Janet Cardiff’’s sound installation “The Forty Part Motet,’’ 40 loudspeakers in an oval in the Fuentidueña Chapel at the Cloisters in Upper Manhattan.

By JIM DWYER

Published: September 19, 2013

Wobbling, blissed out, a few in tears, people emerged every 12 minutes or so from the remnant of a 12th-century Spanish chapel tucked into the Cloisters museum.

Something had happened there, up on a hill at the northern end of Manhattan.

“It’s too soon to talk,” Margaret Cardenas said as she left the chapel.

“Too raw,” said another young woman, Alyssa.

Inside the ancient chapel was the first presentation of contemporary art ever at the Cloisters: “The Forty Part Motet,” an 11-minute immersion in a tapestry of voice, each thread as vivid as the whole fabric. A sacred composition of Renaissance England is rendered by the multimedia artist Janet Cardiff through 40 speakers — one for each voice in the Salisbury Cathedral Choir, which performed the piece in 2000. What started as one microphone per singer is now a choir of black high-fidelity speakers arrayed in an oval, eight groupings of soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass.

In the intimate space of the museum’s Fuentidueña Chapel, the sound, from invisible people, as if from ghosts, feels like charged, living sculpture. Through Dec. 8, it plays in a loop all day.

Ms. Cardenas, 24, had stayed in the chapel through four full cycles, walking along the ranks of speakers, then sitting on a bench in the center.

“I’m kind of out of it — I can’t articulate it,” she said. “Each speaker is a different person. It’s not something you think about: you feel it.”

In a moment, she found the word.

“Transcendent,” she said.

Ms. Cardenas was visiting the East Coast from Oregon for a wedding, and came to New York this week specifically to see a monumental installation by James Turrell in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. Then she heard about the Forty Part Motet and trekked uptown. “This is cooler, honestly, than Turrell,” Ms. Cardenas said. “I was super fortunate to get to see both.”

Others stumbled onto the “Forty Part Motet” while doing a lap around the city museum circuit. No one who sets foot inside the Cloisters can miss the sounds; although they are at their most powerful within the jeweled acoustic space of the chapel, they soar through the building.

“We had no idea it was here, and then we heard it all along as we went around the exhibits,” said Bengt Ehlim, who was visiting the city from Sweden with his wife, Susanne. She seemed to be stepping out of a trance.

“I am so really moved,” Ms. Ehlim said.

The core of Ms. Cardiff’s installation is a motet, “Spem in Alium,” a Latin fragment of the phrase “In No Other Is My Hope,” composed by Thomas Tallis sometime in the 16th century. Its transformation into the “Forty Part Motet” has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the museum’s space in Long Island City, Queens.

“I’d seen it at MoMA, and the gallery was very neutral,” Jeff Gray, 33, a computer programmer and musician, said outside the chapel. “But there’s nothing like this kind of space, the resonance of brick with wood roof. The kind of ghost qualities are a lot more apparent here. Everything bounces a lot more: you hear a voice over here, and you kind of feel it float around you.”

He was accompanied by Etta Yuki, who works in independent film. The sensations, she guessed, were what the director of an orchestra would feel. “And seeing it in a place like this puts it in a spiritual context,” Ms. Yuki, 36, said.

Sampled from the familiar, the sum of the ancient sound and space arrives in modern ears and eyes like nothing else: not like hearing a church choir, not like listening to music on a superb sound system.

“I’ve sung in English church choirs, and I know what it’s like to be in a space with 40 people and singing something like this,” Norman Yamada, 50, a composer and high baritone, said. This was a different, slightly unsettling experience, he said; acoustically “dry” sound was reconstituted. “By close-mikeing each singer, you’ve got it very dry,” he said. “Then you put it back in this space, and it takes the coloring of the space.”

The space, of course, takes its coloring from history. The Fuentidueña Chapel was part of a castle-fortress complex in Segovia during the hundreds of years of war between Muslims and Christians in Spain. Ms. Ehlim, the Swedish visitor, had made the journey from her accommodations in the hectic East Village to the Cloisters looking for the opposite of war. “My sister told me this is a lovely place to go if you want to have some peace in New York,” Ms. Ehlim said.

A new color.

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Escaping the Heat in Art’s Fortress

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Chanel Baldwin, exploring the Brooklyn Museum after learning that admission fees were “suggested.”

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Published: August 22, 2013

CHANEL BALDWIN’S eyes sipped on that painting and only that painting, because it was what was available to her on this side of the money line.

On steaming afternoons for much of the season, Ms. Baldwin, who turned 16 on Thursday, parked herself after summer school at the Brooklyn Museum, a refugee seeking the asylum of air-conditioning.

