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Tuesday, 26 July 2011 00:48

The exhibition The Great American Hall of Wonders examines the nineteenth-century American belief that the people of the United States shared a special genius for innovation. It explores this belief through works of art, mechanical inventions, and scientific discoveries, and captures the excitement of citizens who defined their nation as a “Great Experiment” sustained by the inventive energies of Americans in every walk of life.

The exhibition features 161 objects, including paintings and drawings by pre-eminent artists, including John James Audubon, Albert Bierstadt, George Catlin, Frederic Edwin Church, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Thomas Moran, and Charles Willson Peale, as well as sculptures, prints, survey photographs, zoological and botanical illustrations, patent models, and engineering diagrams. The exhibition explores six subjects that helped shape America during the period—the buffalo, giant sequoia, and Niagara Falls represent American beliefs about abundant natural resources for fueling the nation’s progress, while inventions such as the clock, the gun, and the railroad link improvements in technology with the purposeful use of time.

The Great American Hall of Wonders investigates questions that are still critical today. The exhibition reveals both the successful experiments of the past, as well as the ones that went awry, and invites today’s citizens to explore a valuable legacy left by the founding fathers: a belief in the transformative power of American inventiveness.

The museum is the only venue for the exhibition, which is organized by Claire Perry, an independent curator who specializes in nineteenth-century American cultural history. Until 2008, Perry was curator of American art at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The museum’s National Historic Landmark building is a fitting place to display the exhibition. On July 4, 1836, President Andrew Jackson authorized the construction of a patent office on this site. The building was designed to celebrate American invention, technical ingenuity, and the scientific advancements that the patent process represents. The building was always intended for public display of patent models that were submitted by inventors. By the 1850s, more than 100,000 people each year visited the building, which became known as the “temple of invention,” to see the designs that filled display cabinets in the exhibition galleries. In addition to patent models, the government’s historical, scientific, and art collections were housed on the third floor. The Patent Office occupied parts of the building from 1840 to 1932.

Publication

An illustrated companion book, The Great American Hall of Wonders: Art, Science, and Invention in the Nineteenth Century accompanies the exhibition. It is written by Claire Perry and co-published by the museum and London-based publisher D Giles Limited. It is available in the museum store and online (hardcover, $65; softcover, $45).

Podcast

The 8 episode audio podcast recorded by Guest Curator Claire Perry is available here:


Public Programs and Educational Outreach

Through a collaboration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the museum will present a robust series of public programs and educational outreach about today’s inventors and inventions as a contemporary complement to the exhibition. These programs will include webcast public lectures, an inventors’ symposium and hands-on activities for children and families, as well as college seminars and professional development workshops for educators.

Free Public Programs

July 14, 2011 at 6 p.m.; The Great American Experiment with curator Claire Perry
Fridays in August at 11 a.m.; Spark!Lab
August 13, 2011 at 11:30 a.m. Art-stronaut Family Day

In the News

BBC, July 21, 2011, "Can America's genius for invention endure?" by Jane O'Brien
NPR, Weekend Edition, July 17, 2011, "'Hall Of Wonders' Explores U.S. Innovation" with Linda Wertheimer
Associated Press, July 16, 2011, "Patent models join art in new Smithsonian exhibit" by Brett Zongker
Smithsonian, July 15, 2011, "The Great Hall of American Wonders Opens Today at American Art" by Beth Py-Liberman
The Art Newspaper, July 2011, "The Great American Hall of Wonders" by Javier Pes
Washingtonian, July 2011, "'Hall of Wonders' Opens at the Smithsonian American Art Museum" by Sophie Gilbert
Inventors Digest, July 2011, "Welcome to the U.S. Hall of Wonders"

Credit

The Great American Hall of Wonders is organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in collaboration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Battelle has provided important leadership support for the exhibition.
Generous contributions also have been provided by Sheila Duignan and Mike Wilkins, the Raymond J. and Margaret Horowitz Endowment, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Thelma and Melvin Lenkin, Betty and Whitney MacMillan, Jean Mahoney, and Robin Martin.

Saturday, 16 July 2011 04:25

A painting which has been hanging in a student hall of residence at Oxford since the 1930s could be a Michelangelo masterpiece worth £100million.

The mid-16th century work depicting the crucifixion of Jesus was believed to be by one of the Renaissance artist’s contemporaries, Marcello Venusti.

But Italian scholar Antonio Forcellino claims that infra-red technology revealed the 12-inch by 27-inch work to have been painted by Michelangelo himself. ‘No one but Michelangelo could have painted such a masterpiece,’ Mr Forcellino wrote in his book The Lost Michelangelos.

Only a handful of Michelangelo paintings exist which are confirmed as authentic, and all are in museums.

If the one discovered at Oxford’s Campion Hall is authenticated and put on the market, it could beat the £70million record price for a work of art sold at auction set by a Picasso last year.

Clare Dewey of Axa art insurance said: ‘To say Michelangelos don’t come on the market very often would be an understatement. A tiny drawing by the artist sells for millions, so that puts into context how much a painting would fetch if you could prove it is genuine.

‘It could easily be the most expensive painting ever sold. It could even break £100million if experts believe it is real.’

The painting, Crucifixion With The Madonna, St John and Two Mourning Angels, was bought by Campion Hall at Sotheby’s for an undisclosed sum in the 1930s.

Saturday, 16 July 2011 04:23

Reinhold Wuerth, a German billionaire who turned a family-owned screw wholesaler into a global company, paid more than $70 million to buy a Holbein painting, beating a bid from the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt.

