Mastering the Old Master Market

In making her case of for the renewed importance of Old Master painting, Susan Moore makes some curious mistakes like suggesting the US National Gallery’s Ter Brugghen sold for $10m was sign of demand rather than a sign of the National Gallery’s determination to win its painting back from a restitution claim. In a bigger slip, Moore then counts the sale of the same painting from the auction winner back to the US National Gallery as another example of the “hot” Old Master market.

No matter. All of this interest in Old Master painting is merely a preface to a great preview of the wares on offer at TEFAF Maastricht which opens later this week:

TEFAF Maastricht is, of course, the most important fair in the world for Old Masters: paintings, drawings and prints. Its 75 or so specialist dealers in this field – from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain and the US as well as the UK – present an unrivalled shop-window to the world’s collectors and curators, major and minor. Konrad Bernheimer, chairman of the fair’s pictura, or fine art section, describes the mood among his fellow dealers as “quietly confident”. He believes that more and more collectors are turning to Old Masters from classical modern and contemporary art, not least because it is one area of the market which is showing stability. He is tempting this year’s visitors with the likes of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s impressive “David and Bathsheba” of 1534, and a rare religious painting by Frans Hals, a “St Mark” from a set of Four Evangelists which had originally belonged to Catherine the Great. Both are priced between €5m and €6m.

Old Masters remain unscathed by the downturn (Financial Times)

Contemporarabia

The Gulf States get coordinated in their approach to art. Jan Dalley looks at the preparations that went into making the event that begins next weekend:

It opens in Doha with events centred around Qatar’s proud new Museum of Islamic Art, the IM Pei-designed building that is a sort of beacon in the area – for all the column inches, hype and furious PR effort devoted to successive announcements about Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island (with its Louvre and Guggenheim and all the rest) and Dubai’s own ambitious plans, the MIA in Doha is the only one that is in existence, filled with treasures, and open to the public.

From Doha, where one discussion topic is “Creating Spaces, Creating Audiences”, a pertinent question in a region that is busy building museums yet has no tradition of exhibition-gazing or gallery-going, Contemparabia’s caravan moves on to Dubai and Sharjah. Tate Britain’s orientalist exhibition Lure of the East is a prominent visitor on show; Sharjah’s biennale is set in its own romantic location, and for the discussion groups in Dubai beachside tents make a wonderful setting. Cultural identity and heritage, the role of the public and private sectors, cities as cultural destinations are among the topics covered.

United Front Bridges the Gulf (Financial Times)

Doing Dubai

Susan Moore charts the rise of Emirati art in five short years:

According to Hassan Sharif, the British-trained “father” of conceptual art in the Emirates, it was the 2003 Sharjah Biennial that “changed the artistic landscape of the UAE”. That year the directorship of the show was taken over by Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi, the daughter of the Ruler of Sharjah, who had studied at London’s Royal College of Art. With the help of curator Peter Lewis, she set a new agenda, not only by bringing in artists from all over the world but new media too – video, installation, digital and performance art – and organised a symposium focusing on globalisation and these new practices.

Christie’s went on to stage its first high-profile auction of international modern and contemporary art in Dubai in 2006, and the first editions of the UAE’s two thriving international art fairs, Art Dubai and ArtParis Abu Dhabi, followed in 2007 (this year’s Art Dubai, March 18-21, coincides with the Sharjah Biennial). Bonhams staged its inaugural Dubai auction last year, and Phillips de Pury has announced its plans for auctions later this year. All these events offer a showcase to established and emerging talent in the region alongside Western – and Asian – art and all have the support of the various UAE governments that are investing large sums in building museums and promoting culture in the region.

The Rapid Emergence of Emirati Art (Financial Times)

The Half-Year of Living Dangerously

The FT’s Patricia Chen on Southeast Asian, especially Indonesian, art’s surprising strength:

Yet for some reason, south-east Asian art did not seem as badly affected as its counterparts in other parts of Asia. While prices for other categories plunged, average prices of contemporary art in south-east Asia slid by only about 20 per cent from their height.

