar Museums Authority was flooded with school groups requesting visits. “It is totally booked through November,” said Jean Paul Engelen, the organization’s director of public art and exhibitions, who estimates thousands of students from local schools and universities will have seen “Relics” by the time it closes on Jan. 22.

During the last three years Mr. Engelen, together with Sheikha al Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, 30, the Qatar Museums Authority chairwoman and a sister to the new emir, have overseen the installation of outdoor sculptures around the city by an international array of artists. Some have been more popular than others. Last week when a 16-foot-tall bronze sculpture by Mr. Abdessemed depicting one soccer player head-butting another was installed on the Corniche, the popular waterfront promenade, some residents called for its removal, claiming it offended their sensibilities. Other works have been embraced, including one of Louise Bourgeois’s monumental spiders at the Qatar National Convention Center and “7,” an 80-foot-tall sculpture by Richard Serra that sits on a plaza extending 250 feet into Doha Harbor at the tip of the Museum of Islamic Art Park.

The Qatar Museums Authority has also tried to open up a dialogue with the public about some of its shows. Last week it installed booths in two shopping malls where people could view images of one of Mr. Hirst’s sharks and his diamond skull and give their opinions, which can be found online; users can also express their opinions directly on a Web site. (Tweets are also encouraged.) Another exhibition inviting comment on the Web site is “The Museum of Crying Women,” in which streams of tears are added to portraits of Hollywood stars, first ladies, fashion celebrities and pop-culture figures; the creator of that show, which opened last week in Katara, is Francesco Vezzoli, the Italian artist and filmmaker.

Asking for public opinion is a novelty in this absolute monarchy. But the Qatar Museums Authority seems to be drumming up feedback even more aggressively than most American museums do.

“We try to learn who our audience is,” Mr. Engelen said, “where we can do better, and how we can reach even more people.”

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A version of this article appears in print on October 14, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Gang’s All There, Talking Art in Qatar.