Wuerth purchased the painting from the heirs of the princes and landgraves of the state of Hesse, an aristocratic family descended from Charlemagne, according to an e-mailed statement sent today by Britta Fischer Public Relations on behalf of the Wuerth Collection. The Staedel Museum, where the Holbein has hung on loan since 2003, said in a separate statement that its own final offer of 40 million euros ($57 million) was rejected.

Christoph Graf Douglas, the art dealer who negotiated the sale, said the price was more than 50 million euros, the highest ever paid for an artwork in Germany. He declined to name the final sum because of an agreement between the buyer and sellers.

“It is the most important painting sold in Germany since World War II,” Graf Douglas said by telephone from Frankfurt. “I had other willing buyers but they wanted to take it out of Germany, which wasn’t allowed. I could probably have sold it for more than 100 million euros if it wasn’t barred from export.”

Interested buyers included the J. Paul Getty Museum, he said.

Protective Cloak

The 1525-8 oil painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, “The Madonna With the Family of Mayor Meyer,” was painted on commission for the Basel mayor Jakob Meyer zum Hasen. The Meyers are portrayed at the feet of the Madonna, sheltered under her cloak. It belonged to the family for almost 100 years.

“It is the transition from the wonderful German late Gothic to the Renaissance,” Graf Douglas said. “When you stand in front of it you see how mystical, wonderful it is.”

Saturday, 16 July 2011 04:18

A man arrested last week after being spotted calmly walking out of a gallery with a $200,000 Picasso under his arm had an extensive collection of stolen works hidden in his studio apartment, police have said.

Mark Lugo, 30, was apprehended on July 6 after allegedly stealing Picasso's 1965 'Tete de Femme' from the Weinstein Gallery in San Francisco the previous day.

A subsequent raid on his one bedroom apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, revealed a small museum's worth of art - 11 stolen pieces in total, worth more than $500,000.

The works were taken from seven galleries in Manhattan and included a piece by Cubist master Fernand Léger and another Picasso sketch, authorities said.

After Lugo's arrest in San Francisco, police in New York reviewed CCTV footage from The Carlyle Hotel on the Upper East Side, which had a Léger piece stolen on June 28.

Officers are said to have recognised Lugo from the tapes, connecting him to the robbery of Léger's $350,000 1917 piece 'Composition aux element mecaniques' and enabling them to execute a search warrant on his Hoboken property.

At the apartment on Tuesday, police said they found the 11 stolen pieces of art, some of which were hung on the walls.

'There were about six of them displayed on the wall of the apartment. His whole apartment was filled with wine books, upper-crust living, paintings,' a police source told the New York Post.

Saturday, 16 July 2011 04:15

Misinformation has spread widely about Robert S. Duncanson, an African-American painter. Before and during the Civil War he specialized in portraits of abolitionists and landscapes as exotic as Roman ruins and Kashmir glades. Art historians rediscovered him in the 1920s, but soon muddied his biography with legends and typos.

His father has often been described as a white Scottish-Canadian who gave the painter the middle name Scott. But in truth Robert Seldon Duncanson descended from freed slaves in Virginia, and his only white ancestor was probably a great-grandfather who owned a plantation.

Joseph D. Ketner II, an art history professor at Emerson College in Boston, has been scouring archives and trying to correct the Duncanson record for three decades. The battle can be tiring; the fictitious Scottish back story reappeared in a newspaper last year.

“I wish people would do their homework,” Mr. Ketner said in a recent phone interview.

He has gathered 17 of Duncanson’s works, most of them recently discovered, for an exhibition at the 1810s home of one of the painter’s role models, Thomas Cole. Through Oct. 30, “Robert S. Duncanson: The Spiritual Striving of the Freedmen’s Sons” fills an upstairs bedroom at Cole’s house, Cedar Grove, now a museum overlooking peaks and valleys in Catskill, N.Y.

The exhibition catalog reproduces a newspaper ad that Duncanson posted as a teenage house painter on the outskirts of Detroit, promising “to do work in the most superior style, and to use the best and genuine materials.” He spent most of his career in Cincinnati; white patrons there helped pay for his travels in Europe and Canada.

Each trip “sheds a new light over my path,” he wrote to a friend in 1854. Seeing thousands of other painters’ landscapes “enabled me to judge of my own talent,” he explained.

“I do not feel discouraged,” he added.

In depicting snowy peaks, waterfalls and ruined temples, Duncanson subtly expressed outrage at racism. Tiny figures of black slaves and American Indian hunters labor in the foregrounds. He most likely meant his tableaus of crumbling Roman monuments as a “cautionary tale” for Southerners, about the doom that has awaited slaveholding societies, Mr. Ketner writes in the catalog.

Duncanson also produced explicitly abolitionist paintings for a panorama about 600 yards long. It showed cruel conditions for African-Americans at sugar plantations and auctions and on trade ships. The canvas, now lost, was unfurled at theaters, while a narrator condemned the South as “the land of the free, and the home of the slave.”

During the Civil War “Duncanson began to suffer from dementia that led to violent outbursts, delusions and hallucinations,” Mr. Ketner writes. The painter died at a sanitarium in 1872 at 51. The illnesses may have resulted from lifelong exposure to hazardous paint. “His behavior in his latter years is consistent with lead poisoning,” Mr. Ketner said.

About 250 of Duncanson’s paintings have turned up, and Mr. Ketner hears about potential new discoveries every few weeks. Among the works at Cedar Grove are a riverfront scene that the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in Manhattan bought for $47,500 at Christie’s in New York in 2009, and a depiction of a rocky passageway that private collectors acquired for $45,600 at Swann Auction Galleries in Manhattan in February.

In October Swann will offer a Duncanson scene (estimated at $60,000 to $90,000) with boaters gathered at a grassy lakeshore. The foreground glade looks vaguely English, while craggy mountains in the background resemble the Alps.

