Photographs courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, at the Guggenheim Museum, with portraits here from Belgium, Croatia, England, Poland and Ukraine, as well as New York and South Carolina. More Photos »

 

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: July 5, 2012

Rineke Dijkstra has enormous faith in the power of two things: youth and the camera. In her best work this 53-year-old Dutch artist uses photography and sometimes video to coax out the emotional subtleties and raw energy that are special to children, adolescents and young adults, with grave, revelatory and sometimes ecstatic results.

 

At other times her portraits are more opaque, which can yield another kind of magnetism: We see pictures of resistance to photography in which Ms. Dijkstra’s subjects hold on to their secrets, showing us a more armored youthful vulnerability.

Both kinds of images can be found in Ms. Dijkstra’s richly affecting 20-year midcareer survey at the Guggenheim Museum. Organized jointly with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — and overseen by the curators Sandra S. Phillips of that museum and Jennifer Blessing of the Guggenheim — it brings together more than 70 color photographs and 5 video works. They create an engrossing meditation on the anxieties, pride and tumult of youth and the emergence of the self, and also on the degree to which the camera can capture these rites of passage.

Ms. Dijkstra studied photography at art school in Amsterdam and spent a few years working commercially, taking corporate portraits and images for annual reports — activity that left her frustrated. She felt that her subjects remained hidden behind social and professional masks and habits of self-presentation, while she sought a greater emotional intensity.

A serious injury gave Ms. Dijkstra needed time to think: five months in bed followed by physical therapy that culminated in swimming. One day in June 1991, toward the end of her recovery, she photographed herself immediately after swimming a grueling 30 laps. She thought that fatigue would lend the photograph an emotional immediacy. It did.

That self-portrait, which shows the artist in a dripping bathing suit, looking winded and slightly bowed but staring defiantly at the camera, is in the show. Drawing from traditional portraiture and postmodern setup photography, it signals the beginning of Ms. Dijkstra’s work as an artist, in particular her tendency to photograph the young, who are less practiced at self-presentation.

Echoing the swimming pool image, she began photographing teenagers in similar moments of physical exposure, in swimsuits on the beach. She then sought out situations of genuine stress or momentous change, as in her large head shots of young Portuguese toreros just after emerging from the bullring, their faces bloodied and garments torn, their eyes glowing with triumph and relief; or her full-length photographs of dazed young mothers standing naked with their newborns in their arms, like no-frills, modern-day Madonnas.

Ms. Dijkstra is member of a prominent generation of European photographers that includes Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff, all Germans. But it is often said, and it is true, that her work is less glamorous and more human and frankly expressive than theirs.

Moreover, Ms. Dijkstra uses photography in a way that few of her contemporaries do: as a kind of pivot between portrait painting and reality — that is, between completely hand-formed and therefore fictive pictures of real people and real people themselves. Her photographs adopt some formal aspects of painting, but their subjects are also much more present and unmediated in realistic detail and emotional mood.

The pivoting nature of Ms. Dijkstra’s images is clear in the first gallery of the Guggenheim show, which is distributed somewhat awkwardly through four of the museum’s tower galleries adjoining the rotunda. It begins with an imposing selection of the beach portraits (1992-94) that established Ms. Dijkstra’s reputation: the full-length, nearly life-size color photographs of teenagers and slightly younger children taken at ocean’s edge in the United States, Poland, Britain, Ukraine and Croatia.

The monumental isolation of the figures is enhanced by low-angle shots, along with frontal poses and the austere, slightly abstract background bands of beach, water and sky, all of which echo the full-length portraits of Goya, Hals and Manet. This sense of form and formality contrasts markedly with the pictures’ contemporary casualness — the exposed flesh and intimations of fun and sun — even as it is confirmed by the prevailing seriousness and subtle anticipatory anxiety.

Some subjects, like a Ukrainian youth in a red Speedo-type swimsuit, are rawboned and angular; they have not grown into their bodies. A tall, lanky girl on a Polish beach has full hips but a flat chest; her pale green bathing suit is wet only up to the waist, suggesting the upward progress of puberty. A more mature blond girl in a silky orange two-piece in Hilton Head Island, S.C., has mustered makeup, jewelry and an elaborate hairdo worthy of a local teenage beauty contest.

Speaking about the beach portraits in an interview, Ms. Dijkstra hit the nail on the head when she said, “They showed what we don’t want to show anymore but still feel.” Looking at these pictures, we understand that the emotional vulnerability of youth is not so much outgrown as hidden.

Time, change and the lack of change are among Ms. Dijkstra’s themes, which she often emphasizes by photographing the same person over time. In a series of seven half-length portraits shot over three years, we track the maturation of a teenager named Olivier, starting with two images from July 21, 2000, the day he joins the French Foreign Legion, has his head shaved and dons fatigues. Over the next five images, as he appears in uniforms or sweaty T-shirts, his expression remains amazingly, almost frighteningly, constant and, in a way, young, even as he hardens and fills out, progressing from boy to man.

A fuller transformation is revealed in the same gallery by a series of 11 images taken between 1994 and 2008 that follow a young Bosnian refugee named Almerisa into adolescence and beyond, to motherhood. Always shown seated in a chair, Almerisa becomes tall and gangly, then womanly and, according to some writers, more assimilated.

More transfixing, however, are the subtle and not so subtle changes in her face and, it seems, her attitude. As she tries out different makeup and hair colors, her visage gains a palpable brittleness, becoming slightly common. In the final image she is shown with her infant; corny as it may sound, her face has regained some of the softness apparent in the first images from her childhood.

In Ms. Dijkstra’s videos the passage of time is, as might be expected, even more present, but in remarkably different ways. At one end of the spectrum is the near motionless quiet of “Ruth Drawing Picasso,” a wonderful six-minute portrait that may be as close to still photography as video can get but is much more revealing.

It shows a young schoolgirl seated on the floor of the Tate Liverpool completely absorbed in copying a Picasso painting (that is never shown) into her sketchbook. In her subtle shiftings of gaze, expression and position, Ruth comes across as an immensely likable, self-sufficient child whose existence brightens your view of the future.

In contrast to Ruth’s stillness is the sometimes ecstatic energy found in Ms. Dijkstra’s videos of teenagers in dance clubs: a two-channel projection from 1996-97, “Buzz Club, Liverpool, UK/Mystery World, Zaandam, NL,” and the four-channel installation “The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee), Liverpool, UK,” from 2009.

