"Paley Art Collection Heading to the de Young Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco" via Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

Picasso's 1905-6 painting "Boy Leading a Horse."
The William S. Paley Collection, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New YorkPicasso’s 1905-6 painting “Boy Leading a Horse

By CAROL VOGEL
August 2, 2012, 2:57 PM

The staggering art collection put together by William S. Paley, the television impresario who founded the Columbia Broadcasting System, first went on view at the Museum of Modern Art in 1992. Paley, a longtime trustee at MoMA, had left his paintings, drawings and sculptures to the museum upon his death in 1990. After MoMA showed the collection it then traveled to museums in Indianapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego and Baltimore.

One city that did not get the show was San Francisco. But on Sept. 15, “The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism,’’ will open the de Young Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco before going to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, the Fine Arts Museum of Quebec and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.

On view will be highlights of the Paley holdings, including Picasso’s famous 1905-6 painting “Boy Leading a Horse,’’ Gauguin’s “Seed of the Areoi’’ (1892), from the artist’s first trip to Tahiti, and Degas’s 1905 large-scale pastel and charcoal “Two Dancers.’’ The exhibition will remain on view in San Francisco through Dec. 30.

via bassmuseumpres.tumblr.com

 

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

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

By
Published: August 5, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Silence, From de Chirico to Dale Earnhardt Sr." in @wsj

[image]
Menil Collection, Houston
Giorgio de Chirico's 'Melancholia' (1916) is at Houston's Menil Collection

The avant-garde artist and composer John Cage famously said, "There's no such thing as silence." But that hasn't stopped contemporary visual masters (and, of course, Simon & Garfunkel) from using silence as a subject and a symbol.

"Silence," a new exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston on view through Oct. 21, looks at how many things the lack of sound has come to stand for, from a path to serenity to oppression to mortality.

A starting point for "Silence" lies in the Menil itself. It's home to the Rothko Chapel, a sanctuary lined with 14 of Rothko's monochromes and inaugurated in 1971. It's long been a site for acts of quiet contemplation.

The earliest work in the show is Giorgio de Chirico's "Melancholia" from 1916, a rendering of a Neoclassical sculpture in a seemingly quiet courtyard with two tiny figures whispering to one another behind its back. De Chirico and other Surrealists dealt with "the silence of the world and the isolation of the individual," says curator Toby Kamps.

From the mid-20th century on, artists took a more conceptual approach. In 1961, Robert Morris pieced together a deceptively simple wooden box. Riffing on the silence visitors might expect in a white-walled gallery space, the piece has an internal speaker that plays a recording of all the bangs and clanks that accompanied its making.

While John Cage may have denied silence's existence, his 1952 composition "4'33"" required musicians to sit in silence with their instruments for three short movements, directing the audience's attention toward any ambient noise in or around the room. The composition was a direct influence on several of the more recent works on view in "Silence," including Kurt Mueller's "Cenotaph" from 2011.

The piece is a functional jukebox filled with notable "moments of silence" sourced from YouTube and C-Span and burned onto CDs. The recordings include a remembrance of the Space Shuttle Columbia and President Barack Obama's tribute to victims of the Aurora, Colo., shooting just a few weeks back. Visitors are invited to pop in a quarter and play a commemoration of their choosing.

True to Cage's statement, many of these moments aren't silent at all. "One of my favorites is a moment of silence for Dale Earnhardt Sr., who crashed at the Daytona 500," Mr. Mueller says. "He wore the number three, and on the third lap of the race 10 years later the crowd goes silent, but you still hear the sounds of the cars and the engines, driving around the track."

—Rachel Wolff

A version of this article appeared August 4, 2012, on page C14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Silence, From de Chirico to Dale Earnhardt Sr..

"An Artist Has Her Say—All Over a Museum's Lobby and Store" in @wsj


See a time-lapse video of a room-wrapping installation by Barbara Kruger that opens Aug. 20, 2012, at the Hirshhorn Museum in D.C.