Because she could not afford the $8 suggested student admission — one that she, like so many others, understood to be required — she never got further than the lobby. She helped herself to the bathroom and water fountain, though, and spent a lot of time gazing at the painting called “Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps,” by Kehinde Wiley. On Mondays and Tuesdays, when the museum was closed, she sometimes stood outside the glass doors that whispered puffs of cool air through their divide.

In a perfectly air-conditioned world, Ms. Baldwin’s art consumption might never have been. It was a boiling city that drove her into the frosty museum, and she’s not alone. In a city where culture is supposed to be king, New Yorkers in the summertime sometimes pop into a museum mostly to escape the heat. They come for the air but can grow to love the art, too.

Ms. Baldwin’s confinement to the lobby has made her something of an expert on that Napoleon painting — one of the few works hanging before the place where you pay. First she saw the obvious: A black man with Timberland boots had supplanted Napoleon in a riff on the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David. Then Ms. Baldwin saw the Starter brand wristband. Then she noticed the sperm cells swimming over the canvas. It made her wonder what the artist was trying to say about men of her race.

Ms. Baldwin could have remained at the school for chill air, but who wants to stay there a minute longer than you must? She could have gone home to her mother’s, not far away in Flatbush, but the miserly bedroom air-conditioners breathe too little into the living quarters. Here in the museum the air was different, almost lush. “It’s like when you’re getting into a pool, and they make you shower,” she said.

In the season now passing, museums in New York actively pursued people like Ms. Baldwin — potential visitors for whom liquid-cool air might have been a gateway drug to the art. On Twitter, where so many institutions speak more authentically than elsewhere, there were lures like “Beat the summer heat!” from @MuseumMileNYC, representing several institutions on Fifth Avenue. “Looking to beat the #NYC heat?” the Park Avenue Armory asked. “Beat the heat with our Store’s new Marilyn Minter water bottle & Jasper Johns beach towel,” the Guggenheim offered.

At the Museum of the Moving Image, in Queens, the chill seekers were easily detected: the ones with the soaking shirt backs, and those who sprinted in and asked the receptionist some variation of, “So what kind of museum you got here exactly?” During the heat wave, searing temperatures had driven most people from the surrounding streets, save for a crew of fluorescent-vested construction workers, belt deep in the chopped-up road, singing.

Over at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the next day, Nauman Shah, 25, was leaving French salon paintings on his way to Cypriot sculpture. For this Pakistani-born engineer, who works below earth on the Second Avenue subway project, the air-conditioning was especially important. He was observing Ramadan, the holy month of fasting for Muslims. He woke before dawn and gobbled breakfast, chased by four or five glasses of water — and then the fast. He had to conserve his hydration until 8:23 p.m. Ordinarily, he would have returned to bed, waking only for dinner. But a friend had persuaded him to go out, and they agreed on the Met over other activities, he said, in part because its cool air was almost as effective as sleep at forestalling thirst. It was aiding his monthlong quest, he said, to achieve “control over your soul and desires.”

Around this time, but in another wing, a bird, perhaps also fleeing the heat, fluttered overhead through Rooms 229 and 230. It jolted a teenage boy with a Germanic accent. He asked aloud, “Was that really a bird?”

Back at the Brooklyn Museum, Ms. Baldwin was hanging with Akeem Reuben, 16, her second cousin and another summer-school air-conditioning refugee. Ms. Baldwin was on her usual bench, where she perched because of her belief that it cost money to roam further. But the fee was only “suggested,” I told them. The cousins said no one had explained that before.

Next thing, the three of us were in line. When our turn came, I uttered the museum equivalent of “open sesame”: “No donation today, thank you.”

The gates parted. We received green tags to prove our bona fides. Ms. Baldwin and Mr. Reuben looked stunned: such a formidable barrier, so easily breached. Ms. Baldwin realized they had given her an extra admission tag. She made sure to return it.

Now what did the cousins want to see? “Statues,” Ms. Baldwin replied.

But she never made it there, because the first room set her alight and held her rapt until she had to leave. There was no label too tedious to read, no piece undeserving of her scrutiny. She couldn’t help touching some of the works.

“Look at the detail on it,” she said of a Fred Wilson mirror, gasping. Then over to a grid of shelves with dozens of jugs from around the world. Each column of jugs had a Rolodex-like set of descriptions. She and Mr. Reuben stood there and went through every last jug — reading the card, then looking up at the corresponding piece, then the next and the next. They had time.

A piece called “Avarice,” by Fernando Mastrangelo, gripped Ms. Baldwin. It appeared from afar like a classic Aztec sun stone. But she got up close. Traced her fingers over it. Went to one side, looked at it; went to the other side, considered it that way. She noticed that the piece was made of corn, and then detected a toothpaste tube, soda bottles and cowboy hats lurking on the surface, all crackling with meaning.

Watching her, I realized how the inadvertent exclusion from these rooms must have trained her eyes. Instead of cruising across many floors, she had stared at the Napoleon painting and a nearby sculpture until they had little to give. Having only them to consider had taught her how to see. Now her sight could be marshaled against anything.