In both Ms. Dijkstra once more presents her subjects in formally controlled circumstances, against white seamless backgrounds and shot mostly at three-quarter length. In “Buzz Club” the subjects mostly hang out: They smoke, chew gum and drink beer (often simultaneously) while swaying to the music and largely ignoring the camera. But one young woman in a white dress that reveals her midriff is an exception; as the music’s beat becomes irresistible, she locks eyes with the camera and dances her heart out, to riveting effect.

Her generous performance may have inspired the “Krazyhouse” video, for which Ms. Dijkstra invited selected clubgoers to dance before her camera to their favorite music. Again, their performances vary greatly in generosity or, put another way, in the degree to which the music (and the camera) is resisted or surrendered to. But when they cut loose, as do Simon and Dee, it is hard not to be enthralled, and grateful to Ms. Dijkstra for capturing such powerful flashes of human potential.

“Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective” continues through Oct. 8 at the Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street; (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org.

 A version of this review appeared in print on July 6, 2012, on page C19 of the New York edition with the headline: What’s Hiding In Plain Sight.

By TED LOOS

Published: June 28, 2012

SOME time in the mid 1970s Dorothy Lichtenstein stopped by her husband’s studio on the Bowery one day after lunch, expecting to find him at work on a new painting.

 But instead of creating, the Pop master Roy Lichtenstein was intent on an act of destruction.

Using a matte knife, Lichtenstein — who had long been a household name for his Benday dot paintings of the 1960s — was slashing away at several earlier works, small and colorful abstractions dating to the late ’50s.

“He had dug them out of somewhere and was just cutting them up,” Ms. Lichtenstein recalled recently. “So his assistant and I yelled, ‘Stop!’ ”

They managed to grab a few of the paintings and tucked them away. Now three of them, lent by Ms. Lichtenstein from her large trove of her husband’s works, are appearing in “Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective,” a major exhibition of work by the artist, who died in 1997, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago until Sept 3.

“In a way I’m hesitant to lend them since Roy was destroying them,” Ms. Lichtenstein, 72, said, seated in the living area of the large West Village complex, created from several buildings, that serves as her New York residence and also houses her husband’s last studio and the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, which she started to preserve the legacy of her husband, whom she married in 1968.

Ms. Lichtenstein added that she assumed he simply wasn’t happy with the early pieces, but that they may round out the public’s perception of his work.

“I think it’s good to have them there,” she said. “He wasn’t someone who suddenly emerged fully formed in 1961. He had a somewhat tortured career as an artist before that. He used to describe putting his works on the roof of his old car, driving in from Ohio and going from gallery to gallery.”

Merely by saving them in the first place, Ms. Lichtenstein helped shape the Chicago show, which features more than 170 works and will eventually travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Tate Modern in London and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

But her influence is felt more pervasively too, since she lent dozens more works for the exhibition from her personal holdings, which number in the hundreds. And the foundation, of which Ms. Lichtenstein is the president, also lent pieces to the show.

Flipping through the catalog and referring to the lender identifications, she said cheerily, “Where it just says ‘private collection,’ that’s usually me.”

The organizers of the retrospective said that Ms. Lichtenstein’s participation was crucial.

“The biggest thing for us in the beginning is that she blessed this project,” said James Rondeau, chairman of the contemporary department at the Art Institute, who organized the show with Sheena Wagstaff, chairwoman of modern and contemporary work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “We wouldn’t have been able to move ahead without it.”

“A lot of people have come to her and wanted to do this,” he added. “Sometimes she has encouraged smaller shows, but nothing on this scale.”

Ms. Lichtenstein, who spends much of her year in Florida and the Hamptons, confirmed that there is no shortage of requests to lend crossing her desk. She often parts with one or two pieces here and there.

But she had been feeling that her husband was due for a “really major show”; his last full-on retrospective was in 1993, at the Guggenheim Museum, when Lichtenstein was still alive.

The Chicago show has many of the Pop paintings that audiences may already know, like “Drowning Girl” (1963), but Mr. Rondeau said that he was particularly pleased to feature nearly 50 works on paper, a medium that was not included in the 1993 show.

Ms. Lichtenstein encouraged Mr. Rondeau to pore through 70 boxes of works on paper that are kept in storage. “She had never given access to those before,” he said.

The focus on drawings pleased Ms. Lichtenstein, she said, because they “show Roy’s hand more” and make clear that he wasn’t just an artist who appropriated from comic books, but a master of composition in his own right.

But she stressed that she never tries to guide the hand of curators in terms of content. “I always love to see somebody else’s ideas and interpretations,” she said. “I’ll see things in a new light.”

On special occasions, however, she will get involved behind the scenes, if she knows works that the curators want to include are in other hands. For “Picasso and American Art,” a 2006 show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she wrote two letters to collectors who own major Lichtensteins, encouraging them to lend. “I knew how important Picasso was to Roy,” she said. One letter did the trick; the other was a no-go.

For the Chicago show Ms. Lichtenstein went a step further. She knew that Agnes Gund, the renowned collector and president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, was being asked to lend one of the most famous works of the Pop era, “Masterpiece” (1962), in which a blonde tells a square-jawed artist, “Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece!”

Ms. Lichtenstein said that she surprised Ms. Gund, a friend, by offering another Lichtenstein work of the same size and shape so that she wouldn’t have a blank space on her wall for the run of the exhibition. “Masterpiece” did end up in the Chicago show.

Mr. Rondeau said that such diplomacy and effectiveness were typical of Ms. Lichtenstein’s efforts.

“She’s dedicated a huge amount of her life to protecting Roy’s legacy,” he said. “Not all artists’ spouses choose to manage and maintain that mantle. She feels it acutely and acts on it. She sees this as her job.”

 

Sotheby’s
David Hockney’s ‘‘Swimming Pool,’’  painted in 1965, went for £2.5  million at Sotheby’s in London, up from  its 2007 price of £1.19 million.

LONDON — The market for contemporary art is holding up remarkably well in the midst of the deepening concerns that are engulfing the global economy.

If Sotheby’s sale on Tuesday evening might have left a different impression, it is because brazen speculation no longer flies as easily as it did until recently. The 69 lots of the 79 that came up nonetheless sold quite well, allowing Sotheby’s to post a £69.3 million, or $108 million, score.