August 2, 2012, 6:43 p.m. ET
By KELLY CROW

When artist Barbara Kruger has something to say, she tends to use 12-foot-tall letters.

The 67-year-old Ms. Kruger, who is based in New York, has earned a reputation over the past three decades for pasting aphorisms about power and consumerism atop black-and-white photographs in combinations that are equally wry and wince-inducing. An early example from 1987 shows a hand holding up a card that reads, "I Shop Therefore I Am." More recently, she's created videos and wrapped entire rooms in pithy texts that splay across floors and squeeze above doorways.

Now, Ms. Kruger is headed to Washington, where her latest installation, "Belief+Doubt," has taken over just about every surface in the lower lobby of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The work, which covers 6,700 square feet of surface area, has been printed onto wallpaper-like sheets in her signature colors of red, black and white. The vinyl portions on the floor will be mopped daily to get rid of shoe scuffs. The exhibition goes on public view Aug. 20 and will stay up for about three years.

image

© Barbara Kruger/Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
The Hirshhorn Museum's 'Belief+Doubt.'

The artist has made playful use of the architecture: On the strip of wall above the descending escalator, riders will see "Don't Look Down on Anyone." Across the threshold of the museum's new store will be the phrase, "Plenty Should Be Enough."

The museum store's checkerboard floor also reads like a shopper's lament, with squares that read, "Hoard It," "Crave It," "Break It" and "Return It." Assistant curator Melissa Ho said this last suggestion initially raised some eyebrows with officials at Smithsonian Enterprises, which oversees the Hirshhorn's gift shop, but Ms. Ho said she reassured them. "I said, 'Don't you think she's funny?' "

Collectors seem to think so: Last fall, one paid Christie's a record $902,500 for her 1985 photo of a ventriloquist's dummy, "Untitled (When I Hear the Word Culture I Take Out My Checkbook)."

Humor has long played a role in Ms. Kruger's work—she has placed smiley faces above the lobby's restroom doors—but her style favors satire. That's partly why Hirshhorn director Richard Koshalek said he thought of her two years ago when he was angling to transform the lower lobby. "With Congress steps away from us on the Mall, we have to find ways to engage with the powers of this city," Mr. Koshalek said. "We shouldn't hide from it."

Ms. Kruger said she didn't set out to lobby for any particular political party; indeed, both sides will likely find phrases that sum up their Capitol Hill sentiments. One patch of floor beside an elevator reads, "Admit Nothing. Blame Everyone." Another stretch of wall reads, "Whose Power? Whose Values?" The point, she said, is to provoke people to question themselves, and others. "At election time, questions come in handy, right?" she said.

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

A version of this article appeared August 3, 2012, on page D7 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: An Artist Has Her Say—All Over A Museum's Lobby and Store.

"Filtering Miró’s Work Through a Political Sieve: ‘Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape,’ at National Gallery" in @nytimes

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Successió Miró/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
“The Farm” (1921-1922), part of the National Gallery’s “Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape,” which explores politics in Miró’s art.

August 2, 2012
By KEN JOHNSON

WASHINGTON — Was Joan Miró a political artist? A much-beloved Surrealist, he is not commonly thought of as such. On its face, his oeuvre appears remarkably apolitical, especially considering that he lived through two world wars and a murderous civil war in his homeland, Spain. From the hallucinogenic vision of “The Farm” in the 1920s to his mural-scale fields of color punctuated by wispy signs in the 1960s, evidence of worldly political engagement is hard to find. A reluctant joiner and manifesto signer, Miró (1893-1983) disliked Social Realism. The artists of the past who inspired him were mystic visionaries like Hieronymus Bosch and William Blake.

This poses a problem for the many scholars and critics of today who tend to judge art on ethical grounds. The solution for ideological interrogators, then, would be either to dismiss Miró as a bourgeois escapist or to discover political convictions underlying the seemingly innocuous surfaces of his works. This second option is what the organizers of “Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape” at the National Gallery of Art have determined to pursue. On that score the show is a muddled effort. Fortunately, this does not detract from the approximately 160 works dating from 1917 to 1974 on view. It is a beautiful and exciting show.

