February 12, 2010

Delayed Grants from Rothschild Foundation Start to Come Through

The Judith Rothschild Foundation has paid at least some of the grant money that it had neglected to award to seventeen arts groups last year, according to one recipient, according to the New York Times. “I’m glad I got it because it pays for the catalogue and some printing costs,” said Natalie Edgar, the director of the Philip Pavia Trust in New York, which had been awarded seven thousand dollars toward a book about the works of Pavia, a sculptor.

Edgar was among those who had filed complaints with the New York State attorney general’s office after failing to receive their grant money last year.

Wendy Snyder, director of the Sam Glankoff Collection in New York, said she had also received the ten thousand dollars she had been promised toward the conservation of works on paper by Glankoff, a painter. Edgar said she had received, along with the check, a handwritten note from Harvey S. Shipley Miller, the foundation’s sole trustee, apologizing for the delay. Miller said in January that he had been unable to pay the grants because he had suffered a serious accident. Efforts to reach Miller on Tuesday were unsuccessful; his home number was out of service. His attorney, Erik Stapper, did not respond to messages left at his office.

The foundation was established fifteen years ago under the terms of the will of the abstract painter Judith Rothschild—who died in 1993—in part to encourage interest in underrecognized American painters, sculptors, and photographers who died from 1976 to 2008 (fifteen years before the date of her will and fifteen years after her death).

February 12, 2010

Court Orders Getty Museum to Return Bronze

An Italian judge ruled yesterday that the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles must hand over a rare bronze statue, Victorious Youth, that has been at the heart of a four-decade-long dispute, according to the New York Times.

Judge Lorena Mussoni decreed that the statue—found by Italian fishermen in the Adriatic in 1964 and bought by the Getty in 1977 for just under four million dollars—must be “confiscated from the museum” and transferred immediately to the Italian government, which the ruling identified as its rightful owner.

Maurizio Fiorilli, a lawyer for the government, praised the decision, which he said was a confirmation that the Getty “had not acted in good faith when they bought the statue.” The Italian justice ministry must now make a formal request to American authorities to execute the court order.

The second- or third-century BCE sculpture of an athlete, best known as the Getty Bronze, was excluded from a 2007 agreement between Italy and the Getty for the return of forty artifacts that Italy said had been looted, pending the court decision. The Italian culture ministry said on Thursday that it hoped the Getty would now review that accord and that it would return the statue “in light of this ruling.”

In a statement the Getty expressed its disappointment in the ruling and said the court order was “flawed both procedurally and substantively.”

February 12, 2010

In Art Photos, Uzbek Officials See Slander

How can a photographer defame her country? Uzbekistan tried to answer that question this week in a slander trial that harked back to the days of Soviet censorship, writes the New York Times.

Umida Akhmedova, a photographer and documentary filmmaker, was found guilty on Wednesday of slandering and insulting the Uzbek people. Though the charges carried a prison sentence of up to three years, the judge waived the penalties, saying that Akhmedova had been granted an amnesty in honor of the eighteenth anniversary of Uzbek independence.

After the verdict, Akhmedova said she had been so deeply shaken by the prosecution that, even as she walked away free, it was difficult to feel relief.

“I can’t say my anxiety has subsided, I can’t say I’m suddenly OK,” she said. “There was a fear of going to prison. But to tell you the truth, I feel insulted, that’s the main thing. I still don’t understand how my creative work could have brought me to this courtroom.” Akhmedova said she intended to appeal the conviction.

At issue are Women and Men: From Dawn to Dusk, a book published in 2007, and The Burden of Virginity, a documentary film released the following year. An analysis written by six government experts declares that the film, which explores the tradition of checking a new bride’s virginity, is “not in line with the requirements of ideology.” In an exhaustive criminal complaint, prosecutors argued that Akhmedova’s photographs intentionally showed Uzbek village life in an unflattering light, as in one photograph that shows a young boy lying on the mud floor of a spare-looking house.

The charges prompted widespread protest among fellow photographers, who circulated petitions in Akhmedova’s defense and have organized exhibits of her work in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, and the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. Daniil Kislov, editor in chief of the website ferghana.ru, which has followed the case avidly, said he believed that the publicity prompted the authorities to grant Akhmedova amnesty on Wednesday.