The auction house even achieved a world auction record. Glenn Brown’s monumental canvas “The Tragic Conversion of Salvador Dalí (After John Martin)” ascended to £5.19 million, more than two-thirds above expectations. For a picture that has a touch of spoofery about it, this is not bad. As the title indicates, the apocalyptic scenery with fire burning and lava flowing reinterprets John Martin’s “Great Day of His Wrath” done in the late 1840s, and it looks a bit like a movie poster of the 1950s.

Several other works showed that big money continues to pour into contemporary art.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Warrior,” dated 1982, commanded an even higher price, £5.58 million. But that was under the low estimate, and the difference with Mr. Brown’s painting is that it did not trigger competition.

A glance at the prices previously paid for “Warrior,” done in the late artist’s street graffiti style, helps explain its failure to arouse enthusiasm. Five years ago, it sold for £2.82 million, also at Sotheby’s. Buyers apparently felt that allowing the clever consignor to cash in almost double his 2007 outlay was generous enough.

Earlier in the sale, bidders had been more willing to compete over another composition by Basquiat, “Saxaphone,” painted in 1986, two years before his death. Did they like it better because it is covered with inscriptions? Or were they more tolerant of profit-making when spread over a 15-year period? In 1997, the consignor had bought “Saxaphone” at Sotheby’s New York for $244,500. This week, it fetched £2.72 million, about $4.25 million.

After deduction of the sale charge to the buyer, more than 12 percent, which the auction house cashes in, and of another charge payable by the vendor at a privately negotiated rate, this leaves the consignor a profit of $3 million.

Other clever financial coups were made. David Hockney painted “Swimming Pool” in 1965 in a manner that suggests admiration for Magritte’s faux-naif style with a faint avant-garde whiff. In 2007, its owner, Magnus Künow, acquired the Hockney at Sotheby’s for £1.19 million. This week, it realized £2.5 million.

Francis Bacon’s 1980 “Study for Self-Portrait” also proved to have been a judicious bet. Bought in 2001 at Sotheby’s New York for $2.76 million, the Bacon sold this week for £4.52 million, more than $7 million. From a vendor’s perspective, this is brilliant.

Sadly for Sotheby’s, the sale did not look brilliant at all — quite the contrary, if one merely considered the wild estimate, £5 million to £7 million, plus the sale charge. The attendance glumly watched the Bacon being knocked down to a lone bidder who paid £1 million less than the low estimate.

In this dull atmosphere, the auctioneer Tobias Meyer appeared to be extracting bids from a reticent room when these actually resulted in large prices.

Bidders occasionally displayed some zest. Piero Manzoni’s crumpled canvases coated in white kaolin, with not much else to identify them as art, were vigorously chased. “Achrome,” done in 1959-1960, sold for £2.61 million, matching the ambitious middle estimate.

The problem on Tuesday was not that buyers lacked the wherewithal or the will to spend it. They simply declined to be held to ransom by consignors playing around with estimates and assorted reserves designed to ensure huge profits. If Sotheby’s specialists went along with their vendors’ whims, this means that they had no other way to cajole them into consigning their goods.

Christie’s experienced no such trouble. Its Wednesday evening sale, definitely more substantial, put the market back into perspective. With 60 lots adding up to £132.81 million, Christie’s almost doubled the score achieved by Sotheby’s.

The mood in the room was very different. This was partly because the session included several works seen as hugely desirable by those who follow contemporary art. But the fact that estimates had been set more closely to what the market is prepared to accept played a role in turning the Christie’s session into the success story of the week.

The sale, conducted by Jussy Pylkkanen, president of Christie’s Europe, quickly took off.

The third lot consisted of two fluorescent light tubes by Dan Flavin. It was “number two from an edition of three,” Sotheby’s noted. The fluorescent tubes fetched £205,250, well above the high estimate. Next, a bunch of empty mussel shells spread over a panel coated with resin, plus a “plastic bag filled with mussels,” went up to £433,250. It took the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaelers eight years to put the finishing touches to his “work,” completed two years before his death in 1976.

A vast canvas inscribed “Cy Twombly, Roma, 1962” came on its heels. Blobs of paint squished out of tubes are crushed at wide intervals on the off-white ground and a few gray lines are trailed across, with no obvious purpose. But Twombly, who died last year, has been reestablished as a blue chip among the postwar artists. The “Untitled” picture realized a price of £2.16 million.

Moments later, a delirious reaction was triggered by Yves Klein’s monumental “Le Rose du Bleu (RE22).” Sponges and gravel are stuck on board, held by synthetic resin painted pink. The French artist executed this work two years before his death in 1962. In order to enlighten viewers who might fail to grasp the meaning of the pink sponges and gravel, Christie’s quoted the late French art critic Pierre Restany, according to whom “madder rose represents the Holy Spirit before the gold of the Father and the blue of the Son.” Restany even spoke of Klein’s “Cosmological Trilogy of personal transmutation of colors.”

What is clear is that the sponges and gravel transmuted into gold: At £23.56 million, the work set a world auction record for the artist.

As the sale went on, it became evident that the key to success was not the artists’ aesthetic orientation. If non-representational works like the Klein soared sky high, so did figural art in all its trends.

Francis Bacon’s “Study for Self-Portrait,” done in 1964 in an Expressionist vein, soared to an astronomical £21.54 million.

An untitled Basquiat done in 1981 in the late American artist’s distinctive style also pleased bidders. They sent it climbing to £12.92 million, setting a world auction record for Basquiat’s work.

While the ease with which the Bacon and the Basquiat both surpassed expectations could be accounted for by their instant punch, the bland, more naturalistic Lucian Freud was again favorably received. A small “Head of a Greek Man,” portrayed in October 1946, exceeded the estimate by half at £3.4 million. It was followed by “Naked Portrait II,” painted in the mid-1970s in a style that might be seen as looking back to the work of Manet. That work went for £4.29 million.

Pop art indebted to comic books as a source of inspiration also went down well. Roy Lichtenstein’s “Reflections on Jessica Helms,” painted in 1990 in a belated throwback to the American artist’s early work in the 1960s, found a taker at £4.01 million.

Add “Structure (2),” a superb abstract composition done in 1989 by the German artist Gerhard Richter, which sold for £12.69 million, the fourth-highest price on Wednesday, and few would question the eclecticism of bidders. Names seemed to be the determining criteria of desirability, sparing buyers the ordeal of having to make a decision based on the art itself. When these criteria were met, money flowed as easily as ever.