But for those who pay attention to wall texts and catalog essays, it is a different story. Marko Daniel and Matthew Gale, curators at the Tate Modern in London who organized the exhibition in collaboration with Teresa Montaner, a curator at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, contend that at certain crucial times in his life Miró did express passionately held political concerns, albeit in coded and not obviously illustrative ways.

They see Catalonian nationalism in his early proto-Magic Realist landscapes and in his more abstract images of the Catalan peasant-hunter. Later they find him to be an enemy of Fascism during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. In the postwar years under the Franco dictatorship, he was a mostly passive resister, unknown in Spain outside of a small circle of friends and supporters, even as he was being celebrated in exhibitions elsewhere around the world.

How well do Miró’s actual works support claims of a politicized Miró? Not very. Consider his breakout series of landscapes of the late teens and early 1920s, culminating in “The Farm” (1921-22). In his essay about these stunning paintings, the art historian Robert S. Lubar declares that Miró’s mission was “to link his vision of an essential Catalonia with the promise of an emergent nation that hoped to participate on the world stage as an equal partner.”

This just does not sound right. Miró was a Barcelona city boy. His parents bought the house in Montroig in 1911, when he was in his late teens, for summer vacations. Moreover, romancing rural life is standard fare in art of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Gauguin, van Gogh, Cézanne and countless others contributed to that tradition. What distinguishes “The Farm” is its nearly hallucinatory crystallization of the old buildings, the spindly central tree and the animals, plants and objects neatly distributed around the grounds. It is as if we were seeing through the eyes of a saint in a state of spiritual transport. That this Edenlike scene happens to be in Catalonia rather than, say, Normandy, is incidental. Viewed through a political lens, the Catalan peasant and hunter — the comical pipe-smoking, gun-toting, bearded stick figure who appears in zanily Surrealistic landscapes of the 1920s — may be a personification of Catalan pride. But he is easier to read as Miró’s own avatar, a tracker of signs of cosmic life in the landscapes of his own imagination. Near the end of the 1930s, Miró revisited the realism of “The Farm,” and he produced a masterpiece: “Still Life With Old Shoe” (1937). Struck by the image of the fork stabbing a dried apple and the ominously flowing areas of blackness, critics have read the painting as an allegory about the Spanish Civil War, calling it his “Guernica.” What is immediately captivating about it, though, is how the rustic objects seem to glow numinously from within. It is an image of supernatural immanence in the humblest of circumstances. Making a political case for Miró’s later work is a harder sell yet, as he turned increasingly to abstraction during and after the war. There is more comedy than tragedy in the cavorting hieroglyphic characters and hectic narratives of the wonderful “Constellations” series of 1939-41. A renowned public figure in his last decades, Miró was given to occasional political gestures, like creating posters for liberal causes and a splattered and dripped painting called “Mai 68,” commemorating the youthful revolutions in Paris of the late ’60s. In paintings that he cut holes in and burned with a torch in the early ’70s, he implicitly equated the violation of aesthetic norms with sociopolitical protest, but by then such Dada-like provocations were old hat. In a 1936 letter to his dealer, Pierre Matisse, Miró wrote that he would “plunge in again and set out on the discovery of a profound and objective reality of things, a reality that is neither superficial nor Surrealistic, but a deep poetic reality, an extrapictorial reality, if you will, in spite of pictorial and realistic appearances.” Miró believed in a reality transcending that of the material world: a place between infinite spirit and finite Creation. It is to this realm of imagination that the ladder recurring in many of his paintings leads: to a place inhabited by metaphysical life-forms and mind-stretching symbols, whose hallucinatory presences may convey truths that elude everyday consciousness. But ladders go both ways. They can be a means of escape from worldly woes, but they also may lead the visionary prophet back down to earth, where he may try to get people to become better oriented to transcendental realities — by making art, for example. That we would all be better off if more people kept in touch with cosmic mysteries was an article of faith with Miró, from first to last.