“It has a combination of his devices,” said Nigel Freeman, the director of Swann’s African-American fine art department. “It’s not any particular place.”

Saturday, 16 July 2011 04:07

A £9m appeal has been launched by the British Library to buy the oldest intact book in Europe, a palm-sized leather-bound copy of the gospels buried 1,300 years ago in the coffin of Saint Cuthbert.

The Cuthbert Gospel, on loan to the library since 1979, is regarded as of such importance that the National Heritage Memorial Fund has raided its reserves to offer a £4.5m grant, half the purchase price and the largest single acquisition grant in the library's history. The Art Fund and the Garfield Weston foundation have each promised £250,000.

If the appeal succeeds, the library has agreed the gospel will be displayed half the time at Durham cathedral, where it was found with the body of the saint when his coffin was reopened in 1104.

The gospel is still in its original 7th century leather cover, which has survived in perfect condition.

Saturday, 16 July 2011 04:05

A Gustav Klimt landscape whose provenance includes Nazi looting and murder, and finally restitution to an heir of the original owner, could fetch more than $25 million at auction this fall.

The 1915 oil-on-canvas “Litzlberg am Attersee” (Litzlberg on the Attersee) will highlight Sotheby’s (BID) evening Impressionist and modern art sale in New York on Nov. 2.

“It’s a beautiful, beautiful painting,” said Jane Kallir, director of Galerie St. Etienne in Manhattan, which gave Klimt his first U.S. exhibition in 1959. The estimate is “a conservative, very prudent starting point. I would not be surprised if it does considerably better.”

Earlier this month, the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg, Austria, returned the artwork to Georges Jorisch, the grandson of Amalie Redlich, a Jewish woman who owned it until she was deported to Poland by the Nazis in 1941 and murdered. Her art collection was seized by the Gestapo and sold off.

In 1944, the Klimt appeared in the collection of the Landesgalerie Salzburg, now known as the Residenzgalerie, and later in the Salzburg Museum of Modern Art.

The painting initially belonged to Austrian iron magnate Viktor Zuckerkandl and his wife, Paula, who were art patrons. In 1927, part of their collection passed to Viktor’s family. “Litzlberg am Attersee” landed with Viktor’s sister, Jorisch’s grandmother.

Saturday, 16 July 2011 04:00

New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, which is borrowing for the first time to build a new site in lower Manhattan, pared back yields after investors placed orders for more than twice the $125 million offering.

“Institutional investors have plenty of room for this name because they don’t have any credit exposure to it,” said Fred Yosca, head of fixed-income trading at BNY Mellon Capital Markets LLC in New York.

The securities, rated A, the sixth-highest grade from Standard & Poor’s, yielded 3.7 percent for $50 million of debt due July 2021, the largest portion. Morgan Stanley, the underwriter, lowered yields on three different maturities, including a 0.13 percentage point cut to 4.87 percent on the 20- year bonds, according to a person familiar with the transaction who declined to be identified because the person wasn't authorized to speak publicly on the deal.

Strong demand prompted Morgan Stanley to compress the offering period to one day from two, the person said. More than 21 investors offered a total $286 million in orders while individuals were alloted $57.5 million, the person said.

The Whitney, founded in 1931 and specializing in contemporary U.S. art, has a “non-binding memorandum of understanding” from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for it to assume operating costs at the Whitney’s Madison Avenue building, according to the bond offering document. The Whitney expects the arrangement to be final later in the year, and last for eight years beginning in 2015, when the museum opens its downtown space.

Museum Deals

The Met and the Whitney announced their deal May 11, the day after the Museum of Modern Art agreed to buy the headquarters of the American Folk Art Museum, which is in default on bond payments.

The new location, which will be more than twice the size of the Whitney’s current space, is expected to boost the museum’s average annual attendance to 720,800 in fiscal 2016 from 392,324 a year during fiscal years 2008 to 2010, Fitch Ratings said in a June 30 report.

The Whitney will depend on gifts and contributions to pay its debt principal. Its interest-only debt burden will reach 21 percent of its expenses, said Joanne G. Ferrigan and Douglas J. Kilcommons, Fitch analysts, in the report.

The museum’s endowment totaled $185.6 million as of June 30, according to offering documents. It expects to raise $625 million from its capital campaign by 2015. As of last month, it had pledges of $411 million, or about 66 percent, the documents said. The Whitney anticipates full payment of those pledges by 2020, 11 years before the final maturity of the bonds.

Saturday, 16 July 2011 03:57

T. Lux Feininger, a painter and photographer who, as a young student at the Bauhaus, used his camera to compile an invaluable and visually distinctive record of the artistic avant-garde in Germany between the wars, died last Thursday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 101.

The death was confirmed by his daughter-in-law Kate Feininger.

Mr. Feininger was the younger brother of the photographer Andreas Feininger. His father was the painter Lyonel Feininger, one of the first artists appointed by Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar.

At 16 he became a student at the Bauhaus, which had moved to Dessau. There he collaborated in Oskar Schlemmer’s experimental theater, played in the Bauhaus jazz band, and studied painting with Josef Albers, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.

Above all, he took photographs. The Bauhaus did not have a photographic studio until 1929, but Mr. Feininger, who had begun taking photographs several years earlier with his grandmother’s box camera before graduating to his own 9-by-12-centimeter plate camera, played the role of artistic photojournalist.

Influenced by the New Vision principles articulated by the Bauhaus teacher Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Mr. Feininger chronicled daily life at the Bauhaus in images that showed a playful, spontaneous spirit and a keen sense of new formal developments in photography.