The message this week is clear: The market for contemporary art is full of vitality. But buyers will no longer put up with speculators playing games at their expense.

 

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Everyday Abstract — Abstract Everyday Shinique Smith’s “Bale Variant No. 0022,” in this show at the James Cohan gallery, one of five Chelsea shows of contemporary painting. More Photos »

June 28, 2012

By ROBERTA SMITH

Painting is a lot of things: resilient, vampiric, perverse, increasingly elastic, infinitely absorptive and, in one form or another, nearly as old as humankind. One thing it is not, it still seems necessary to say, is dead.

Maybe it appears that way if you spend much time in New York City’s major museums, where large group shows of contemporary painting are breathtakingly rare, given how many curators are besotted with Conceptual Art and its many often-vibrant derivatives. These form a hegemony as dominant and one-sided as formalist abstraction ever was.

But that’s another reason we have art galleries. Not just to sell art, but also to give alternate, less rigid and blinkered, less institutionally sanctioned views of what’s going on.

Evidence of painting’s lively persistence is on view in Chelsea in five ambitious group exhibitions organized by a range of people: art dealers, independent curators and art historians. Together these shows feature the work of more than 120 artists and indicate some of what is going on in and around the medium. Some are more coherent than others, and what they collectively reveal is hardly the whole story, not even close. (For one thing there’s little attention to figuration; the prevailing tilt is toward abstraction of one sort or another.) A few of the shows take a diffuse approach, examining the ways painting can merge with sculpture or Conceptual Art and yield pictorial hybrids that may not even involve paint; others are more focused on the medium’s traditional forms.

All told, these efforts release a lot of raw information into the Chelsea air, creating a messy conversation, a succession of curatorial arguments whose proximity makes it easy to move back and forth among them, sizing up the contributions of individual artists as well as the larger ethos.

Everyday Abstract — Abstract Everyday

A good place to start thinking about the expansive possibilities of painting is this show at the James Cohan Gallery, one that is not explicitly about painting but that nonetheless includes a lot of works of a definite pictorial nature. Organized by Matthew Higgs, director of the alternative space White Columns, it charts a literal-minded kind of abstraction that uses common materials and, often, painting as a jumping-off point.

Representing 37 artists, the show reaches into the past for Hannah Wilke’s small, delicate chewing-gum reliefs from 1975 that are evocative of female genitalia, and for an Andy Warhol 1978 “Oxidation Painting,” its gaudy green-gold splatters achieved by having his assistants urinate on canvasses covered with copper paint.

Recent efforts include paintinglike wall pieces like Alexander Bircken’s striped rectangles of crocheted yarn (a skeletal homage to Robert Rauschenberg’s “Bed”?) and Bill Jenkins’s wire bed frame threaded through with short snakes of rope (Jackson Pollock?). There are works that suggest three-dimensional paintings, including a thick pylon of bright bundled fabric by Shinique Smith and a free-standing sheaf of painted fabric and paper by Nancy Shaver.

Other standouts include Udomsak Krisanamis’s 1996 “Acid Rain,” a swirling painting-collage of black and white; Gedi Sibony’s “The Two Simple Green Threes,” whose stenciled motif suggests a rehearsal for a quilt; and a painting on paper by David Hammons in which splashes of pink Kool-Aid evoke the nearby Warhol. There are lots of illuminating connections to be drawn among the works here.

Context Message

The robust, even wholesome physicality of Mr. Higgs’s show finds its complement in “Context Message,” at Zach Feuer, a rather more barbed presentation of what I would call painting, quasi-painting and anti-painting. With works by about 40 artists (including some collectives and collaborations), the show has been organized by Tyler Dobson and Ben Morgan-Cleveland, two young artists who run the small, forward-looking gallery Real Fine Arts in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

It starts off winningly. At its center hang two beautiful quilts, one by Lola Pettway, the other by Mary Lee Bendolph and Ruth P. Mosely, all from the acclaimed quilters’ collective of Gee’s Bend, Ala. The works surrounding these two amazing pictorial objects oscillate erratically among the ironic, the sincere, the subversive and the snarky.

R. H. Quaytman, known for cool photo-based works, contributes a small, sweet but rather generic oil portrait of her husband. The great blues guitarist and self-taught painter John Fahey (1939-2001) is represented by a lively gestural abstraction.

The canvasses of Merlin Carpenter, Bjarne Melgaard and Michael Krebber all add fairly obvious twists to ironic art-world self-reference with images and texts copied from the Internet. In between, paintings by Alistair Frost, Margaret Lee and Michele Abeles, David Diao and Martin Kippenberger all reward attention.

This show never quite comes together, but that may be its point. Its scrappy waywardness gives a vivid picture of the general unruliness in and around painting right now.

Painting in Space

A similar lack of focus afflicts this show at Luhring Augustine, but not quite so fruitfully. Packed with well-known names, it is a benefit exhibition for the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., and has been organized by Tom Eccles, the center’s executive director, and Johanna Burton, director of its graduate program. Among the 26 artists here the three who explore the show’s titular theme most actively are Martin Creed, represented by a big latticelike red wall painting; Rachel Harrison, whose bright, patchily painted plastic-foam sculpture comes with a length of searing orange carpet; and Liam Gillick, the subject of a show that opened at Bard last weekend, whose spare painted metal sculptures suggest geometric paintings extruded into space.

Otherwise, videos and sculptures by Tony Oursler, Pipilotti Rist, Haim Steinbach, Mark di Suvero, John Handforth and others mainly squander an interesting concept: Just about anything seems to qualify as “painting in space.” Paintings of a more wall-bound, canvas-based sort, by artists like Josh Smith, Amy Sillman, Glenn Ligon and Sarah Morris, range through current abstraction, but that’s not the same.

Stretching Painting

The 10 artists in “Stretching Painting” at Galerie Lelong don’t so much push the medium into space as meddle with its physical properties at close quarters, on the wall.

Sometimes the exercise is disarmingly simple, as with the magnified brushwork and pale colors (diluted with plaster) of Alex Kwartler’s two large paintings on plywood. Sometimes it is startlingly obsessive, as with the work of Gabriel Pionkowski, a young artist who unravels canvas, colors the individual threads and partly reweaves then into stripes or jacquardlike patterns; or Donald Moffett’s wildly suggestive combinations of furlike paint surfaces on emphatically perforated wood.