"$4M Pop Piece Found: Roy Lichtenstein's Electric Cord" - @NYPost

$4M piece found

By KATE KOWSH, LIZ SADLER and DAREH GREGORIAN

Last Updated: 8:53 AM, August 1, 2012
COSTLY JUICE: “Electric Cord” went missing in 1970.

A multimillion-dollar Roy Lichtenstein painting that disappeared 42 years ago has popped up in a Manhattan warehouse — and its owner is trying to make sure it doesn’t pull another vanishing act.

“Electric Cord” was last seen in 1970 when owner Leo Castelli sent the piece by the pop-art prince out to be professionally cleaned. It was never returned, and the fate of the painting was a mystery — until last week.

That’s when Castelli’s widow, Barbara Castelli, got a call from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation saying the piece had turned up at a high-end art storage warehouse on the East Side, where someone was trying to sell it.

She asked for a restraining order barring the estimated $4 million painting from being moved from the Hayes Storage Warehouse until she can get her day in court, saying in court papers that she’s “deeply concerned” about the possibility of the artwork, “which is an American treasure by an artist native to Manhattan, again disappearing, perhaps to never be seen again.”

Justice O. Peter Sherwood signed off on Castelli’s temporary court order freezing the painting’s location pending a hearing with the warehouse people and “John Doe” on Monday.

Amye Austin, an operations supervisor at Hayes, declined to comment.

Leo Castelli, who put on Lichtenstein’s first solo exhibit at his gallery in 1962, bought “Electric Cord,” a painting of a tightly wrapped electric cord, in the 1960s for $750, the court papers say.

In January 1970, he sent the piece out to be cleaned by a well-regarded restorer named Daniel Goldreyer. But instead of returning the painting, Goldreyer told Castelli the work had been lost.

Lichtenstein, who’s known for his dotted comic book-like panel works, died in 1997, and Leo Castelli died in 1999. The work was officially listed as “lost/stolen” in the international Art Loss Registry in 2007.

Then last week, James Goodman Gallery owner James Goodman called the Lichtenstein foundation to say he’d been told by a “third party” that the painting was at Hayes Storage, and asked if they’d authenticate the work, the court filing says. A rep for the foundation then tipped off Barbara Castelli.

Goodman told The Post he had no idea that the painting might have been stolen, and that the current owners claimed to have an invoice showing the piece was purchased from Leo Castelli.

kate.kowsh@nypost.com

via m.nypost.com

"Bald Eagle Is a White Elephant Thanks to Uncle Sam: #RobertRauschenberg | #Canyon" by Eric Felten in @wsj

By ERIC FELTEN

Oh, the perils of found-object art. Over the course of some 20 years, art dealer and collector Ileana Sonnabend negotiated with federal regulators over a prized possession: "Canyon," a work by artist Robert Rauschenberg that combines a painting, a rope-trundled pillow and a stuffed bird. The problem was the bird—a young bald eagle of obscure origin. And now, five years after Ms. Sonnabend died, the problem continues to be the bird. Under federal statutes that prohibit any traffic in bald eagles or their remains, the artwork cannot legally be sold to anyone. And yet the Internal Revenue Service is demanding that Ms. Sonnabend's heirs pay $40 million in taxes on "Canyon." It's the sort of case where you wonder if the IRS agents are named Willem and Franz.

The mantle of art provides little mediation or mitigation when it comes to endangered species. When Lawrence M. Small was made secretary of the Smithsonian Institution a little more than a decade ago, he let some magazines photograph his collection of Amazonian tribal art, much of which was made of feathers of protected rain-forest birds. The articles and photos were perused with keen interest at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which soon began an investigation. That he considered the items art made no difference—Mr. Small eventually pleaded guilty to federal misdemeanor violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

Does it help if the artwork is famous? Perhaps, as art lawyer Ronald Spencer notes, it is "bad public relations to destroy works of art," and that can temper the urge to seize. Still, counting on enforcement agencies to be reasonable is a dicey strategy. What is deemed all right under one administration might be discovered to be not all right at all once different officials are in place. The stuffed bird adorning "Canyon" first caught the attention of Fish and Wildlife Service agents in 1981, when the artwork came back through U.S. Customs after a European tour. The Interior Department seems to have been rather accommodating at the time, giving Ms. Sonnabend a permit to hang on to the piece.

