Pop Up Exhibition on View at the Empire State Building

Klari Reis, "Temazepam", 2008. Mixed media and epoxy polymer on floating aluminum panel.
NEW YORK, NY.- The Cynthia Corbett Gallery presents "Art at the Top in association with Ronnette Riley Architect at The Empire State Building". The exhibition features PHOTOGRAPHY by Tom Leighton, Lluis Barba, Boyarde Messenger & PAINTING by Klari Reis, David Gista, Cecile Chong and Geoff Stein.

Featuring in the exhibition will be new series of work by Geoff Stein entitled "Irrational Exuberance" a series of portraits about the credit crunch. These works are acrylic and collage and feature newspaper cutting detailing the events surrounding key events over the last year. The work Madoff, includes reports from the SEC and Dept. of Justice complaints made against Bernard Madoff.

The Cynthia Corbett Gallery, an international contemporary art gallery, represents emerging and newly established contemporary artists. The Cynthia Corbett Gallery is a regular exhibitor at major international contemporary art fairs. The Cynthia Corbett Gallery has an annual program of off-site exhibitions which take place in Cork Street, Mayfair and London’s East End throughout the year. The gallery also works with a number of mid-career American, British and European artists whose works have been published and acquired by International museums and institutions. corbettPROJECTS, launched in 2004, focuses on presenting curated projects which address contemporary critical practice and works with emerging curators and artists for site specific installations. These solo and group exhibitions, which are selected by a curatorial panel lead by Director Cynthia Corbett, present an innovative programme of events in a variety of media including photography, painting, sculpture, performance art with particular emphasis placed upon emerging video art. The Cynthia Corbett Gallery also provides an art consultancy service, and works with international Advisors and Curators and well as private Collectors.

At 94, She’s the Hot New Thing in Painting

Under a skylight in her tin-ceilinged loft near Union Square in Manhattan, the abstract painter Carmen Herrera, 94, nursed a flute of Champagne last week, sitting regally in the wheelchair she resents.

After six decades of very private painting, Ms. Herrera sold her first artwork five years ago, at 89. Now, at a small ceremony in her honor, she was basking in the realization that her career had finally, undeniably, taken off. As cameras flashed, she extended long, Giacomettiesque fingers to accept an art foundation’s lifetime achievement award from the director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Her good friend, the painter Tony Bechara, raised a glass. “We have a saying in Puerto Rico,” he said. “The bus — la guagua — always comes for those who wait.”

And the Cuban-born Ms. Herrera, laughing gustily, responded, “Well, Tony, I’ve been at the bus stop for 94 years!”

Since that first sale in 2004, collectors have avidly pursued Ms. Herrera, and her radiantly ascetic paintings have entered the permanent collections of institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Tate Modern. Last year, MoMA included her in a pantheon of Latin American artists on exhibition. And this summer, during a retrospective show in England, The Observer of London called Ms. Herrera the discovery of the decade, asking, “How can we have missed these beautiful compositions?”

In a word, Ms. Herrera, a nonagenarian homebound painter with arthritis, is hot. In an era when the art world idolizes, and often richly rewards, the young and the new, she embodies a different, much rarer kind of success, that of the artist long overlooked by the market, and by history, who persevered because she had no choice.

“I do it because I have to do it; it’s a compulsion that also gives me pleasure,” she said of painting. “I never in my life had any idea of money and I thought fame was a very vulgar thing. So I just worked and waited. And at the end of my life, I’m getting a lot of recognition, to my amazement and my pleasure, actually.”

Julián Zugazagoitia, the director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, called Ms. Herrera “a quiet warrior of her art.”


“To bloom into full glory at 94 — whatever Carmen Herrera’s slow rise might say about the difficulties of being a woman artist, an immigrant artist or an artist ahead of her time, it is clearly a story of personal strength,” Mr. Zugazagoitia said.

A minimalist whose canvases are geometric distillations of form and color, Ms. Herrera has slowly come to the attention of a subset of art historians over the last decade. . Now she is increasingly considered an important figure by those who study her “remarkably monumental, iconic paintings,” said Edward J. Sullivan, a professor of art history at New York University.

“Those of us with a passion for either geometric art or Latin American Modernist painting now realize what a pivotal role” Ms. Herrera has played in “the development of geometric abstraction in the Americas,” Mr. Sullivan said.


Painting in relative solitude since the late 1930s, with only the occasional exhibition, Ms. Herrera was sustained, she said, by the unflinching support of her husband of 61 years, Jesse Loewenthal. An English teacher at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, Mr. Loewenthal was portrayed by the memoirist Frank McCourt, a colleague, as an old-world scholar in an “elegant, three-piece suit, the gold watch chain looping across his waistcoat front.”

Recognition for Ms. Herrera came a few years after her husband’s death, at 98, in 2000. “Everybody says Jesse must have orchestrated this from above,” Ms. Herrera said, shaking her head. “Yeah, right, Jesse on a cloud.” She added: “I worked really hard. Maybe it was me.”