“He captured what the student life was like there in a sophisticated, innovative way, even though he was totally untrained,” said Laura Muir, assistant curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard. “He merged photojournalism with the New Vision aesthetic of exaggerated angles, extreme close-ups and cropping.”

Theodore Lux Feininger was born on June 11, 1910, in Berlin. While at the Bauhaus, he sold his photographs to picture newspapers and periodicals through the Berlin photo agency Dephot. In 1929 his work was included in Film und Foto, a groundbreaking survey of modern photography in Stuttgart.

After he turned to painting that same year, he exhibited widely in Germany under the name Theodore Lux before emigrating to the United States in 1936. He left most of his photographic negatives in Germany, where they disappeared.

Thursday, 14 July 2011 02:42

The market for contemporary art is more resilient than it was three years ago, according to Dallas- based collector Howard Rachofsky.

The former hedge fund manager, who with his wife Cindy is one of the art world’s best-known buyers, spoke after auctions showed some contemporary prices returning to their peak levels, defying nervousness in the wider economy.

“There’s so much wealth in the world looking for alternative assets,” said Rachofsky. “The market is broader than it was. It’s grown with new buyers from Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. A number of players have come in from the financial industry and they look for value.”

Wealthy individuals are investing in contemporary works as a hedge against economic uncertainty, dealers said. Sotheby’s and Christie’s International’s June series of contemporary art auctions in London raised 220.6 million pounds ($352 million), the second-highest total ever for the U.K. capital.

Still, the market isn’t fully back to the boom levels of 2007 and mid-2008, Rachofsky, 67, said in a telephone interview.

“Some prices are high and comparable to former values,” he said. “It’s not universal. There isn’t a mania out there. If the financial markets go into crisis, there will be deflation in art as well. There will be a pause.”

Dealers at last month’s Art Basel fair in Switzerland reported plentiful sales in the $200,000 to $2 million range. Buyers spent a record 108.8 million pounds at Sotheby’s on June 29, when the little-known Duerckheim collection of 1960s and ‘70s German art fetched 60.4 million pounds, double the estimate. Works by Sigmar Polke and Georg Baselitz set auction records for the artists at 5.8 million pounds and 3.2 million pounds apiece.

Koons Market


“Those prices showed that the Polke and Baselitz markets had been quiet and underpriced,” Rachofsky said. “The Jeff Koons market is still off right now, though. Prices aren’t at the level of 2008.”

A 1980s sculpture of 18 basketballs in a vitrine by Koons failed to find a buyer at Sotheby’s (BID) against a low estimate of 600,000 pounds. In June 2008, during the final months of the boom, Rachofsky sold the artist’s 1995-2000 sculpture “Balloon Flower (Magenta)” at Christie’s for a record 12.9 million pounds to finance other purchases. Auction prices for heavily traded names such as Koons slumped by as much as 50 percent during the crisis.

Thursday, 14 July 2011 02:39

At the world's top auction houses, sellers put paintings on the block, but it's the art handlers who actually get them there.

Handlers at Sotheby's are saying the company is trying to shortchange their role in the process by asking for concessions in their contracts. With the art handlers' union raising the specter of a strike, the two sides are set to meet Monday in an attempt to hammer out a deal, according to the union.

The contract between the handlers' union and the auction house expired at the start of the month, and they have been unable to reach a new agreement.

Sotheby's wants to offer buyouts and replace some of the unionized art handlers with nonunion labor, according to Teamsters Local 814 President Jason Ide.

The union, however, says the auction house shouldn't be asking for concessions on the heels of the second-most-profitable period in its history.

Sotheby's sales increased by 74%, to $4.8 billion, during 2010, with $161 million in net income and significant upticks in executive pay. President and Chief Executive William Ruprecht received nearly $6 million in salary, stock awards and other compensation, representing a more than 150% increase versus his 2009 package.

Mr. Ide, himself a former Sotheby's art handler, said the company's achievement should allow it to avoid asking for cuts, such as a reduction in the workweek, By not doing so it would be jeopardizing its "longstanding relationship" with the union, he said.

"They've had an amazing year and that's a testament to the success of their business, but it's also a testament to the abilities" of handlers and other employees, Mr. Ide said.

Thursday, 14 July 2011 02:37

It is an all-too-familiar pattern in many communities: artists discover an inexpensive, underdeveloped neighborhood and move in, only to be ousted from the area by soaring retail rents once it catches on in popularity.

Many argue that it happened in Greenwich Village, and most point to SoHo as the quintessential example of the phenomenon. Now, the same pattern may be occurring in Chelsea, where an explosion of residential development along the High Line is attracting retailers serving new residents — retailers who are now competing for space with the hundreds of art galleries that are the backbone of the neighborhood.

But some real estate experts say Chelsea’s fate may be different, because a healthy number of the neighborhood’s arts businesses had the foresight to buy their gallery and studio spaces, rather than lease them.

“The difference between SoHo and Chelsea is that so many artists, or even art companies or art investors, bought condos in Chelsea, so they actually made investments as opposed to leasing,” said Barbara Byrne Denham, the chief economist at Eastern Consolidated, a commercial real estate brokerage.

“I think that will preserve their spaces, and the flavor of Chelsea as kind of an art mecca,” she said.

Ms. Byrne Denham said there could be as many as 350 art galleries in Chelsea. Enough of them own their space that in a recent report on the commercial property sales market in Chelsea, Ms. Byrne Denham said, “we had to separate them as their own property type.”

“I said, ‘There’s something in this that really stands out: the fact that so many properties sold as art studios, art condos and art buildings,’ ” she said.

In 2008, the sales volume in that sector peaked at about $105 million, then activity froze with the financial crisis, according to the report. Sales activity in arts-related properties recommenced in the latter half of 2010.