Auction houses argue that the south-east Asian art market is intrinsically different from others. The buying and selling of artworks has been the preserve of a coterie of savvy, passionate and well-heeled art-lovers from Indonesia, and Indonesian works account for 80 per cent of auction volume.

Having weathered many financial crises, the Indonesians are said to have learnt to “crisis-insulate” themselves by remaining fairly liquid. The telling sign is that prized works have not left their collections, yet.

Dark Days, High Hopes (Financial Times)

And Getting Your Affairs in Order

Hard on the heels of the spectacular event at Sotheby’s this week where thousands showed up to view the Valmadonna Trust library–and dozens of those viewers stopped by to thank and congratulate Jack Lunzer, the collector who assembled the trove–comes this story from Ireland. The octogenarian Lunzer’s sale was an attempt to see his great work find a safe home before his frailty catches up with him. Anne Bullitt was not a distinguished collector. She is the only daughter of William Bullitt and Lousie Bryant. He was a US Ambassador to the Soviet Union and France; she the radical made famous in Warren Beatty’s “Reds.”

Anne Bullitt lived in Ireland for 40 years and was a successful horse breeder. But as that business wound down and her health began to fail, her estate, including the contents of her home among which are a Picasso painting, a Ming vase and a pair of pistols given to Lafayette by George Washington. These items are now part of a dispute in the Irish courts. The Irish Times summarizes the cause:

[W]hen her financial advisers came to see her, they had to read out documents, he said. By 1997, she was living in three rooms in the stately home and her bedroom was only ever lit by artificial light, Mr Shipsey added. However, Ms Bullitt was “an independent and determined lady”. She had decided to sell Palmerstown House and discussions took place between her advisers and a number of interested parties.

One of those was a developer who offered IR£8.2 million for the house and estate, counsel said. However, about the same time, the advisers became aware Ms Bullitt, who was 75 and in poor health, had agreed to sell for IR£10 million to Mr Mansfield. This caused “a degree of consternation” with her advisers who had already orally agreed a deal with the first developer, counsel said. [ . . . ] The court would hear evidence that Ms Bullitt’s advisers became concerned about her ability to manage her affairs and they asked that she be made a ward of court. They arranged for a psychiatrist to visit her in July 1998 but to say she was unco-operative was “an understatement”, Mr Shipsey said. The psychiatrist’s interview was “terminated in a very peremptory manner” and in 2000, the president of the High Court made her a ward of court.

Estate of US Socialite Disputed in High Court (The Irish Times)

Roberta Smith shows art dealers some love in her review of The Art Show at the Park Avenue:

In boom times art dealers tend to get demonized on the way up and the way down. They deserve it, some people say. But the art world’s zealously tended hierarchy — artists on top, art dealers at the bottom — has never been right.

Art dealers put their money where their vision is; only artists take greater risks. They help artists do what we all hope to do: make a living at something they love. If the nonartists in the realm of art achieve this state — and some of us are privileged to do so — it is partly because of the strange, tenuous, sometimes infuriating world that art dealers help construct, one day, artist or artwork at a time. [. . . ]

Razzle-dazzle spectacle, stampeding collectors and buy-it-now pressure-cooking has never been the Art Show’s style; neither has aisle upon aisle of booths stretching as far as the eye can see. But the times may be catching up with it.

The Art Show was founded in 1989. This year’s version has, as usual, just 70 participants. It serves as a reminder that the boom-time art world was only a portion of a much larger, less volatile sphere. The vast majority of artists in this sphere never saw their work go to auction, much less fetch stratospheric prices there. Their boats may have floated a little higher, but they weren’t swamped in dough. Most of the dealers did not have month after month of sell-out shows, nor were their rosters teeming with freshly minted M.F.A.’s.

This fair is loaded with work that you will be grateful to see. There’s little grandstanding and few works that reach out and grab you by the neck.