But she was irritated with the museum. New York is run on the kinds of understandings that kept the cousins in the lobby, with so many places formally open to anyone but protected in their exclusivity by invisible psychic gates.

Ms. Baldwin suggested a more honest approach, since people tend to think you have to pay: “They should just put a sign out telling us that it’s somewhat free.” Either way, she pledged to inform all her friends.

As the cousins left the museum for the oven of the outdoors, two schoolmates crossed their path, heading inside. “What’s going on here?” one asked. It was the cousins’ first occasion to share their discovery.

Art Basel in Miami is one of many international art fairs. Olafur Eliasson’s “Your Shared Planet” at a booth there in 2012.

By GRAHAM BOWLEY

“Untitled” by Jackson Pollock was one of the forged works. How imitations of the most heralded Abstract Expressionists by a complete unknown could have fooled connoisseurs and clients remains a mystery.

By PATRICIA COHEN and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Published: August 15, 2013

For 15 years, some of the art world’s most established dealers and experts rhapsodized about dozens of newly discovered masterworks by titans of Modernism. Elite buyers paid up to $17 million to own just one of these canvases, said to have been created by the hands of artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell.

But federal prosecutors say that most, if not all, of the 63 ballyhooed works — which fetched more than $80 million in sales — were painted in a home and garage in Queens by one unusually talented but unknown artist who was paid only a few thousand dollars apiece for his handiworks.

Authorities did not name or charge the painter and provided few identifying details except to say he had trained at a Manhattan art school in a variety of disciplines including painting, drawing and lithography. He was selling his work on the streets of New York in the early 1990s, they said, when he was spotted by a Chelsea art dealer who helped convert his work into one of the most audacious art frauds in recent memory.

The new details about the man said to have created the fakes were contained in a superseding indictment, handed up Wednesday against one of the co-conspirators, Glafira Rosales, an obscure dealer from Long Island who was arrested after a lengthy Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry. She has been charged with wire fraud and money laundering in connection to what authorities have called a scam, but her boyfriend, alleged to be the other co-conspirator who discovered the painter, has not been charged.

Investigators say Ms. Rosales sold 40 of the counterfeit works through Knoedler & Company, a venerable Upper East Side gallery that took in about $63 million from their sale. The gallery, which abruptly closed in November 2011, kept $43 million of that sum, and paid Ms. Rosales $20 million. Fakes sold through a second Manhattan dealer, Julian Weissman, brought in another $17 million, according to the indictment.

Meanwhile, the painter earned $5,400 for a painting in December 2005 and $7,000 for another in February 2008, the indictment said.

Ms. Rosales has pleaded not guilty and was released on bail earlier this week. Knoedler, its former president Ann Freedman, and Mr. Weissman have repeatedly said they believed the works they sold had been authentic.

How imitations of the most heralded Abstract Expressionists by a complete unknown could have fooled connoisseurs and clients remains a mystery.

“It’s impressive,” said Jack Flam, president of the Dedalus Foundation, the nonprofit organization that authenticates Motherwell’s work. “Whoever did these paintings was very well-informed of the practices of the artists.”

One of the first experts to publicly identify some of these paintings as forgeries, Mr. Flam noted that not only the works themselves, but also the backs of the paintings and the way the canvases were treated and the frames constructed aped the styles of the artists.

But he said “the way we look at reality is highly influenced by the context it’s presented to us.” The fact that they were sold by Knoedler, a respected gallery, influenced people’s opinions, he said.

Ms. Rosales’s boyfriend and business partner, who was not named in the indictment but has previously been identified in court papers as Jose Carlos Bergantiños-Diaz, processed the freshly painted fakes, “heating them, cooling them, and exposing them to the elements outdoors, in an attempt to make the fake works seem older than, in fact, they were,” the indictment said.

Ms. Rosales concocted various stories about the sudden appearance of so many never-seen-before works, telling Knoedler and Mr. Weissman that a majority came from a family friend who had inherited them from his father and insisted on remaining anonymous. The works, she said, were acquired in the 1950s and kept stashed in a sealed container.

Eight lawsuits have been brought by customers who say they were duped into buying forgeries. Many of the works were subjected to forensic testing that concluded they were forgeries.

Two of those suits were settled, including one involving a Pollock bought by a London hedge fund director for $17 million.

Ms. Freedman’s lawyer, Nicholas Gravante Jr., said: “Rosales’s confession confirms that Ann Freedman was the central victim of this criminal scheme.” Knoedler’s lawyer, Charles D. Schmerler, said in a statement: “If proven true, the new allegations against Rosales are a sad development for the entire art world.” But he said claims that Knoedler knowingly sold inauthentic paintings were baseless.

A lawyer for Ms. Rosales, Steven R. Kartagener, declined to comment on the new charges.