Before 2007, arts-related sales activity in Chelsea was much slower, with about two properties changing hands a year between 2003 and 2006, Ms. Byrne Denham said. Much of that space is in former industrial buildings that were converted as artists and art galleries left SoHo in the mid-1990s.

Many of Chelsea’s arts sales in 2007 and 2008 were fed by one developer, Bass Associates L.L.C., which built the Chelsea Arts Tower, a 20-unit commercial condominium at 545 West 25th Street.

The building took just over two years to sell out, beginning at prices of about $700 a square foot and peaking at prices of more than $2,000 a square foot in 2007, said Margarette Lee, a principal with Youngwoo. Then prices fell, as they did throughout Chelsea, though they have now returned to about $1,200 a square foot, she said.

Ms. Lee said that planning for the Chelsea Arts Tower began as far back as the mid-1990s, when the developer acquired the lot in Chelsea.

“All these galleries were being ousted by retailers in SoHo, and they came to Chelsea, and they started buying their real estate, because everywhere they go, the neighborhood gets really nice, and the rent goes up so high, they have to leave,” she said. “We saw that and went in early and said, ‘I think a lot of these art-related businesses would want to buy instead of rent.’ ”

Thursday, 14 July 2011 02:35

Charles Saatchi is the most influential collector of the past 25 years, and one of the most controversial. Notorious for never appearing at his own openings and for not granting interviews, the British former advertising magnate remains a mysterious figure who wields his influence through his Saatchi Gallery shows and the subsequent sale of the artworks in them; to this day he continues to influence the market for contemporary art in his Gatsbyesque style. I’ve met him only once, at a London restaurant with our mutual friend Jean Pigozzi; Mr. Saatchi picked up the tab, which was generous of him since he was on a diet and ate almost nothing.

A new edition of The History of the Saatchi Gallery (Booth-Clibborn, 1,008 pages, $85.00) has just been released. It’s a reprint of the same title done in a monster-size “OPUS” edition in 2009. Now that it’s available in a manageable size, it’s time to buy it and study it. I scored my signed copy at Sotheby’s in London during last month’s auction previews. This tome is essential for serious art collectors because it shows us the amazing breadth of what Mr. Saatchi has bought, exhibited and sold between 1985 and 2009, following a collecting model I’ve dubbed the “show and sell.” There are many questions surrounding the underlying meaning of his collecting activity, and the morality of his method; just about everything about Mr. Saatchi interests me, in fact, because there’s a lot of Saatchi-ness in today’s art market.

What motivated Mr. Saatchi to produce the oversize book two years ago and to republish it today in a smaller but still jumbo size is no doubt both his ongoing need for recognition and his desire to donate his gallery with its sundry art leftovers to the British government, presumably so that he won’t have to continue underwriting it himself. He tried to get out from under it last July (see my article from Nov. 3, 2010) but that deal fell apart over the gallery’s plan to fund itself through future purchases and sales, a practice that violates museum bylaws in Britain and everywhere else. But buying and selling is what Mr. Saatchi has done for years, and it has worked amazingly well for him it seems, at least until fairly recently.

Flipping through the book, I couldn’t help but marvel at the amazing Warhols he owned, the Judds and the Mardens, the Freuds and the Serras, though sadly for him he owned no Lichtensteins, Bacons or Basquiats. I couldn’t stop myself from adding up what these artworks would be worth today, forgetting Mr. Saatchi’s recent shows and sticking only to the really good stuff he had up until the end of the mid-’90s: I easily came up with $1.5 billion. Even this past decade he proved he still had the eye when he bought, exhibited and then sold great painters like Marlene Dumas, John Currin and Peter Doig and even a few emerging artists, like the then-up-and-coming Mark Grotjahn, who have since garnered blue-chip status. He also had great sculptors like Charlie Ray and Thomas Schutte, but over time his hit ratio has been going down, the proof of this being the book’s inclusion of some horrid and unforgivable chazerai—junk food—that you couldn’t pay me to hang in my house.

Making things more difficult for Mr. Saatchi today is the fact that the art market has become more efficient, and he’s often priced out of it. Rising art prices have forced him to eschew the four-man shows of famous artists he used to do in favor of broader and broader shows with catchy adman titles like “Painting Today” or “Sculpture Tomorrow,” probably because his buy-show-sell strategy has become riskier and less lucrative; art today is fully valued and looks like it will remain so.

When those drift-net shows dead-ended, he went ethnic, with Indian art, then Chinese art, and I’ve already forgotten what else. It’s all worth studying because he has successfully invented a new way to collect art, though sadly now the overall quality of the work keeps forcibly trending down.

Part of me feels Mr. Saatchi never should have moved beyond the original show of 1985, “Judd, Marden, Twombly, Warhol.” It was so good it could have stayed up permanently. As crazy as this sounds, and though it wouldn’t cause any “sensation,” the quality was outstanding, and it would be worth a helluva lot more money than whatever is left in his collection today. In fact, the number of never-ever-to-be-seen-again-on-the-market works that he has shown and sold over the years is downright depressing.

So what conclusions, if any, am I to draw from all this? I asked a wise veteran, art dealer Arne Glimcher, founder of the Pace Gallery, who has dealt with Mr. Saatchi over the years; his answer: “Charles was always a dealer.”

Many would concur, but I don’t; if you’ve owned all that, even if most of it is long gone, then you are what they call a collector-dealer. And, yes, Mr. Saatchi is the original collector who deals. The very reason why Mr. Saatchi, who should instead be lauded for what he’s done for art, is more often maligned by the “art world” is that he regularly sells anything he can. The art world to this day loves to adhere to its hypocritical views that dealers are permitted to sell for profit but “collectors” should not do the same.