Rewards and Clarity in a Show of Restraint (New York Times)

Holland Cotter puts Piero Manzoni in context:

He was born into an aristocratic family; his full name was Count Meroni Manzoni de Chiosca e Poggiolo. He had an early interest in art but bowing to parental wishes ended up in law school, where he did not thrive. A switch to studying literature and philosophy helped, but not enough to keep him in school. He had prodigious energy. He couldn’t sit still. So around 1955 he turned to making art and taught himself what he needed to know.

The times were right for his adventurous disposition. Cold war Europe was a shifting, uneasy place, traumatized by the past, giddy with new prosperity. Everyone was consuming like mad by day and having nightmares about nuclear bombs at night.

Two different styles of abstract painting reflected the tense atmosphere.

Art informel, the European version of Abstract Expression, was all about that, all about the anguished ego and so on. By contrast geometric abstraction, with roots in Malevich and Mondrian, was about being above it all, about utopia. Manzoni, who was coming to all this from outside the art establishment, had little patience for either position and tried to shake them up.

He made gestural pictures but with gooey tar instead of paint, so they’re not soulful, they’re gross. As for geometric abstraction, he covered canvases with coats of gesso and left them like that, primed, but that’s all. They look blank, as if waiting for a real painter to show up.

He was one of many artists worldwide bent on bumping off art as they’d known it. Lucio Fontana, a hugely influential senior figure, was slashing paintings with knives. Alberto Burri, trained as a doctor, was painting with a blowtorch. In Japan, Yayoi Kusama filled canvases with obsessive dot patterns that left surfaces looking like scar tissue.

Yves Klein, from France, was more hands off. He made production-line art: same-size abstract paintings, all in one brand-name color. And in the United States, as early as 1951, Robert Rauschenberg had done all-white paintings, the only inflections being shadows accidentally cast on the surface.

To Bump Off Art as He Knew It (New York Times)

Elizabeth Eaves confronts to the now-fashionable idea that a crash is good for the arts. In nice piece of reasoning published on Forbes.com, Eaves tackles the notions haunting both the book business and the art world that a return to more modest times will produce great art and literature:

I understand why some artists and writers resist identifying too closely with money. Creative careers tend to be vocations. If you start valuing what you do in, say, dollar-an-hour terms, the result can be terrifying. And the more you let your ego inflate based on a huge sale, the more emotional fallout there will be in that year you don’t sell anything.

Still, money draining out of circulation is bad for the arts and for artists. In the U.S., creative endeavors are often funded by nonprofits. Those organizations’ donors are now disappearing. Would-be art buyers are also struggling, in some cases trying to sell off collections. [ . . . ]

Yet even as the market value of individual works goes down, it’s likely that more–not fewer–people will now seek to become auteurs. That’s because with massive layoffs in more lucrative fields, the opportunity cost of taking a shot at painting or book-writing has just disappeared. [ . . . ]

In The New York Times in January, Holland Cotter observed that financial struggles at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles weren’t the result of “the economic downturn so much as stupidity.”

The museum hadn’t–oops–socked any money away when times were good. Luckily, and unlike other struggling U.S. museums, it received a $30 million bailout from billionaire art collector Eli Broad. A self-made man, he keeps artists in business by paying attention to the bottom line. Money is good for the arts, but until it returns, we can at least be grateful for decent accounting.

Art and Literature, Meet Accounting (Forbes)

Art & Porn

Ken Johnson’s review of Mel Ramos show in the New York Times is the jumping off point for a riff on the recent history of the intersection of pornography and art. After leading us from Ramos, the Wesselmann to Mapplethorpe and Salle to Koons to Yuskavage and Currin, Johnson get’s his porn on:

So-called pornographic imagery is ubiquitous in art today. Hilary Harkness’s lesbian S&M narratives, drawn and painted with old-masterly refinement; the photographer Thomas Ruff’s pixelated pornographic imagery, downloaded from the Internet; Mr. Currin’s own recent X-rated paintings. A recent exhibition of montages by Richard Prince featured much-enlarged images of naked women from trashy vintage pornography and fragments of de Kooning paintings and drawings of women.