But it was a different story in 1998 when she tried to lend "Canyon" to an international retrospective of Mr. Rauschenberg's work. The Sonnabend Gallery "encountered resistance from a new administrator at the Department of the Interior," as ARTnews put it. Federal officials notified the gallery it would have to "relinquish the carcass to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service" or donate the artwork to a nonprofit museum—unless "the carcass was taken from the wild prior to 1940" (when the Bald Eagle Protection Act became law).

But how to prove that? This is when the gallery again enjoyed the benefit of regulatory discretion. Mr. Rauschenberg was allowed to simply swear before a notary-public that the eagle was old enough to be legal. He told a quirky story about how the bird had come into his possession. It seems that an artist friend living in an apartment above Carnegie Hall rescued the dingus from the trash in 1959. The eagle, the story went, had belonged to an aged tenant who in his youth "was a member of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders." According to Mr. Rauschenberg's notarized statement, "this Rough Rider acquired, from the wild, a bald eagle which he had taxidermed prior to 1940." When the old cowboy had died, his family tossed the unwanted bird in the garbage. Though the artist was recounting a third-hand tale of an unknown, unnamed cavalryman he had never met, Mr. Rauschenberg's account was accepted as appropriate documentation. Who said the feds can't be reasonable?

Not everyone gets such benefit of the doubt. Just imagine if Gibson Guitar Corp.—locked in a dispute with the Fish and Wildlife Service over the legality of foreign wood sourced for its instruments—had ever tried to offer proof of provenance as flimsy as the artist's notarized statement. But then again, in its dispute Gibson chose not to make nice. The company has been challenging Fish and Wildlife rulings in court. Which might help explain why, a year ago, heavily armed and body-armored agents descended on the company's Nashville factory to seize guitars and pallets of wood.

The Sonnabend heirs would ultimately find out how unreasonable enforcement agents can be. When the IRS first came looking for some payment on the unsalable "Canyon," the tax agency told an attorney working for the estate, Ralph E. Lerner, that the artwork was worth $15 million. But the lawyer refused to agree to that number, insisting that, because there is no legal market for the painting, it has no dollar value. Then, in what Mr. Lerner described to Forbes as the "most shocking part" of the whole fiasco, all of a sudden the IRS issued an official Notice of Deficiency declaring the Rauschenberg to be worth $65 million. Which would suggest that the market value of going along to get along is somewhere around $50 million.

The IRS valuation isn't necessarily crazy, even if its justification—the idea that an imagined black-market value should be binding on people not engaged in black-market transactions—is. But thanks to federal law, that value is entirely hypothetical.

How arbitrary is it to take a good off the market and then demand taxes be paid on an imaginary, indeed illegal, market price? The circumstances may be rare and peculiar, but the capriciousness of officials appears to be all too common.

A version of this article appeared July 26, 2012, on page D10 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Bald Eagle Is a White Elephant Thanks to Uncle Sam.

via online.wsj.com

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

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

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

By 
Published: July 26, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

TIN DRAPERY FOR HIGH LINE

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

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

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

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

NEW MUSEUM EXPANSION

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

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

These are among the Web site’s new features:

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

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

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

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

THE STAMPS OF DANCERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By 
Published: July 26, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

TIN DRAPERY FOR HIGH LINE

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

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

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

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

NEW MUSEUM EXPANSION

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

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

These are among the Web site’s new features:

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

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

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

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

THE STAMPS OF DANCERS

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

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

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

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

"Beyond Dogs: A Woodsman Explores Roots - William Wegman Show at #Bowdoin College Museum of Art" in @nytimes

 

William Wegman's Wilderness: A visit with the artist William Wegman and his dogs at their home in Maine.