I’ve had to deal with this disingenuous hypocrisy for over a decade, but as archaic and absurd as this may sound, most of the art world still buys into the charade. Though I can’t compare myself to Mr. Saatchi, I too have sold art to buy more art, and I refuse to bow to any false moral judgments that others may cast upon me; nor will I behave like a rich, vacuum-cleaner-style collector. I’ll let others play that role.

It’s a well-known fact that in 2007 I sold a fabulous sculpture by Jeff Koons at auction and it achieved the highest price ever paid for an artwork by a living artist. It was a great work by a great artist and it made a great price, so why should I feel badly about a sale that was good for the market, good for the gallery (prices jumped for new works) and a good market confirmation of the artist’s enormous stature? Instead, I received several dirty looks and was accused of being a profiteer: all sour grapes, I’m afraid.

This brings us to the tired old story of how Charles Saatchi ruined Italian painter Sandro Chia’s market when he dumped a suite of Mr. Chia’s paintings at auction years ago—what rubbish that all is. Mr. Chia is a minor figure today; his paintings just aren’t that interesting. Mr. Saatchi didn’t sell just his Chias; he’s dumped everything for years, including his John Currins and his Peter Doigs, but those works have gone straight up into the millions of dollars. As a matter of fact, a Doig painting made $10 million in London last month and collector demand for work by John Currin has never been stronger.

Thursday, 14 July 2011 02:31

Just one week after kicking off its membership program, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has already welcomed 3,000 Original Members. “It’s a rewarding testimony to the excitement and anticipation of the Museum's opening on 11-11-11,” said Don Bacigalupi, Crystal Bridges executive director.  “The response has exceeded our expectations.  People are calling, faxing, mailing, emailing and using our website to purchase memberships.  And it’s not slowing down.”

As the museum continues to receive additional members, the staff and volunteers want to show their appreciation for the outpouring of support.

“We have decided to extend the Nov. 9 members-only preview event to member number 3,001 and beyond by keeping the doors open 24 hours,” said Kathryn Roberts, director of member and guest services.

Every member will be notified in early fall about the process for securing their timed tickets for the preview.  The initial 3,000 members will have the first opportunity to select their preferred time followed by subsequent Original Members.

Original Membership benefits apply through Nov. 30, 2012.  Memberships can still be purchased by calling (479) 418-5728 or by visiting www.crystalbridges.org.

Thursday, 14 July 2011 02:28

Nearly $400,000 worth of original Canadian artwork, including five paintings by the Group of Seven, was stolen in a late night heist in Toronto Sunday.

Toronto police responded to a break-and-enter call at the Canadian Fine Arts store shortly after 10 p.m.

They found 11 paintings missing, including works by Group of Seven members Frederick J. Varley, J.E.H. MacDonald, Alfred J. Casson, Frank H. Johnston and Alexander Y. Jackson.

Police suspect more than one person was involved in the robbery.

The thieves forced their way into the back of the gallery, setting off an alarm as they broke in, said Det. Erwin Huber.

They set off additional motion alarms as they ran straight to a room where the Group of Seven paintings were kept. They took the 11 paintings, frames and all.

Police suspect the thieves were professionals who knew which paintings in the gallery were most valuable.

Thursday, 14 July 2011 02:18

The significance of the exhibition “Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters,” at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, changed abruptly a few days after it opened.

It was conceived as an exercise in compare and contrast between a contemporary artist and an old master (Nicolas Poussin, 1594-1665). With the news of Cy Twombly’s death on July 5, the natural response of a viewer shifted. Instead, this became a mini-retrospective of a historic figure in modern art, paired with pictures by a predecessor he revered.

In recent years, London audiences have caught up with Twombly, born in 1928. His painting -- and also his less- familiar sculpture -- was the subject of a triumphant exhibition at Tate Modern in 2008. That show proved that he made a unique contribution to the visual art of our times.

Or, to put it another way: There is nothing quite like a Twombly. As he said in a rare interview with Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, he never took to the “Wagnerian American” mode of painting.

A generation younger than abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, Twombly took their idiom and made of it something less grandiloquent and more quirkily intimate. Over 60 years, his work developed into one of the most rich and idiosyncratic oeuvres in contemporary art -- loosely gestural, romantic, often containing stray words or fragments of poetry written onto the canvas.

Chilly Eroticism

Poignant though it has become in the light of Twombly’s death, it must be said that at first glance the Dulwich show is puzzling. These are two considerable artists from wildly diverse eras. Poussin (1594-1665) was the master classicist of 17th- century art. He took the carnal, erotic idiom of Venetian mythological painting and disciplined it into a stately, intellectual and, if you don’t like it, chilly grandeur.

So why put him on the same walls as Twombly? The basic premise is that Twombly, unexpectedly, loved Poussin. He told Serota, “I had different crushes on different artists. But I look a lot at Poussin.” And, even more vividly, “I would’ve liked to be Poussin, if I’d had a choice, in another time.”

Thursday, 14 July 2011 02:16
How do you know summer is pretty much in full swing out in the Hamptons? The Parrish Art Museum has its annual Midsummer Party, which brings out a mixture of artists, their benefactors, the occasional fashion designer and socialite and what seems like much of the community's octogenarian population.

"Every year this is a big deal," said Caroline Hirsch, the owner of the comedy club Carolines on Broadway. "It's a museum that's right in our backyard."

Soon, the Parrish will be right in Ms. Hirsch's backyard. She lives in Watermill, where a new Herzog & de Meuron designed edifice housing more of the institution's permanent collection is set to open next year. Saturday's party was the last to be held at the structure on Jobs Lane.

Was everything on schedule?