John Howard, a Wall Street executive who has sued Knoedler, Ms. Freedman and Ms. Rosales after paying $4 million for a painting attributed to Willem de Kooning, said that after he purchased the work in 2007, he asked Ms. Freedman to be on the lookout for a rare item — a small Motherwell from the artist’s acclaimed “Spanish Elegy” series.

“I doubt you’ll ever see one,” he remembered her saying.

Then six months later, he said, he got a call from the gallery saying one had surprisingly turned up. He decided not to buy it, he said. He noted that the work remained in an inventory of works unsold when the gallery shut its doors.                       

Owner Who Plans to Sell a Banksy Mural Steps Forward

Johnny Ohalloran spends a moment over the grave of 18-year-old graffiti artist Israel Hernandez Llach, who died after being shocked by a police officer's Taser, during the youth's funeral in Florida, August 14, 2013. (Al Diaz/Miami Herald/MCT)

A tearful funeral service Wednesday ended a week of mourning for the family of an 18-year-old artist who died after Miami Beach police shot him with a Taser.

But relatives and community leaders say they're still waiting for answers about Israel Hernandez-Llach's death.

More than a hundred people, including many teenagers, attended the service at Vista Memorial Gardens & Funeral Home in Miami Lakes. Some carried red roses and wore pins designed by the young man's friend, a fellow artist. His mother and sister linked arms and wailed along with others as they followed the casket to the grave site under the mid-day sun.

Only sobs broke the silence as the casket was lowered into the grave. Relatives of the Colombian-born young man took turns dropping earth onto the casket. Unusually, many in the crowd chose to stay as heavy equipment did the rest. The teen's mother stepped away, leaning on others for support.

"This is a very sad day, not only for the family but the whole Hispanic community," said Fabio Andrade, a family friend and president of the Americas Community Center. He broke down in tears when speaking of the young man and said community members are rallying to reform guidelines for the use of Tasers.

The family is still waiting for authorities to explain why their son died Aug. 6 after police caught him spray-painting graffiti on a building near 71st Street and Collins Avenue. They've received no official answers from police or the medical examiner, according to Andrade.

"There is no question after seeing Lito after seven days that there were really bad bruises on the body that shows that there was more than just a Taser," he said, using a term of endearment. "You could see it very clearly when we received the body." Police have said he was Tasered just once and no other force was used in making the arrest.

According to the police report, Hernandez-Llach "came crashing down hard" onto the hood of a car after launching himself over a fence to get away from police.

Miami Beach officer Jorge Mercado, who fired the Taser that struck the young man in the chest, was placed on administrative leave after the incident.

The service coincided with the release of the police radio recording that captured 14 minutes of conversations between officers, dispatchers and paramedics on the morning that Hernandez-Llach was Tasered.

The tape begins at 5:13 a.m. as a police officer, presumably Mercado, breathlessly reports to dispatchers that he is pursuing a suspect.

"Going into a building,'' the officer says, panting. He continues announcing his location, as he pursues the subject for several minutes, describing him as a 6-foot-1 male with a yellow or cream-colored, long-sleeved shirt and dreadlocks. Three minutes into the chase, another officer interrupts, asking why they were chasing the suspect. The dispatcher responds: graffiti. The dispatcher begins to re-deploy other units to the area.

One officer questions the wisdom of reassigning patrols to the call.

"This is a graffiti subject. We'll look in the area...but like I said, this is a misdemeanor. We're not going to bring the dogs out for this. We're gonna' be looking out till we find him, but he's probably hiding out somewhere.''

Seven minutes after the chase begins, an officer spies Hernandez-Llach hopping the fence, then announces that he is in custody. About 30 seconds later, an officer reports that the suspect appears to be having a "seizure,'' though the officer says he is breathing. There is no mention of a Taser being used.

Tasers result in death in only the rarest of cases. When deaths have occurred in the past, they are often the result of a pre-existing medical condition or a reaction to drugs in the system. The medical examiner hasn't ruled on the cause of death pending the result of toxicology tests.

The funeral service followed an all-night wake during which many stopped by to view the open casket. The funeral home donated the plot and services after hearing that the family was trying to raise money for the burial.

"This is the time for the authorities to change something," said Manuel Santander, a family friend. "Anything we do, it's going to be the same for Israel and the family, but at least the police department, the city and Miami-Dade County have to think about how this thing doesn't happen again."
 

By Katia Savchuk and Julie Brown

ROSENBAUM

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/ARS

Jackson Pollock's 'Number 7, 1952.'

Water Mill, N.Y.
And Southampton, N.Y.

In accounts of the Abstract Expressionist era, painter and assemblage-maker Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990) is better known for throwing great parties and purchasing important works by major artists than for producing significant work of his own.