Kate Shepherd and Jim Lee indicate new possibilities for the modernist monochrome. Assembled by Veronica Roberts, a New York-based curator and scholar, the works here can sometimes feel a bit small-bore. This is relieved by Patrick Brennan’s “Boomtown (A long road home),” a big, bristling collage festooned with small paintings, and Lauren Luloff’s “Flame Violent and Golden,” which seems pieced together from textile remnants that are actually hand-painted on different scraps of cloth, using bleach. It has some of the scenery-chewing exuberance of Julian Schnabel, which is quite refreshing.

The Big Picture

A penchant for small, modestly-scaled works that is often evident in these shows is at its most extreme at Sikkema Jenkins in “The Big Picture,” a slyly titled show of works by eight artists whose efforts rarely exceed 20 inches on a side.

An implication here is that small is not only beautiful but also might actually be radical, or at least anti-establishment, in a time of immense, often spectacular artworks. Another suggestion is that there remains plenty to be done with paint applied to small, flat rectangular surfaces.

These arguments are made effectively and repeatedly, whether by Jeronimo Elespe’s “Segundo T,” whose scratched patterns suggest a text or a textile as much as a painting; Merlin James’s resplendent “Yellow,” which simply pulses with small, well-placed blooms of color; or Ann Pibal’s latest, more forthright collusions of brushy and hard-edged abstraction. Through quietly inspired brushwork alone, David Schutter breathes his own kind of life into landscape-suggestive monochromes, while John Dilg brings the canvas weave to bear, almost pixelatedly, on his cartoon-visionary landscapes.

Robert Bordo, Josephine Halvorson and Ryan McLaughlin all make the case that art exists foremost for close looking and internalized experience and nothing does this better than painting. Other mediums can do it just as well, if we’re lucky, but not better.

For the moment three solo exhibitions supplement the conversation among these group shows in nearly mutually exclusive ways. In Cheyney Thompson’s installation (through Saturday) at Andrew Kreps (525 West 22nd Street) postwar gestural abstraction and Conceptual Art collide to bracing effect in a series of gaudy but weirdly methodical canvasses of identical height whose widths are proportioned to the walls on which they are displayed; never has Mr. Thompson’s sardonic skepticism about painting and its processes looked so fierce or decorative.

At Derek Eller (615 West 27th Street) André Ethier’s small canvasses (also through Saturday) mine the overlap between modernist and folk painting with a vibrant insouciance and could easily have been included in the Sikkema Jenkins show. And in her Manhattan gallery debut at Thomas Erben (526 West 26th Street) Whitney Claflin presents, through July 28, busily painted, also small canvasses enhanced by collage-poems, jewelry, sewn patches and feathers; they announce painting’s ability to absorb all comers in a whisper that is also a joyful shout.

Canvas Is Optional

THE BIG PICTURE Through July 27. Sikkema Jenkins, 530 West 22nd Street, Chelsea; (212) 929-2262.

CONTEXT MESSAGE Through Aug. 3. Zach Feuer, 548 West 22nd Street, Chelsea; (212) 989-7700.

EVERYDAY ABSTRACT — ABSTRACT EVERYDAY Through July 27. James Cohan, 533 West 26th Street, Chelsea; (212) 714-9500.

PAINTING IN SPACE Through Aug. 17. Luhring Augustine, 531 West 24th Street, Chelsea; (212) 206-9100.

STRETCHING PAINTING Through Aug. 3. Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, Chelsea; (212) 315-0470.

 

Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan A detail from “Catasta” (“Stack”), made out of piled fiber-cement tubes, in the retrospective of Mr. Boetti’s life’s work, opening on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art. More Photos »

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: June 28, 2012

The statue is a 1993 self-portrait of the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti, who died a year after it was made and who seems to have lived his life in a kind of fever delirium of ideas, many of which thread through “Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan,” a magical survey of his art. Part of it is on view in the museum’s atrium, with the rest to open on the sixth floor on Sunday.

Boetti was born in 1940 in Turin, the Motor City of Italy and the home of Fiat. He came of age creatively in the 1960s. Influenced by Duchamp, by industrial culture and by a natural attraction to the intricacies of language and arcane systems of logic, he made work that at first was low on formal allure and packed tight with conceptual content.

Certainly the first objects you see on MoMA’s sixth floor are far from prepossessing: sheets of printed graph paper; a ziggurat-shaped column of rolled commercial cardboard; a seemingly half-finished piece of embroidery; a picture postcard of two look-alike men holding hands; a light bulb in a box.

Yet each of these things, or groups of things, is a study in complication, a visual essay on the ambiguities that surround conventional notions of measurement, meaning, value and time. All the printed lines of the graph paper, for example, have, for no given reason, been traced over, freehand, in pencil, firmly here, shakily there, so that a common emblem of geometric exactitude has become personalized, like the lines of an encephalogram.

The ziggurat sculpture is tall, and for that reason monumental, though it’s also a giant toy, produced through a version of a trick that Boetti remembered performing as a child, when he put his finger in the center hole of a rolled tape measure and pulled upward to create a mini-tower.

The embroidery, consisting of three patches of brown wool stitched by Boetti’s first wife and collaborator, Annemarie Sauzeau, on an otherwise empty piece of cloth, looks like a work in progress, though it’s as complete as it needs to be. The shapes of the stitched patches are quite specific: they exactly correspond to maps of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip printed in an Italian newspaper at the time of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

The hand-holding twins on the postcard are easily identifiable as a double portrait of Boetti, who would repeatedly over the years present himself as a dual, left-brain-versus-right-brain personality. He trained himself to write and draw ambidextrously and transformed himself from solo artist to artist-team by adding a conjunction to his name: Alighiero Boetti became Alighiero e Boetti: Alighiero AND Boetti.

Finally, there’s the light bulb in the box, a clunky, self-effacing piece that turns out to be the most charismatic object of all. The bulb is programmed to turn on once a year, for a mere 11 seconds, and on a random schedule. Even Boetti couldn’t predict when it might light, though the idea that it will at some point do so creates a tension of expectation. Maybe you’ll be the one looking at it when the magic moment occurs.

In these early concept-intensive works, Boetti laid out the fundamentals of his career. They include an interest in the concept of natural variation built into repetition and accident built into control; a preference for collaboration (including self-collaboration) as working method; a fascination with geography and the larger world beyond art; and a deep sense of investment, philosophical but also emotional, in the workings of time.