Published: July 27, 2012
By CAROL KINO


ONE sunny morning last month the artist William Wegman led me into the woods surrounding his lakeside retreat here, along with his Weimaraners, Bobbin, Candy and Flo. “This is one of my favorite paths,” he said, as he passed an old garage. “It’s filled with haunted little things.”

His route led to a junked 1950s Buick and an even older pickup truck and sedan, which looked as if they’d been gathering leaves and rust since the Hoover administration. After noting that the Buick was his “favorite relic,” Mr. Wegman reminisced about the time he had walked miles into the wilderness, only to discover an abandoned couch.

This disjuncture between nature and the man-made is something Mr. Wegman, 68, prizes about the area, and his own wry humor is the hallmark of his work, which is so diverse that it should be hard to characterize. But to the wider world, he is known as the guy who makes large, colorful photographs of dogs dressed as things like fashion models and fairy tale characters. Though he has produced many different sorts of dog-free artworks in many different styles throughout his long and successful career, including paintings, drawings and collages (as seen in his 2006 Brooklyn Museum retrospective), the art world knows him as a dog photographer too. Even his much-admired conceptual videos and photographs of the 1970s often feature his first Weimaraner, Man Ray.

But now the show “William Wegman: Hello Nature,” through Oct. 21 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Me., aims to shine light on a less obvious aspect of Mr. Wegman’s oeuvre. Its ostensible focus is his attachment to the western mountains of Maine, where he has summered for over 30 years. Yet the true thread running through it is Mr. Wegman’s lifelong fascination with nature itself, and his affection for the many ways it has been revered, romanticized and interfered with by human beings.

“Growing up in rural Massachusetts before anyone I knew had a television set, I spent most of my time in the woods,” Mr. Wegman writes in the show catalog. “The earliest painting I remember making was of a duck and a rock with a question mark.”

The oldest work on display is a deadpan photographic diptych from 1971, in which Mr. Wegman and a woman mimic fishing and ice-skating in his studio. The latest is one of his so-called postcard paintings from this year, in which one or more tourist postcards blossom into a fantastical oil-painted scene. (In this case a picturesque lake becomes a flooded house.)

In between come photographs of dogs, costumed or blending into the landscape; totemic alphabets made from photographs of plants and leaves; and all manner of paintings, drawings and collages. The museum is also screening Mr. Wegman’s short film, “The Hardly Boys in Hardly Gold” (1995), a detective saga based on the Hardy Boys and shot in and around Loon Lake, in which dogs play all the roles.

The show has been in the works since 2009, when Kevin Salatino, until recently the museum’s director, moved here from Los Angeles. (He now directs the art collections at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif.) Mr. Wegman’s Los Angeles dealer, Marc Selwyn, mentioned that the artist spent summers here and suggested the two collaborate on a show.

Mr. Salatino’s plan was to exhibit the early conceptual work. But when he and Diana K. Tuite, a curator at the museum, began visiting Mr. Wegman at his studio in Chelsea, the idea of a “nature-centric” show emerged, Mr. Salatino said. “I realized that this was an aspect of the work that had never really been thought through thematically before,” he added. “But it weaves its way through everything, even the early conceptual work.”

Inevitably the show also became autobiographical, and the catalog is essentially an artist’s book. Part field guide, part memoir, it’s filled with Mr. Wegman’s youthful artwork and family photographs, as well as an essay about his early aesthetic tastes, back when he was making watercolors of his dog in the woods, painting American Indian alphabets using pigment extracted from berries, and admiring the sensuous brushwork in the Breck Girl ads.

“So many people would be inclined to suppress the naïveté of their worldview,” Ms. Tuite said. “But in Bill’s case he wears it so proudly, almost so much so that it is kind of a conceptual move in and of itself.”