Attempting to rewrite that history is "Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet," the provocative show at the Parrish Art Museum near the Long Island communities where Ossorio, as well as Jackson Pollock, lived and worked. It positions the underrated oeuvre of the wealthy bon vivant on equal footing with works by Pollock and Jean Dubuffet, his two renowned friends, who held him in high regard as a professional colleague. What they all had in common was a penchant for experimenting with unconventional materials and techniques, and a predilection for rawness over refinement.

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The Ossorio Foundation, Sally Vanasse and Nicole Vanasse/Lee Rosenbaum

Alfonso Ossorio's 'Head' (1951).

"Ossorio's patronage overshadowed what we know of him as an artist," observed Klaus Ottmann, curator-at-large of Washington's Phillips Collection, where a larger version of the show opened in February. Conventional wisdom pegged Ossorio as a dilettante and Sunday painter, and an early collector of masterpieces by Pollock, Dubuffet and Clyfford Still. Five works formerly in his collection are now on display at the Parrish. They had once been ensconced at the Creeks, Ossorio's grand East Hampton estate on Georgica Pond, which he bought on Pollock's recommendation. (It is now owned by the billionaire Ronald Perelman.)

Grappling with the question of why "his artistic career [was] so thoroughly marginalized," Phillips Collection director Dorothy Kosinski wrote in her catalog preface for the show (which she co-curated with Mr. Ottmann) that Ossorio "was perhaps too difficult to categorize" both personally (Philippines-born, naturalized American of mixed ethnic heritage, observant Catholic, gay) and professionally (diverse techniques, styles and media).

Pollock and Ossorio first met in 1949 through dealer Betty Parsons, who exhibited both. Pollock suggested that his new friend visit Dubuffet in France, which Ossorio did later that year and again in 1951. Although interested in each other's work, Pollock and Dubuffet never managed to meet.

The best evidence that Ossorio was no Sunday painter is his feverish burst of productivity in 1950, during a sojourn in the Philippines—his first time back since being sent away as a child to receive a British and U.S. education.

He had returned to design the interior of the chapel of St. John the Worker, being constructed for employees of his family's sugar factory, the source of his substantial wealth. While creating the chapel's monumental, fiery-hued mural depicting the Last Judgment, Ossorio also produced hundreds of his most riveting, idiosyncratic works—the so-called Victorias Drawings (actually, watercolors), named after a mill town on the island of Negros where the chapel was located. What is thought to be the first Victorias image is tellingly titled "The Child Returns."

These small, vibrant works on paper, swirling with lush reds, oranges and greens, are anomalous among the pieces in the show, including the other Ossorios. With their tropical palette and haunting treatment of religion and family, they convey the disturbing emotions unleashed by the artist's bittersweet homecoming. In the first page of his Philippines diary, he described his "lonely" childhood and sense of being "never at home in any conventional category."

Even the technique used to create these distinctive works was a departure for Ossorio. Inspired by the Surrealist Victor Brauner, he employed the wax-resist painting method in his Victorias works: With a candle or hot wax, he drew on a paper sheet that he first coated with watercolor. He then applied another layer of paint, which would not adhere to the waxed areas. Next, he drew with black ink over the waxed and painted surface, adding virtuosic, delicately rendered details to the layered image. On some of these works, he also cut or tore the paper support, creating shaped borders or lacy interiors.

The wall devoted to eight examples of this rarely seen "fracas of forms" (as Dubuffet described them in an admiring 1951 catalog essay, reproduced in the Parrish exhibition's catalog) is itself worth the visit to the museum. If, like me, you find yourself yearning for more, there's a plentiful stash in storage drawers at the nearby Southampton warehouse occupied by the Ossorio Foundation, which is still seeking homes for some 550 works remaining in his estate. It is open year-round to the public by emailed appointment.

Did Ossorio have any effect on his colleagues' work, beyond his financial patronage? Pollock's transition from his celebrated, mural-size poured paintings to more overtly figurative drawings in black industrial paint may have been inspired by Ossorio's works in his Manhattan studio, where Pollock resided while his friend was abroad.

One of those semifigurative Pollocks, "Number 7, 1952," lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a highlight of the Parrish show. With an elegance reminiscent of old-master drawings, this abstracted but recognizable head, delineated in black and enlivened by yellow splotches, hangs next to Ossorio's Abstract Expressionist-influenced "Head" (1951). Overworked and overwrought, the Ossorio suffers by comparison to Pollock's confident expressiveness.

The catalog suggests that Dubuffet's experimental collages (not in the show) that incorporated butterfly wings may be indebted to a butterfly-shaped Victorias drawing sent to him by Ossorio, who frequently depicted children with angellike wings. The juxtaposition of Ossorio's impenetrably scrawled and slathered "Martyrs and Spectators" (1951) with Dubuffet's mud-hued, grotesquely broad-bodied, tiny-headed woman—a 1950 work from his well-known "Corps de Dame" series—exemplifies the predilection of all three artists for dense compositions in which the deployment of materials is as much the subject as what they depict.