In the mid-1960s, certain features of Boetti’s art, notably its use of found and down-market materials, recommended him to a group of Italian experimental artists gathered under the rubric of Arte Povera. Initially, Boetti found their company stimulating and threw himself into collective activities. The MoMA show, organized in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Tate Modern in London, includes a poster he designed in 1967, listing the names of the vanguard “poor art” crew, his own among them.

Within a few years, though, he began to back away, claiming that the Arte Povera work had become materially too showy — “baroque” was his word — and its makers too commercially ambitious. (He tended to affect a contrasting slacker pose, evident in another self-portrait formed from lumps of cement, in which he lies prone on the floor.)

His break with group identity, coupled with his discomfort with the growing violence of Italian politics, propelled Boetti into traveling abroad. Within a relatively short time he visited Africa, South America, the United States and East and Central Asia, becoming a prototype of the artist as global nomad that is now a norm.

The trips took his art in new directions. In the early 1970s he initiated mail-art projects that brought into play language, chance, networking and madly intricate levels of tabulation (keeping track of what mail got sent to whom, when and where, and then what got re-sent, etc.).

His most fruitful trip was to Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1971, the first of many he would make until the Russian invasion of the country in 1979. There most of his abiding concerns — with collaboration, everyday materials, internationalism, the passage of time — were finally united in one grand and continuing plan that centered around his commissioning of embroideries, based on specified designs, by Afghan craftswomen.

As a test run, he ordered two small examples, for which he provided text drawings. One spelled out Dec. 16, 2040, in block letters and numerals, the other July 11, 2023. The first referred to the centenary of his birth; the second, to the day he predicted he would die. The embroiderers sewed the dates precisely onto fabric and surrounded them with floral decorations, an addition Boetti loved precisely because he hadn’t expected it.

Satisfied, he then began to commission the large embroidered images of maps that are now synonymous with his name. The templates for them were standardized, printed world maps used in European classrooms. Boetti had tracings of them made, which he customized by filling in the contours of individual countries with the colors of national flags. He then sent the models off or delivered them in person to Kabul, where he had financed a small hotel.

The first completed map embroidery, dated 1971-72, is in the MoMA show and hung toward the end of the sixth-floor installation. It’s a splendid, regal thing. The national colors are jewel-bright; the oceans sapphire blue, with stitch-work that seems to simulate the texture of moving water. More than a hundred such embroideries were produced over the next two decades and more. And inevitably the main image varied in details from one version to the next.

Sometimes this was Boetti’s doing. Although he claimed little overt interest in politics, he was alert to international news. As nations came and went or shifted affiliation, he updated his map drawings, making radical revisions after the splintering of the Soviet Union. At one point he began to use a new map altogether, one that gave more prominence to the Southern Hemisphere.

The Afghan artisans introduced changes of their own. Personnel changed; levels of skills varied. When embroiderers ran short of a particular color thread and had to substitute another, oceans came out pink, yellow or red instead of blue. Boetti approved of, even treasured, any and all such differences and from the start established the framing borders of the textiles as a free zone, open to all, for religious texts, political commentary and poetry in Italian, English and Farsi.

In 1980, with the Soviet occupiers entrenched and Afghanistan’s borders closed, production came to a forced halt. For the next few years, Boetti went through his own crisis of creativity before reconnecting with Afghan artisans in exile in Pakistan. At this point he shifted gears somewhat by ordering, in addition to the maps, a set of 50 kilim carpets, woven by men, with abstract, pixelated geometric designs determined by a complex system of mathematical variables.

The MoMA show’s organizer, Christian Rattemeyer, the museum’s associate curator of drawings, has placed nine of the kilims on the floor of the atrium, each under a bare light bulb, as if to accommodate a congregation of abstract thinkers, some of them Sufi perhaps — Boetti was very interested in Sufism — for discussion and contemplation.

The walls surrounding the rugs are hung with map embroideries, but also with less familiar textiles, including one from a 1994 series called “Tutto.” “Tutto” means “all,” “everything,” and that’s what this embroidery seems to hold. It’s crammed, jigsaw-style, crazy quilt-style, with themes and images that weave through Boetti’s career: twins, hardware, lamps, letters, towers, continents, abstractions.

Given that it was created the year the artist died of cancer, it could be read as a kind of deathbed vision of past life passing in a chaotic stream before his eyes, though it’s just as likely he had another image in mind, that of a great steaming stew of life on the boil, rich with piquant memories and fresh ideas.

“Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan” continues through Oct. 1 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.

 

There’s a bittersweet addition to the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden this summer. Half hidden in the shade of a tree, it’s a life-size bronze statue of a gaunt-looking guy holding a fountainlike hose in one hand. When water spraying from it hits his head, steam rises, as if his brain were sizzling.

LONDON – At Christie’s post-war and contemporary art auction here on Wednesday evening – an event aptly described by the super dealer Larry Gagosian as “Masterpiece Theatre’’ – collectors from around the world dropped millions of dollars on works by many of the major names of the 20th century, and record prices were set for two of them: Yves Klein and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Hoping to capture the attention of both established collectors and new-rich ones from places like the Middle East, Russia and Asia, Christie’s had marshaled its international connections, pulling in exceptionally strong artworks for an evening auction like few others London has seen. The sale totaled $207.3 million, against an estimate of $160.1 million to $216.9 million, the highest total of any auction in the category that Christie’s has held in Europe.

Unlike Sotheby’s, whose auction on Tuesday evening made $108 million with more works of lower value, Christie’s reached for the stars.

Three bidders wanted Klein’s “Le Rose du Bleu (RE 22),’’ an organic landscape of pink sponges and pebbles that was bought by a telephone bidder for $36.7 million, a record price for the artist at auction and well above its high estimate of $31.2 million. (Final prices include the buyer’s commission to Christie’s: 25 percent of the first $50,000; 20 percent of the next $50,000 to $1 million and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.) The painting, which was being sold by an anonymous collector, was one of the earliest of just 12 such sponge reliefs that the artist produced in pink rather than his trademark ultramarine blue.