"We always try to be on time," said Ben Krupinski diplomatically. He is the local builder who is overseeing the project, visible from Route 27 on every trip back and forth from Bridgehampton, perhaps its best advertisement.

"Anyone who's been stuck in traffic can see it's a pretty great site," said the museum's director, Terrie Sultan.

Herzog & de Meuron, Mr. Krupinski continued, "wanted to put a floating bench in the wall. In the actual wall! I said, 'Do you know how to do that?' They said, 'No.'" But it's all been figured out, he explained, via some process that's too complicated to go into here.

The social crowd came decked out in jewel-toned gowns: Debbie Bancroft in cobalt blue; Tiffany Dubin in purple; BJ Topol Blum in orange; Kathy Hilton in a rainbow Ralph Lauren.

"We mimic the artwork," said Ms. Bancroft, referring to the multihued, three-dimensional, geometrically asymmetrical Dorothea Rockburne paintings on display. Ms. Rockburne, a Canadian painter, is having her first career retrospective at the museum at the moment.

In truth, there was more probably work on the guests on Saturday than on the walls. But this is a testament to a) the self-preservation tactics employed in well-heeled, extremely social neighborhoods like Southampton, as well as to b) the aspirational ladies who come husband-hunting at an event like this, where rich men, they suppose, are in great supply. They are also, they forget, in great demand.

Since the Parrish party falls in July, there is usually a climate problem. Cocktails under the tent are usually too hot—thank you, waterproof mascara—and dinner in the tent, at least until everyone starts sucking up the air, is like a meat locker.
Tuesday, 12 July 2011 02:04
MANCHESTER, N.H. –  Predictions are always dangerous but I am betting that the Kellogg Collection of American Folk Art, slated for sale at Northeast Auctions on August 6, will be a shot in the arm for the Americana field.
 
The sad news emanating from the American Folk Art Museum, whose shaky finances forced it to shutter its stylish headquarters at West 53rd Street in Manhattan on July 8, has contributed to a general sense that folk art has lost its fizz.

Truth is, many buyers are sitting on the sidelines. Auctioneers will tell you that the business relies on high-profile, single-owner catalogued sales to generate excitement.  Such consignments have been scarce in the past three years, the slack only partly offset by estate properties.
 
From the point of view of the market, the collection formed over the past four decades by Steven Kellogg, the author and illustrator of children’s books, and his wife Helen, a scholar of American folk painting, ticks all the boxes. Exercising a keen eye for color, form, pattern and surface, the Kelloggs chose pieces that spoke deeply to them and made them smile. They were especially drawn to folk portraiture, painted surfaces and American Windsor chairs.
 
The Kellogg collection contains a little more than 200 lots, most of which are moderately priced to appeal to exactly the sort of retail shopper who attends Antiques Week in New Hampshire, which begins at Northeast Auctions on August 5 and continues for eight days. I am told that the Kelloggs and their advisor, Pennsylvania dealer Patrick Bell, never seriously considered auctioning the collection anywhere but in New Hampshire in August.
 
The Americana crowd is one big, mostly happy family. Besides New Hampshire, it gathers in New York in January and Philadelphia in April. All three destinations were developed by show promoter Russell Carrell, as Northeast Auctions chief Ron Bourgeault reminded me, beginning in the late 1950s.
 
“Russell gave those of us in New England, particularly, the opportunity to find these objects,” says Bourgeault. Chronicled by trade publications like Antiques and The Arts Weekly and Maine Antique Digest, a community of kindred souls developed. At its heart and representative of its spirit are the Kelloggs.
 
Assembled by Bell, Northeast’s catalogue, A Product of Passion: The American Folk Art Collection of Helen & Steven Kellogg, is a colorful record of the country Americana collecting movement. With contributions by Bell; the actress Helen Hunt, a Kellogg family friend; the dealer Stephen Score; the collectors Charles Santore, R. Scudder Smith and Joan Johnson; the scholar Elisabeth Garrett Widmer; and Steven Kellogg himself, it documents the couple’s personal journey while honoring an era when enthusiasm ran high and buyers were altogether less cynical and more daring in their tastes than they are now.
 
Stephen Score shares the Kelloggs’ soulful rapport with folk art. One recent afternoon, the Boston dealer offered his recollections of times spent with the collectors, who a decade ago moved from Connecticut to Steven Kellogg’s boyhood home of Essex, N.Y.
 
“Working with them was so natural it was like breathing in and out. They made interesting choices. They didn’t want generic portraits of children. They wanted to live with children who had interior lives, who were quirky and charming and expressive. Some of this goes to Steven, who because of his work had a ready-built preference for simplified line and shape, color and the expression of real spirit in an economical way,” said Score.
 
“Helen has a very referential intelligence and was able to discern an artist’s development over time. One time in Boston, we spent the evening on the floor looking at watercolors upside down. She was trying to tease out the characteristics of the noses, eyes and mouths and did not want to be prejudiced by the constellation of the other facial elements. She is a contrarian, willing and eager to challenge conventions to get to the truth.”
 
Score concluded, “The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time when things were coming out of the woodwork with dazzling speed and regularity. You might find a great watercolor. Then you would trip over some fabulous piece of furniture. With the freshness and excitement came a kind of generosity. The Kelloggs were open and sharing. Everyone liked them and enjoyed working with them.”
 
Over the years, the Kelloggs donated a few pieces and sold others when they moved. For the most part, the collection is intact, says Bell.
 
Arrayed here are a few of the highlights:

  • Lot 567 – Purchased from Wayne Pratt, this 66 inch tall carousel figure of a giraffe is attributed to Daniel Muller of the Dentzel Company in Philadelphia. In wonderful old paint, it is estimated at $50/70,000.