Notwithstanding his sophistication and erudition, Ossorio was at his best when creating works that come across as outsider art. Like the intimate Victorias Drawings, some of the monumental Congregations, from the 1960s, are irregularly shaped and refreshingly oddball. Although not in the Parrish show, which chiefly focuses on works from 1948-52, the Congregations can be seen by appointment at the Ossorio Foundation. Encrusted with jewellike baubles and punctuated by glaring glass eyes and phallic protrusions mounted on panel, they are both fanciful and menacing.

Finally given a bit of overdue attention in the Parrish's uneven but tantalizing sampling, Ossorio now deserves a comprehensive retrospective, to be appreciated on his own terms, not upstaged by marquee names. Perhaps this "huge talent," as Ms. Kosinski describes him, may at last win due art-historical recognition.

Ms. Rosenbaum writes on art and museums for the Journal and blogs as CultureGrrl.

In the process, conservators at the Los Angeles-based center are pioneering the use of digital X-ray radiography, near-infrared imaging, electron scanning microscopy and mass spectrometers to probe the painter's flamboyant work. Their forensic tools turned the $140 million canvas into a crime scene in which the culprit is the chemistry of decay.

"From the chemical composition and buildup of paints, we are unlocking evidence of Pollock's creative process, his choice of materials, and any alterations through time," said Getty conservation analyst Alan Phenix.

Mural is one of a half dozen Pollock paintings undergoing restoration recently at collections around the world. The University of Iowa, which owns it, commissioned its repair. Art collector Peggy Guggenheim, who commissioned Pollock to paint "Mural" for her New York townhouse, donated it to the university, located in Iowa City.

Photos: Probing Pollock's 'Mural'

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Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

Experts examined 'Mural,' by Jackson Pollock, at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles.

Graphic: The Restoration Work

Get an up-close look at some of the restoration work on the painting, see the results of analysis of the paint used, and take a look around the Getty Conservation Institute.

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The massive 8-by-20-foot canvas was a turning point in modern art when it was painted in 1943, energizing the abstract expressionism movement. "Scholars have always looked at this painting as a seminal work; a moment in which Pollock is changing," said Yvonne Szafran, senior conservator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, which is collaborating on the project with the conservation institute at the Getty Center complex.

The 70-year-old painting embodies the conundrum posed by all famous works of art—whether conservators should restore and refurbish, or simply preserve what they find as best they can. But time is especially cruel to modern art. Commercial paints fade and flake. Canvas sags. Frames warp. Exotic creative materials, from synthetic dyes, neon tubes and plastics, to body fluids, animal parts and table scraps, readily disintegrate or rot.

That limits a conservator's choices in the effort to save modern works. "If they are made of lettuce, there is only so much you can do," said conservation expert Gillian McMillan at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

And the artist's palette keeps expanding. "If a material has been invented—and there are millions of materials out there—I swear there is an artist who has tried to use it," said James Coddington, chief conservator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who has been restoring three Pollock paintings. "It is very hard to know what the longer-term performance of these materials might be."

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Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

Alan Phenix at the Getty Conservation Institute points to a digital image of the Jackson Pollock painting under repair.

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Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

The artist's signature.

At the Getty, researchers are trying to make necessary repairs without changing the character of Pollock's work—to preserve rather than restore. But the materials in his painting posed their own technical challenges. The painting is so large that it took three days to X-ray the canvas in its entirety.

"Big paintings like 'Mural' lead a hard life," said Getty conservator Laura Rivers. "They are stretched, un-stretched, rolled, unrolled over and over."

As a result, its paint in places has chipped. Some colors have faded—driven by the internal chemistry of the pigments they contain. The canvas itself has sagged under the weight of all the paint it holds. And like other famous works of art, Pollock's painting also suffered the ill effects of earlier preservation work.

Using a noxious solvent called xylene, Ms. Rivers spent weeks removing the acrylic varnish applied across the painting during a restoration in 1973, which had masked the painting's texture and sheen. To protect herself from the fumes, she wore a face mask as well as three layers of gloves.

To safely analyze the chemistry of Pollock's paints, the conservators used a series of noninvasive imaging techniques, including infrared imaging and X-ray fluoroscopy, which let them probe the canvas with different electromagnetic wavelengths without having to touch it. A single application of teal blue contained 12 different pigments, the spectroscopic analysis showed.

Microscopic examination of paint samples—each no more than a half-millimeter across—revealed as many as 25 layers of color splashed, spattered and brushed on the linen canvas.

Their tests revealed that Pollock had been surprisingly cautious for an artist once renowned as "Jack the Dripper" for his exuberant splatters of color. He painted "Mural" methodically, working from right to left, with the canvas upright and not horizontal on the floor, as with many of his later paintings.