The other record was achieved for a 1981 Basquiat canvas of a primitive figure with clenched teeth, his oversized hands held high in the air. It had been estimated to bring $15.6 million to $23.4 million, but was purchased by a telephone bidder for $20.1 million. (The painting had last been up for sale at Sotheby’s in New York in 2007, when it brought $14.6 million.) Brett Gorvy, chairman of Christie’s post-war and contemporary art worldwide, who took the winning bid, described the buyer as “a seasoned European collector who had been looking for the right Basquiat for years.”

“There was strong American buying tonight,’’ Mr. Gorvy said after the sale. “But Europeans were even stronger.’’ (Surprisingly, he added, there was little action from either Asian or Russian buyers, in contrast to many recent sales.)

Another hefty price was paid for Francis Bacon’s “Study for Self-Portrait,’’ a 1964 full length painting of the artistperched on a bed, which was expected to sell for between $23.4 million and $31.2 million. After it failed to sell at auction at Christie’s in New York in 2008 it was the subject of a law suit, in which the owner, a family trust led by the Connecticut collector George A. Weiss, claimed that Christie’s had reneged on a $40 million guarantee (a sum promised the seller regardless of a sale’s outcome). That suit was settled in July of last year, with Christie’s agreeing to pay the trust an undisclosed.

On Wednesday night William Acquavella, the Manhattan dealer, bid for the work by phone in what became a protracted battle against Christopher van der Weghe, another Manhattan dealer. Mr. van der Weghe won, paying $33.6 million. “We knew we would have to fight for it,’’ Mr. van der Weghe said after the sale, describing the client he had bid for only as an international collector. “Quality is more important these days than ever.’’

Gerhard Richter has been a consistent winner over the past few years and on Wednesday night “Strutur (2),’’ a richly painted 1989 canvas of alabaster whites and gunmetal grays, sold to a telephone bidder for $19.8 million. It had been estimated to bring $14 million to $18 million.
Lucian Freud, who died a year ago, has a loyal following too, especially after the recent exhibitions here and in New York. Two works by him both brought strong prices. “Naked Portrait II,’’ a 1974 painting of the artist’s lover Jacquetta Eliot curled up asleep, had been expected to sell for $5.8 million to $6.8 million; it made $6.7 million. And “Head of a Greek Man,’’ a 1946 portrait, fetched $5.3 million, well above its estimate of $2.3 million to $3 million. Both paintings were purchased by telephone bidders.

Not everything sold high. Jeff Koons’s monumental stainless steel sculpture “Baroque Egg with Bow (Blue/Turquoise),’’ from 1994-2008, was snapped up by Ivor Braka, a London dealer, for $4 million, just under its low estimate. “Koons is one of the truly ground-breaking artists of the 20th and 21st centuries,’’ Mr. Braka said after the sale, “and to buy something like this at this level, especially given the elevated prices for other artists, was great. Some days you just get lucky.’’

The Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, designed by Foster + Partners, at the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas.

 

Keeping up with the Joneses.

It happens in many settings, from the classroom to the country club, and, perhaps not surprisingly, among cultural organizations, according to a new study that finds that many institutions recently expanded their buildings in part because everyone else had.

Other reasons that organizations will build too much are overambitious trustees, self-interested architects and unrealistic financial projections, according to the study by the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago that is to be released Thursday.

The study, “Set in Stone,” examined the cultural building boom between 1994 and 2008, when museums, performing arts centers and theaters in the United States got swept up in new construction or major renovations.

More than $16 billion was spent by cultural organizations on building projects during that period, some inspired by the hope that construction initiatives could do what a Frank Gehry-designed museum building did for Bilbao, Spain: transform a small city into a major cultural destination.

“This issue between confusing a want with a need is enormous in the sector,” said Carroll Joynes, a founder and senior fellow at the policy center. “There are clear ways to avoid this. You can learn from what other people went through.”

A number of the lessons, the study suggests, could be drawn from its case studies of expansions like that of the Art Institute of Chicago over the past decade.

At first glance the project seemed daunting: a $300 million venture that would boost yearly operating costs by an estimated $4 million and would necessitate another $87 million in fund-raising to expand the endowment.

But with the Italian architect Renzo Piano engaged and several key trustees and the museum’s director gung ho, the expansion gained a kind of inexorable momentum.

Attendance did spike initially when the new wing opened in March 2009, but then it dropped back to normal levels. A precipitous decline in endowment income led to pay cuts, furloughs, a salary freeze and two rounds of layoffs.

“Instead of expanding its budget as expected, the Art Institute was forced to contract instead,” the study said.

The study examines not only what arts organizations got wrong but also what they got right and offers guidance for arts executives, civic leaders, donors and government officials about how to avoid pitfalls and how to grow intelligently and responsibly — or maybe not at all.

“It’s lessons from the front lines,” said Adrian Ellis, an arts consultant who helped conceptualize the study. “The stories aren’t told that often.”

The study was based on interviews with people in more than 500 arts organizations and drew data from more than 700 construction projects that ranged in cost from $4 million to $335 million. The New York region led the country in cultural building ($1.6 billion) after Los Angeles ($950 million) and the Chicago area ($870 million).

In many cases the researchers found that organizations failed to realistically assess the demand for their projects and their capacities to complete them: Do we really need this? Can we afford to build it? Can we support a larger operation going forward?

“All of the work fundamentally says, ‘Don’t build what you can’t sustain,’ ” said Duncan M. Webb, an arts management consultant, who was an adviser on the study.

Architects can also run away with a project, the study reports. “They say the building is for you, but the building is for them,” Mr. Joynes said. “It’s for the pictures and for their careers. From their point of view it’s a real success if it gets built.”

The study found that the most successful projects were driven by a clear artistic mission and demonstrable need; had authoritative and consistent leadership throughout the process; controlled expenses during construction; and generated income after completion.

The report’s other case studies were the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Va.; the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas.; and the Long Center for the Performing Arts in Austin, Tex. — all of which encountered financial hurdles after expansion.

“The Modern Wing was not an impulsive project,” Douglas Druick, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, said. “It was 10 years in the making, and it puts the Art Institute on a solid footing for the future. We expect it to be here for decades, just as we still open the doors of our original 1893 building every morning.”

Additional examples outside the study abound, Mr. Joynes said, like the recent travails of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, which had to close its new flagship building in Midtown and move to its smaller Upper West Side location after almost going out of business. “The Folk Art Museum should not have happened,” Mr. Joynes said. “It was a wonderful museum and they self-destructed. Our whole purpose in this is to say, ‘There are ways to do this that can protect your organization and help you fulfill your mission that won’t cripple you or take you down.’”