  • Lot 572 – Illustrated on its top with game boards and its underside with kittens climbing a tree, this early 19th century chair table with late 19th century painted decoration passed from dealer Bill Samaha to collector Virginia Cave, who auctioned it for $21,850 at her landmark sale at Northeast in 2000. It is presently estimated at $20/25,000.

  • Lot 512 – Helen Kellogg identified the husband and wife painters Samuel Addison Shute and Ruth Whittier Shute in research published in 1978. Only a handful of signed Shutes are known. This unsigned double portrait on paper came from Stephen Score and is estimated at $20/25,000.

  • Lot 642 – Joel and Kate Kopp chose this mid-19th century chenille shirred pictorial rug for their 1985 book, American Hooked and Sewn Rugs: Folk Art Underfoot. The Kelloggs purchased it from the dealer-collector Allan Daniel. It is expected to bring between $10,000 and $15,000.

  • Lot 503 - This 19th century blanket chest is grain painted and embellished with crisp architectural details. It brought $8,000 at the Miele sale in 1984 and $14,950 at the Feldman auction in 1998. It is currently estimated at $15/20,000.

  • Lot 544 - This great writing-arm Windsor chair with two drawers is branded with the name of its maker, E.B. Tracy of Lisbon, Ct. Illustrated in Charles Santore’s book, The Windsor Style: Volume II, it is estimated at $8/12,000.
 
The Kellogg collection may be viewed at Northeast Auctions in Portsmouth, N.H., between July 25 and 30. The public preview begins on August 5 in Manchester, N.H., prior to the sale.
 
Write to Laura Beach at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Tuesday, 12 July 2011 01:20

Talk about a "rogues" gallery.

Two Manhattan art dealers -- including the former longtime president of the prestigious Knoedler Gallery -- have been accused of selling forged paintings, and concocting phony stories about their origins, by a group that authenticates the artwork of famed abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell.

Explosive court papers allege that Ann Freedman -- who left Knoedler amid questions about the paintings' authenticity -- and Julian Weissman, a former Knoedler salesman, claimed the works came from "secret" and "private" collections, with one supposedly owned by a Kuwaiti princess and another "acquired directly from Motherwell."

But the Dedalus Foundation, which was established by Motherwell before his death, says that the paintings all appear to be forgeries, with one board member calling them "laughable fakes."
It also says Freedman and Weissman may have sold phony paintings purportedly by other famous modern artists, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

The foundation charges that Freedman and Weissman got seven forged Motherwells from a Long Island woman, Glafira Rosales, whose "husband or partner," José Carlos Bergantinos Diaz, has "been accused publicly, as far back as 1999, of allegedly trafficking in forgeries."

Tuesday, 12 July 2011 01:01

Two French men, both Jewish, both powerful, both wealthy, both part of the art elite, both with strong ties to the United States, one a friend of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, the other a potential rival – and both in trouble with the law, in America and in France.  It’s enough to wag even the most apathetic of tongues, and it is, especially in Paris, where some claim both cases smack of anti-Semitism and political conspiracy, while others call it a cautionary tale about the arrogance of power.

This past week, while Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, celebrated the near-collapse of the case against him for alleged rape of a chambermaid at New York’s Sofitel hotel, Guy Wildenstein, scion of the Wildenstein art dynasty, was charged with possession of stolen property and fraud. For Wildenstein, the charges are the latest in a series of criminal investigations and lawsuits that have followed him over the past six years, in which numerous works of art have been seized from the family holdings, which some estimate to be worth $4-5 billion, and possibly even more. Both Strauss-Kahn, or DSK, as he is known, and Wildenstein are Jewish.  Both have homes in the USA and Paris.  But where Strauss-Kahn was a strong contender to oppose Sarkozy in the 2012 French Presidential elections, Wildenstein is a close friend of Sarkozy and a founding member of his political party, the UMP.

The Intrigue: Art Power Meets Political Power Meets Billionaire Wealth

But the connections don’t stop there.  DSK’s wife, the American-born journalist Anne Sinclair, is also the granddaughter of legendary Paris art dealer Paul Rosenberg, who – back in the day — worked closely with Wildenstein’s own grandfather, Georges.  (The Wildenstein art dynasty extends back five generations with the founding of  the Wildenstein Gallery in Paris  in the 1870s.) The two galleries – Rosenberg and Wildenstein – were among the world’s most powerful during the early-to-mid 20th-century, and together represented the works of Pablo Picasso.  Sinclair’s art collection, inherited from her mother, is to some extent shrouded in secrecy; and while the contents of the collection are not entirely known, ArtInfo.com estimates its worth at “tens of millions of euros.” (In truth, it may well be worth significantly more than that, given the number of Picasso works alone – possibly reaching into the billions, or near it.)

Now, here’s where the story gets tricky.  ArtInfo also reports that “Much of Paul Rosenberg’s collection was looted by the Nazis, and, though the family has obtained restitution for several works, it is thought that many more have not been returned to their rightful owners.”  Match this with the fact that, along with the lawsuits and criminal investigations plaguing Wildenstein, some Jewish families allege that the Wildensteins – though Jewish themselves – cooperated with Nazi officials from time to time.  And many of the lawsuits against Guy Wildenstein have been filed by the families and descendants of  French Jews,  who contend that works left in the care of the Wildenstein family for safekeeping during WWII still remain in the Wildenstein vaults.  In January of this year, French police raided the Wildenstein Institute in Paris, seizing various works by Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, and others, which Jewish families  and others claim were stolen (or at least, should have been returned to them, and were not).    Were any of these works once in the Rosenberg collection? Are they part of what should have been Sinclair’s inheritance?

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