Moreover, Pollock relied almost exclusively on traditional oil paints, the researchers determined. "In a funny way, despite its radical creative dimension, it is really quite conservative from a materials point of view," said Dr. Phenix.

But the tests also showed that Pollock had used a white, water-based house paint to lighten the background spaces between the swirls of oil paint. That paint had grown transparent as it aged. "Oil and water don't mix, so you get some odd interactions that pose a conservation challenge," said Dr. Phenix.

Even so, the Getty conservators don't plan to repaint those patches. "We accept changes like that," said Ms. Szafran. "It is part of the aging of the painting, its inherent vice."

In the weeks ahead, the Getty researchers expect to rebuild the wooden framework that supports the large canvas and keeps it taut. They have spent months consulting with art scholars on the proper way to proceed. "You are balancing historical accuracy and authenticity with what you know of the artist's intent," said Getty conservation scientist Tom Learner. "We want this painting to look like a well-preserved 70-year-old."

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com

"Soundings’ Features Art With Audio Elements

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Soundings: A Contemporary Score, a survey of sound art, opens at the Museum of Modern Art on Saturday. Tristan Perich’s “Microtonal Wall” is a 25-foot panel with 1,500 tiny speakers, each at different pitch. More Photos »

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: August 8, 2013

Three summers ago, the Museum of Modern Art installed a 1961 sound art work by Yoko Ono in its atrium. It was called “Voice Piece for Soprano — Scream 1. against the wind 2. against the wall 3. against the sky.” It consisted of a live standing microphone and some extremely loud amplifiers. Anyone passing through the atrium was invited to stand in front of the mike and follow the instructions in the title: that is, scream.

Countless visitors, including many kids and antic-minded adults, gleefully complied. But where Ms. Ono could turn a scream into a coloratura aria, the average amateur participant just gave an explosive shriek and scampered away. The piece stayed in place for months. It turned the museum into a sonic hell. MoMA habitués, including guards, couldn’t wait for it to go away.

Still, it had its merits. It was, for one thing, a very un-MoMA phenomenon: unpredictable, uncontrolled, anarchic, all that that institution is not. It also did what sound art was historically meant to do: to give sound — variously referred to as noise, or music or silence — the assertive presence of any other art medium, make it fill space, claim attention and time.

In recent years, attention has been slight. The much-maligned 2002 Whitney Biennial included a substantial amount of sound art, by the likes of Maryanne Amacher and Stephen Vitiello. But like many of that show’s innovations, this one sailed straight over the heads of critics and didn’t get much follow-up.

Now, more than a decade later, MoMA is picking up the slack with a survey show of new art called “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” which opens Saturday. As if in reaction to Ms. Ono’s eruptive brashness, it is low key to the point of timidity. And formally speaking, much of it isn’t sound art in any pure sense. It’s sculpture, film, installation and work on paper with audio components.

Throughout the 20th century, sound was frontier terrain, staked out by crazies and visionaries: pro-violence Futurists, war-addled Dadaists and out-there beings like Antonin Artaud. The composer John Cage and his Fluxus successors were part of sound art’s gentler, though no less radical side. And that’s the side, now neatly landscaped, that “Soundings” is on.

The simple fact that the show looks like a normal, neat, stuff-on-the-walls-and-floors MoMA fare says a lot. Two artists are represented only by drawings. Marco Fusinato’s are based on the printed pages of a score by the composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001). On each page, Mr. Fusinato has drawn hundreds of ink lines tying all the notes to a single central point. Were the piece played the way the score looks, it would sound like a detonation.

The large-format drawings on paper by Christine Sun Kim are also scores, but look expressive and personal, even diaristic. Ms. Kim has been deaf since birth, and her approach to sound is highly conceptual. Basically, she’s creating the idea of it, visually, in terms most useful to her: American Sign Language, written English, physical gesture.

Both artists present sound in abstract form, as notion. The work of a third artist, Carsten Nicolai, incorporates sound that’s actual but inaudible. Using a tanklike container, he directs low-frequency sound waves onto the surface of a pool of water and, with mirrors, projects the patterns the waves create onto a display screen. The screen is the first thing you see when you enter the galleries. You could easily take it for an abstract painting with the shakes. Only when you circle around, do you see that it’s really an elaborate, overly ingenious kinetic sculpture.

The show has more busy sculpture. One by the American composer Richard Garet is an ensemble of old stereo speakers, a spinning turntable, a microphone and a glass marble, joined to produce a sound like a skipping record. A concoction of buzzes and flashes by the British artist Haroon Mirza is notable mostly for serving as a frame for one of MoMA’s Mondrian paintings, which looks like a fancy acoustic panel in this context.

And the Rube Goldberg bug carries over into an installation by the Scottish artist and filmmaker Luke Fowler and the Japanese composer Toshiya Tsunoda that includes electric fans, landscape images projected on a loose cloth, stretched piano wires and a dollop of Cagean chance. If the cloth, blown by the fans, touches the wires, we get a sound, a dull drone. The piece is very pretty to see, but to hear, not much.