In person Mr. Wegman, who seems kindly and dryly humorous at once, also affects a certain degree of naïveté. For one so famous he’s surprisingly self-effacing, quick to compliment others and to claim he doesn’t know much about anything. He also loves reminiscing about his childhood. In an interview in his studio, as the dogs snored on a couch, he talked about his first trip to Maine in 1958. Then 14, he had driven up from East Longmeadow, the small Massachusetts quarry town where he grew up, with slightly older boys to fish in the Rangeley Lakes. “It took really a long time to get up here,” he recalled. “Then we hit a rock.” They were rescued by the proprietor of a lake club, who put them up in one of his log cabins for a week while the car was being fixed. “It was a very memorable trip,” Mr. Wegman said.

Years later, in 1979, halfway through his second marriage, and just as his large color Polaroids of Man Ray were starting to bring him fortune and fame, he returned to Rangeley with a new fishing buddy, and rented a cabin at another camp, York’s. Before long he had bought the cabin, the tennis court and, by 1989, the main lodge itself. Today, this is where he lives part-time, with Christine Burgin, his wife of 17 years; their children, Atlas, 17, and Lola, 14; and the dogs of course. The lodge’s main room still looks much as it did in the ’70s, he said, with a looming fireplace, light fixtures made from birch branches, and taxidermied bison, moose, elk and caribou heads on the walls. Every surface seems to be packed with sporting equipment, memorabilia, artwork and books. His studio occupies a third of the building.

York’s is where he found his way back to representational painting, in the mid-1980s, after Man Ray’s death. “I loved painting,” he said. “That’s why I went to art school. But soon after I got to art school I stopped, because painting was dead in the ’60s.” At first he was so self-conscious that he painted on the back of the canvas. But soon he was working fluently, in a variety of styles, including cartoonish caricature and brushily expressionistic figuration.

York’s was also the place where, in 1987, Mr. Wegman made his first photograph of his second Weimaraner, the slinky, almond-eyed Fay Ray, by a brook in a Wonder Woman mask. A few years on it also played a pivotal role in his romance with Ms. Burgin, then an art dealer in SoHo.

Soon after they began dating, the couple traveled to Maine so that Mr. Wegman could work on his “Field Guide to North America and Other Places,” an edition of 20 unique artists’ books, several of which are included in the current show. Packaged in a plywood box and wrapped in a piece of Buffalo plaid blanket, sort of like an L. L. Bean take on the Duchampian valise, each contains about 20 loose double-sided pages of photographs, collages and multimedia works on materials like paper, bark and felt, creating a gentle parody of centuries of nature writing. Mr. Wegman made his first postcard painting for these books, and almost every one includes a photograph of a half-naked Ms. Burgin, brandishing a toy tomahawk as she runs into the woods.

Mr. Wegman said her help was crucial: “I was making lots of pictures. I had things all over the place. She would help make it neat, neat, so I wouldn’t get too flummoxed.” (She now oversees his projects, alongside her own business.)

Ms. Burgin saw the project as a field guide to Mr. Wegman, who “has a million ideas a minute” and “things going in every direction,” she said. The guide, she added, “was a key to Bill in some way, like a key in a map, and I think this show is too.”

During the ’90s, as they were having children, Mr. Wegman focused much of his energy on children’s books, featuring Fay and her descendants. The woods and the town of Rangeley often served as his set. Now, four generations of Weimaraners and one generation of Wegmans later, he continues to find inspiration in the locale — and so do his dogs. In Maine, he said, they behave quite differently from the way they do in the city. “In New York you can call them or have someone drop something, and you can get a surprised look,” he said. “But here you get a waft of some scent that makes them really open up in a different way. They kind of lead with their noses.”

One might say that Mr. Wegman does too. He’s now working on a series of postcard paintings on wood, which he started here last year. Although he’s not quite sure what to make of them yet, “Maine is a place where I’m willing to try anything,” he said. “Things emerge in a very unique way up here.”

 

 

via nytimes.com