The fault line running through all this involves the question of the “proper” use of sexual imagery in art. Do we ever allow it as an end in itself, or must it always be redeemed by some aesthetic, social, moral or ironic purpose? Can pornography be high art? Indian and Japanese artists raised it to that level in pre-modern times; literature is loaded with great erotica, from the Marquis de Sade to “The Story of O.”

In the midst of all of this, Johnson seems not to have noticed that Ramos’s ladies are changing shape, reflecting perhaps a more age-appropriate eroticism for the artist.

The Image is Erotic. But Is It Art? (The New York Times)

The Jewish Question

Jackie Wullschlager looks at the idea of Jewish art in the Financial Times:

Yet there are now Jewish museums in every western capital – London’s Ben Uri is campaigning this year for central premises to house its extensive, distinguished but never-shown collection of Jewish art – and the question nags on. The art historian Ernst Gombrich’s lofty reply, that the loudest claimant for a uniquely Jewish art was Hitler, and that separatist thinking leads at best to marginalisation, carries less conviction in today’s culture of minorities and migrations than it did in the assimilationist postwar era. Exile, diaspora, transit, divided identity – if these themes define the Jewish experience, we are all Jews now in the mercantile, transient, global, self-inventing 21st century. That makes Jewish art doubly relevant: distinctive and universal.

Is There Such a Thing as Jewish Art? (Financial Times)

The Bad Germans Were Good

Jori Finkel looks at the opening of LACMA’s “The Art of Two Germanys” opening today:

It’s easy to assume that art produced in East Germany between World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall was all safe, predictable, state-sanctioned propaganda depicting heroic workers in Socialist Realist scenarios. But this exhibition introduces East German artists who explored some of the same fraught political, social and aesthetic issues as their better-known counterparts in West Germany, like Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth and Jörg Immendorff.

Don’t miss the interactive graphic giving a close reading to Lutz Dammbeck’s “Nibelungen.”

When Worlds Collide in a Single Face (The New York Times)

Lost Horizons

The Wall Street Journal’s travel section finds the “lost” city of Bagan in Myanmar:

In the late 13th century, the mighty Mongol emperor Kublai Khan rode onto this sprawling plain dotted with thousands of brick pagodas. Soon after, the Mongol hordes came crashing down, and more than 200 years of artistic flowering, akin to Europe’s Renaissance, was snuffed out almost overnight.

Time has stood still since then — or so it can seem to modern-day visitors to the ancient city of Bagan, the center of a Buddhist empire that once stretched across a large swath of modern Southeast Asia. What remains of ancient Bagan are a few humble villages interspersed among some 2,500 Buddhist pagodas and temples, making the Bagan Archaeological Park one of the richest, and surely one of the least-visited, artistic treasure troves on earth.

Asia’s Lost Treasure Trove (Wall Street Journal)

The Street Speaks

The New York Times looks at the changing status of museums to street artists like Shepard Fairey now that his work has been included in the National Portrait Gallery:

The Tate Modern in London devoted a big show to street art last year, letting artists plaster its facade with the kind of work usually plastered illicitly all around its Southwark neighborhood. Other big street names are also starting to pop up in museum collections, like Swoon, whose ghostly, papery work has been bought by the Museum of Modern Art.

But the Shepard Fairey moment may be less significant for what it says about how museums view street artists than for how those artists have come to view museums — how for many younger artists, street and otherwise, museum enshrinement no longer represents the kind of end zone it did for many who came before, even those like Keith Haring who began with street art and deep misgivings about the establishment.

Outlaws in the Art Museum (and Not for a Heist) (The New York Times)

No Autocrat for the Arts

David A. Smith critiques the assumption that a cabinet-level bureaucrat for the arts will improve the situation for the Arts in America:

The primary false assumption at play here is that more centralization is the best way for the government to address a problem and signify its importance. Accompanying this is the belief, stretching back to the Progressive Era early in the 20th century, that efficiency and better advocacy flow from such centralization.