Both of the show’s videos are good. For the 2011 “Music While We Work,” the Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang recruited retired sugar factory workers to return to their former plant, record its ambient sounds and create a score from them. As we watch them attentively holding microphones at assembly lines and loading platforms, we’re hearing what they are conscientiously rehearing: the soundtrack of their lives.

The Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard also recorded and filmed specific environments, four public buildings in Chernobyl, abandoned after the 1986 nuclear disaster. Unlike Ms. Wang, he manipulates his data by recording and rerecording it multiple times, until sounds and images become dense, grainy and heavy. Interiors seem to be slowly leaking out of darkness into visibility; sounds swell from near-silence to a carillon clamor.

Bells — church bells, stock exchange bells, bicycle bells, all taped in Manhattan — are the substance of a charming timed sound installation by Mr. Vitiello in MoMA’s sculpture garden. (One bell goes off every minute; they all go off on the hour.) It’s one of several works that extended the exhibition — organized by Barbara London, an associate curator in the department of media and performance art, and Leora Morinis, a curatorial assistant — into other parts of the museum.

Most of the outlying things are physically plain and audio-intensive. In a sweet, slight piece by Florian Hecker, three discretely placed speakers carry on an electronic conversation between two floors of the museum. Tristan Perich’s “Microtonal Wall,” a 25-foot-long panel pieced together from 1,500 tiny speakers, each tuned to a different pitch, is a kind of monumental musical instrument. To walk past it is to feel the sensation of a xylophone playing in your head.

Susan Philipsz’s “Study for Strings,” inside the galleries, is the closest thing to conventional music, and one of the show’s strong entries. It’s a recording of only the viola and cello parts, and their pauses, from a string orchestra composition written in 1943 by Pavel Haas in a German concentration camp. A performance by prisoners of the full, 24-part piece was filmed for Nazi propaganda purposes, after which the musicians, including Haas, were killed.

Clearly, sound, all but dematerialized, can be extremely powerful. Here’s proof. And there’s more in Jana Winderen’s “Ultrafield,” a classic “field recording” piece for which the artist taped sounds made by bats, deepwater fish and insects pitched beyond human hearing. Converted to the minimal audibility, the whirs, ticks and crackles of invisible beings turn a dark gallery into a kind of cosmic acoustic device.

Finally, one piece, Camille Norment’s “Triplight,” radiates that wondrous thing, the music of silence. The hardware involved is bare-bones: a 1955 standing microphone, of a kind once regularly used by jazz, blues and pop singers. In this one, though, the amplification unit has been replaced by a small light that flickers and brightens as if responding to a singer’s breath and voice.

It’s tempting to see Ms. Norment’s mute mike as a counterweight to Ms. Ono’s loud one. And a few more comparisons, probing the parameters of an understudied discipline, might have given some punch to a show that, like too many others at MoMA these days, tames unruly impulses in art, past and present, when it should be egging them on. There’s still a major sound art exhibition waiting to be done, and it will be, but not here.

To the Editor:

The choice being debated in Detroit — whether to sell works from the Detroit Institute of Arts to help pay the city’s debts — is agonizing. How can we equate a few pieces of canvas with paint on them with the pensions of thousands of firefighters, nurses, police officers, teachers and other civil servants?

The same choice is being played out in many other communities across the country. In a sense, we have always had this dilemma, but this time, there are several special factors. One is that cities and towns are going bankrupt, and they can’t continue to provide basic services, let alone support for art museums. Another factor is the stunning rise in prices for works of art. Thousands of works go for over a million dollars every year; eight- and even nine-figure prices are common.

Mixed into this is the fact that museums have become dependent on support from federal, state and local government in the form of tax subsidies, tax exemptions, especially from real estate tax, and, most important, tax deductions. At the same time, private donors are being asked to give more and more; how long will the 1 percent agree to subsidize a service for the 99 percent? There are more than 100,000 nonprofit arts organizations in this country, all with their hands out.

How can museums justify this kind of support? We claim to be moral institutions, open to all, providing the best to the most, and we all work hard to do just that. But is that really our audience? Don’t we, for the most part, serve the affluent, the educated, the converted, those who are on our side of the income and education gap?

Museums make a determined effort to widen their audience — the Detroit Institute of Arts is a leader in that effort — but we are still falling short. The shortfall is where that agonizing question arises: How many lives is a Rembrandt worth?

FRANK ROBINSON
Ithaca, N.Y., Aug. 5, 2013

The writer was a museum director for 35 years, at Williams College, the Rhode Island School of Design and Cornell University.

Editors’ Note: We invite readers to respond by Thursday for the Sunday Dialogue. We plan to publish responses and Mr. Robinson’s rejoinder in the Sunday Review. E-mail: letters@nytimes.com