“The authorities want to show a rosy-cheeked face, a beautiful face, as if the wise rulers rule so well that nothing will ever happen,” he said. “And 99 percent of artists are afraid to get involved in anything problematic.”

February 12, 2010

Museum of Contemporary Art Denver Names New Associate Curator

Nora Burnett Adams, who has served as an adjunct curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver since August, has been named to the newly created position of associate curator, notes the Denver Post.

Adams, thirty-two, will work under director Adam Lerner, who will continue to serve as the museum’s chief curator. She is currently at work on two upcoming solo exhibitions: Isca Greenfield-Sanders in the fall and Dario Robleto in winter 2011.

The New York native, who is completing the dissertation for her doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, was a curatorial and exhibition assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2004–2006 and a one-year intern at the Museum of Modern Art before that.

February 11, 2010

Francesco Bonami Joins French Legion of Honor

Curator Francesco Bonami has been named a member of the French Legion of Honor. Bonami was born in Florence in 1955 and has been a US citizen since 2001. He was the first US citizen to be appointed the director of the International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, in 2003, at which he curated “Dreams & Conflicts,” and he is currently a curator, along with Gary Carrion-Murayari, of the 2010 Whitney Biennial, which opens February 25. From 1999 to 2008, he was senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; he has served, since 1995, as artistic director of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin and also as artistic director, since 1997, of Pitti Immagine Discovery in Florence. The French Legion of Honor, an order founded by Napoleon in 1802 and headed by the nation’s president, is France’s highest recognition. Each year, the Legion admits a small number of foreign citizens in recognition of their achievement in letters and the arts.

February 11, 2010

Success for Sotheby’s Lenz Sale

On Wednesday evening, Sotheby’s made history for the second week running, this time with contemporary art, writes Souren Melikian for the New York Times.

In a two-hour session conducted by Tobias Meyer, the auction house’s worldwide head of contemporary art, seventy-four of the seventy-seven lots offered sold for £54.07 million, or about $84.5 million. While greater totals have been recorded in the past, a contemporary art sale with a 96 percent success rate is an unheard-of occurrence.

Sotheby’s luck was to have secured large holdings from the collection built up over the past fifty years by Gerhard and Anna Lenz. The German couple was involved with the Zero avant-garde art movement almost from its beginnings. This gave the cachet of history to forty-nine paintings, drawings, and low-relief panels made up from a variety of media.

From the moment “go,” bidders jumped in with a determination never witnessed before in a contemporary art sale. The session opened with rows of aluminum strips hung on a panel signed by Heinz Mack in 1961. Mack was a friend of the French painter Yves Klein, whose influence on the emergence of Zero was decisive. Estimated to be worth £25,000 ($39,000) to £35,000 ($55,000) plus the 25 percent sale charge, the Untitled (Lamellen Relief) panel ended up at £205,250 ($322,000).

Next came a very different work, Rauchbild (Smoke Picture), painted by Otto Piene, also in 1961. That went up to £223,250 ($350,000). However, when the third lot signed by Günther Uecker in 1964 rose to £825,250 ($1.3 million), establishing a third auction record in a row, it became clear that the entire movement was causing wild excitement, regardless of style and medium. Of the forty-nine works from the Lenz collection all but one sold, mostly multiplying their high estimates many times over. The sale ended with nineteen world auction records.

February 11, 2010

Alexander McQueen (1969–2010)

Alexander McQueen, the British fashion designer known for some of the most controversial collections of the past two decades, was found dead Thursday morning at his apartment in London, said Ed Filipowski, a partner in the public-relations firm KCD.

The New York Times’s Eric Wilson reports that the cause was apparently suicide, though Filipowski said McQueen’s family had not yet made a statement.

Though he apprenticed on Savile Row, McQueen, who was forty, thumbed his nose at the conventions of English style by staging often lavish runway productions that included clothes made with animal bones, and models made to look as if they were patients in a mental ward or participants in a life-size chess match. Yet he was a tailor of the highest order, making impeccably shaped suits that were also surprisingly commercial.

But McQueen’s troubled personal life was often the subject of concern among his colleagues and close friends. He was deeply affected when Isabella Blow, the eccentric stylist who discovered and championed the designer, committed suicide in 2007, and he was said to be devastated by the death of his mother on February 2.