Many will say (often in a testy voice) that the arts deserve a cabinet-level presence because they are just as important to the country as the Defense Department. While that’s something of an apples and oranges comparison, the deeper problem is that it assumes that the country’s defense and its arts can be furthered via the same sort of bureaucratic means. But while our nation’s defense would collapse in the absence of the centralized power of our Defense Department, having a Department of Culture — or even a “Cultural Czar,” to use that awful label we’ve apparently become so fond of — would be neither an effective nor necessary way to guarantee the health of cultural expression in America.

An Old, Bad Idea for the Arts (Wall Street Journal)

Dale Buss takes the WSJ Masterpiece column to Wisconsin and Frank Lloyd Wright’s famed S.C. Johnson headquarters, a building Kenneth Frampton called “not only the greatest piece of twentieth-century architecture realized in the United States to date but also, possibly, the most profound work of art that America has ever produced.”

Inside what is still S.C. Johnson & Son Inc.’s headquarters, the irrepressible Wright created an artificial forest that evokes the real ones where he placed structures such as his own home, Taliesin, about three hours away in the Wisconsin woods, and Wingspread, the house nearby that he designed for Johnson. Thus the three-story administration building features a half-acre Great Workroom for clerical employees that is distinguished by an arboreal canopy created by a grid of “dendriform” columns and interspersed skylights. The resulting openness must seem even more refreshing today — in contrast to the tight, sterile spaces of Cubicle Nation — than when the building was completed in 1939. Guided tours are open to the public.

Actually, the new headquarters began a form of architectural husbandry that S.C. Johnson continues to this day. In 1950, the company opened next door a 14-story, cantilevered research tower also designed by Wright (but mothballed in 1982 when it didn’t meet new fire-safety codes). Its visitor center is built around the clamshell-shaped Golden Rondelle theater, an IMAX predecessor that was a sensation as Johnson Wax’s exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York — and now gleams incongruously, like some vestige of “The Jetsons,” despite the fact that Wright’s school redesigned it for the spot. In 1986, Johnson Wax installed an 11-foot-diameter carbon-fiber outdoor globe — from an original design by Wright — that rotates every 24 minutes on the same axis as the Earth. And now, adjacent to all of these, the company is building Project Honor, two structures totaling 65,000 square feet that will align with the key horizon on the Wright buildings. One will display Carnauba, the aircraft flown by Chairman Emeritus Sam Johnson (since deceased) and his sons to Brazil in 1998 to retrace the expedition of his father, Herbert Johnson Jr., in search of palm wax.

Wright’s House of Wax (Wall Street Journal)

Michael Fitzgerald’s anatomy of masterpiece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal was worth the price of admission . . . and more. A close reading of the painting itself and the events surrounding the work, Fitzgerald makes a case that “Miró had labored so long on the canvas because he conceived it as a true masterpiece — a proof of his artistic achievements up to that time. In the process, it opened the path to his finest work of the later ’20s and probably the greatest of his career, paintings that share “The Farm”‘s central vision but reverse its celebration of plentitude with radically austere compositions of sparely drawn figures and saturated fields of color.”

Miró has done more than showcase his remarkable skill as a draftsman and realist. He has set his subjects in a world that tips into the profoundly unreal. In a space that should recede to distant mountains, there is hardly any difference between the very near and the very far. The hawthorn plant in the left foreground is as precisely rendered as the eucalyptus tree in the center and the horse-drawn mill on the edge of the distant woods. The house and barn flatten like cardboard cutouts instead of serving their traditional purpose of mapping three-dimensional depth. Even the square paving stones in the central foreground seem to point up to the sky rather than lead back into the illusory space of the painted world. The teaming life of Miró’s farm presses forward and nearly tumbles onto our laps.

Miróó’s Rich Harvest (Wall Street Journal)