The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, Mr. Ellis said, is an example of an organization that failed to build the necessary consensus among public officials and others before embarking on its $265 million complex, which opened in 2001.

“They thought, ‘If we can just get this thing up, everything will fall into place,’ and that simply isn’t the case,” Mr. Ellis said of the Kimmel. “If you haven’t thought about how to operate it, it will come back and bite you.”

Anne C. Ewers, Kimmel’s president and chief executive, acknowledged that she inherited a $30 million building deficit when she came on board in 2007 but said that she retired it the following year and that the institution was in the process of correcting “architectural mistakes” like the acoustics. “The biggest challenge was not having established an endowment dedicated to the maintenance of the facility,” she said.

In part because of these experiences and the economic downturn, the researchers say, the cultural building boom is decidedly over. The trend now is toward adaptive reuse of existing buildings and cultural districts that link various smaller organizations.

“We’re less interested in the idea of palaces of the arts,” Mr. Webb said. “A lot of these communities got in over their heads. I think we’ve learned our lessons.”

Gustav Klimt: 150 Anniversary Celebration
Neue Galerie
Through Aug. 27

New York

Few artists evoke the troubled opulence of Vienna before World War I as vividly as Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). To mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, the Neue Galerie has mounted an exhibition of paintings and drawings from its own and private collections.

"Gustav Klimt: 150th Anniversary Celebration" is not the exhausting blockbuster you might expect. Instead, having staged a larger Klimt show in 2007, the Neue Galerie has now zeroed in on some of his top works, offering a succinct and cogent presentation of Klimt's fairly rapid artistic evolution from polished academic realism toward his distinct, increasingly abstract style vividly linked to Art Nouveau.

Klimt absorbed old and recent influences as he needed them, from ancient Egypt and Byzantium through 19th-century Orientalism, Impressionism and Symbolism. Among the show's landscapes, "The Park of Schloss Kammer" (c. 1910) presents a shimmering blend of French influences—the massive trees and dappled background light rendered with Pointillist textures, the opalescent lake suggesting one of Monet's water-lily views. "Forester House in Weissenbach on the Attersee" (1914) is another wonderfully decorative composition, its textures of slate roof, flower-strewn lawn and vine-covered wall punctuated by the open casement windows whose slightly wavy delineation conjures up the flamelike intensity of Van Gogh.

Beyond the visual impact of Klimt's portraits and figure studies, their allure rides upon their libidinous candor. In the era when the essentially conservative Viennese were disquieted by Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical probing into the unconscious, Klimt's increasingly rebellious imagery disturbed the establishment. He loved women, and his posing, floating and reclining female subjects seem sexually aware—and willing. Even when they aren't nude, he implies they ought to be.

View Slideshow

Neue Galerie New York/Estates of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer

"Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (1907).

 

Thus Klimt, who in 1897 co-founded the anticonservative artists group Vienna Secession, was at the artistic center of an imperial capital increasingly divided between the traditions of the Habsburg empire and the revolutionary ideas of a rising generation. Apart from their sexuality, Klimt's oil portraits and allegorical groups reflect this through persistent tension between naturalism and stylization.

"The Dancer" (1916) is a prime example. Her face, bare bosom and legs, painted in morbid blue-gray tones, are engulfed in a polychrome welter of stylized floral patterns. The riotous Japanesque background seems to flow from the dancer's flower-patterned chemise—provocatively unbuttoned. And so busy is that background and enigmatic the perspective, that you can easily miss the yellow daffodils in her left hand. Another naturalistic touch is the meticulous rendering of the dancer's shoes—Klimt pays conspicuous attention to their wide ribbon ties and gracefully curved "Louis" heels, then at the height of fashion. He was, after all, a close companion of the fashion designer Emilie Flöge, with whom he is depicted in several rare photographs hung in the adjoining room.

The stark sensuality of "Pale Face" (1903), suggests 17th-century Dutch portraiture seen through an Art Nouveau lens. The pale pinks and delicate modeling of the subject's calm, sculptural profile are set against softly defined, sinuous black-and-white passages of her hat, hair and coat. And the smokelike quality of these passages is sharply offset by a typical Klimtian touch—a silver-gray checkerboard pattern in the upper right corner further accented with the portrait's only stroke of red.

Not surprisingly, the place of honor is accorded the Neue Galierie's prized possession, the 1907 portrait of Klimt's possible lover, Adele Bloch-Bauer. In all its gleaming allure of gold and silver leaf, this portrait stands as a more modernist riposte to John Singer Sargent's once-notorious portraits of Madame X (1884) and of Isabella Stewart Gardner (1888). Like many of Klimt's mature portraits, it is iconic not just because it is so familiar, but because it actually evokes the style of Byzantine and Russian icons, the latter with their characteristic gilt metal coverings. Bloch-Bauer's head, shoulders and arms seem to peer out from behind a carapace of gold, its surface a dazzling swirl of burnished and stippled textures.

It is hard to separate precisely Bloch-Bauer's gown from the elaborately patterned background, or to determine whether she is seated or standing. But in the adjoining gallery a series of eight preparatory drawings for the portrait reveal how painstakingly Klimt worked out the pose and composition that today seem so spontaneous. The drawings also reveal the various ways Klimt arranged her hands to conceal her deformed finger.

Klimt was associated with the Wiener Werkstatte, which was dedicated to raising the quality of design of domestic objects. Placing Klimt's paintings in the context of Viennese decoration are three important Modernist-style clocks, designed by architects Adolf Loos, Otto Prutscher and Josef Urban. And to provide a telling reflection of the jewel-like patterns of the Bloch-Bauer and "Dancer" portraits, the gallery also features a group of brooches and related jewelry whose burnished silver and gilt mounts glow with the seductive radiance of polished cabochon emeralds, opals, carnelians and other precious stones.

When Klimt died in 1918 at age 55, painting and music were at a crossroads, and his late imagery prompts us to speculate which path he'd have taken had he lived into the 1920s and '30s. Would he have reflected Arnold Schoenberg's atonality and become more abstract? Or would he have continued to vent his erotic nature by maintaining his increasingly stylized representational idiom, echoing the late-Romanticism of Richard Strauss? It's tantalizing to ponder.

Mr. Scherer writes about classical music and the fine arts for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared June 26, 2012, on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Forever Between Two Worlds.

via online.wsj.com