February 11, 2010

LA MoCA Announces Acquisition of More than Fifty Artworks

The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art said Wednesday that in 2009 it acquired more than fifty “significant” artworks in a range of media, including paintings, sculptures, video, multimedia installations, drawings, and photographs, reports the Los Angeles Times. The museum said the works were added to its collection through gifts and purchases.

Among the major acquisitions were Bruce Nauman’s Setting a Good Corner (Allegory & Metaphor), 1999, a video work that came from Alan S. Hergott and Curt Shepard; Jennifer Pastor’s Christmas Flood, 1994, a sculpture from Eileen and Michael Cohen; and Mike Kelley’s drawing Untitled (From a Little Girl’s Room), 1980, which was one of three gifts from Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo.

The museum said it added some new names to its collection, including artists David Altmejd, Mark Dion, Máximo González, Mary Kelly, Karen Kilimnik, Lara Schnitger, and Andreas Siekmann.

Some of the museum’s recent acquisitions are currently on view in the exhibition “Collection: MoCA’s First Thirty Years.” They include Altmejd’s The Egg, 2006, and Paul McCarthy’s Tokyo Santa, Santa’s Trees, 1996/99.

In addition, MoCA said it has deepened its holdings of works by Los Angeles–based artists, including McCarthy, Pastor, Lisa Lapinski, and Jason Rhoades.

Other recent acquisitions include Dion’s large-scale installation When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (Toys ‘R’ US), 1994, a gift of Per Skarstedt; González’s ¿Dónde se han ido las flores?, 2006, a gift of Dirk Denison; and Schnitger’s sculpture Going Topside, 2009, which the museum said was purchased with funds provided by Andre Sakhai.

February 11, 2010

Major Polaroid Collection Hits the Auction Block

A large collection of Polaroids brought together by Polaroid’s founder, Edwin H. Land, going on the auction block, reports the New York Times. The collection includes shots by Andy Warhol, Ansel Adams, and Chuck Close.

The company that Land started in 1937 became a victim of the digital age, going bust first in 2001 and again in 2008. The second time, after it was bought by Petters Group Worldwide, Polaroid was caught up in a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme run by the company’s founder, a Minnesota businessman named Tom Petters, who was convicted in December of fraud and money laundering, among other charges.

To pay off creditors, a bankruptcy court in Minnesota is forcing Polaroid to sell a portion of its collection at Sotheby’s in New York on June 21 and 22. On offer will be four hundred photographs by Ansel Adams alone, along with prints by Close, Wegman, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, Robert Frank, Robert Mapplethorpe, Warhol, and Lucas Samaras. Together the twelve hundred objects are expected to fetch $7.5 million to $11.5 million.

“It’s an amazing body of work,” Close said in a telephone interview. “There’s really nothing like it in the history of photography.” But, he added, “to sell it is criminal.”

While he and other artists would have liked the collection kept intact in a museum’s holdings, John R. Stoebner, the court-appointed trustee for Polaroid, said he had talks with several museums, including the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, but was never able to reach a deal.

The collection has its roots in the Artist Support Program, a project Land started after realizing how important artists’ input was in improving his products. It was a handy arrangement, the collection’s longtime curator, Barbara Hitchcock, explained: Polaroid provided some of the greatest talents around with equipment and film, and they gave the company photographs. “Experimentation was encouraged by Polaroid,” Hitchcock added. “It was a mantra—experimentation, creativity, innovation, pushing the envelope of photography.”

Rauschenberg, for instance, used bleach to make his large Polaroid 1990s prints Bleacher Series: Japanese Sky and Bleacher Series: North Carolina, both of which are included in the sale. He turned to the chemical after some black-and-white photos faded in the sun when he left them to dry.

As the years went by, the company amassed thousands of examples of work by Rauschenberg and other celebrated artists, many of whom relied on Polaroid’s twenty-by-twenty-four-inch camera. Hitchcock recalls Warhol, in particular, as a Polaroid nut who frequently used the camera and film at the Factory, his studio. Land collected conventionally made prints, too, believing that showing them alongside Polaroids would illustrate his products’ high quality.

For six days before the auction, Sotheby’s plans to put the images on public view in an exhibition expected to take up its entire York Avenue headquarters. This is likely to be the first and last time the cream of Polaroid’s collection will be seen together.