In a series of interviews in her sparsely but artfully furnished apartment, Ms. Herrera always offered an afternoon cocktail — “Oh, don’t be abstemious!” — and an outpouring of stories about prerevolutionary Cuba, postwar Paris and the many artists she has known, from Wifredo Lam to Yves Klein to Barnett Newman.

“Ah, Wifredo,” she said, referring to Lam, the Cuban-born French painter. “All the girls were crazy about him. When we were in Havana, my phone would begin ringing: ‘Is Wifredo in town?’ I mean, come on, I wasn’t his social secretary.”

But Ms. Herrera is less expansive about her own art, discussing it with a minimalism redolent of the work. “Paintings speak for themselves,” she said. Geometry and color have been the head and the heart of her work, she added, describing a lifelong quest to pare down her paintings to their essence, like visual haiku.

Asked how she would describe to a student a painting like “Blanco y Verde” (1966) — a canvas of white interrupted by an inverted green triangle — she said, “I wouldn’t have a student.” To a sweet, inquiring child, then? “I’d give him some candy so he’d rot his teeth.”

When pressed about what looks to some like a sensual female shape in the painting, she said: “Look, to me it was white, beautiful white, and then the white was shrieking for the green, and the little triangle created a force field. People see very sexy things — dirty minds! — but to me sex is sex, and triangles are triangles.”

Born in 1915 in Havana, where her father was the founding editor of the daily newspaper El Mundo, and her mother a reporter, Ms. Herrera took art lessons as a child, attended finishing school in Paris and embarked on a Cuban university degree in architecture. In 1939, midway through her studies, she married Mr. Loewenthal and moved to New York. (They had no children.)

Although she studied at the Art Students League of New York, Ms. Herrera did not discover her artistic identity until she and her husband settled in Paris for a few years after World War II. There she joined a group of abstract artists, based at the influential Salon of New Realities, which exhibited her work along with that of Josef Albers, Jean Arp, Sonia Delaunay and others.

“I was looking for a pictorial vocabulary and I found it there,” she said. “But when we moved back to New York, this type of art” — her less-is-more formalism — “was not acceptable. Abstract Expressionism was in fashion. I couldn’t get a gallery.”

Ms. Herrera said that she also accepted, “as a handicap,” the barriers she faced as a Hispanic female artist. Beyond that, though, “her art was not easily digestible at the time,” Mr. Zugazagoitia said. “She was not doing Cuban landscapes or flowers of the tropics, the art you might have expected from a Cuban émigré who spent time in Paris. She was ahead of her time.”

Over the decades, Ms. Herrera had a solo show here and there, including a couple at museums (the Alternative Museum in 1984, El Museo del Barrio in 1998). But she never sold anything, and never needed, or aggressively sought, the affirmation of the market. “It would have been nice, but maybe corrupting,” she said.

Mr. Bechara, who befriended her in the early 1970s and is now chairman of El Museo del Barrio, said that he regularly tried to push her into the public eye, even though she “found a kind of solace in being alone.”

One day in 2004, Mr. Bechara attended a dinner with Frederico Sève, the owner of the Latin Collector Gallery in Manhattan, who was dealing with the withdrawal of an artist from a much-publicized show of female geometric painters. “Tony said to me: ‘Geometry and ladies? You need Carmen Herrera,’ ” Mr. Sève recounted. “And I said, ‘Who the hell is Carmen Herrera?’ ”

The next morning, Mr. Sève arrived at his gallery to find several paintings, just delivered, that he took to be the work of the well-known Brazilian artist Lygia Clark but were in fact by Ms. Herrera. Turning over the canvases, he saw that they predated by a decade paintings in a similar style by Ms. Clark. “Wow, wow, wow,” he recalled saying. “We got a pioneer here.”

Mr. Sève quickly called Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, a collector who has an art foundation in Miami. She bought five of Ms. Herrera’s paintings. Estrellita Brodsky, another prominent collector, bought another five. Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, also bought several, and with Mr. Bechara, donated one of Ms. Herrera’s black-and-white paintings to MoMA.

The recent exhibition in England, which is now heading to Germany, came about by happenstance after a curator stumbled across Ms. Herrera’s paintings on the Internet. Last week The Observer named that retrospective one of the year’s 10 best exhibitions, alongside a Picasso show and one devoted to the American Pop artist Ed Ruscha.

Ms. Herrera’s late-in-life success has stunned her in many ways. Her larger works now sell for $30,000, and one painting commanded $44,000 — sums unimaginable when she was, say, in her 80s. “I have more money now than I ever had in my life,” she said.

Not that she is succumbing to a life of leisure. At a long table where she peers out over East 19th Street “like a French concierge,” Ms. Herrera, because she must, continues to draw and paint. “Only my love of the straight line keeps me going,” she said. By DEBORAH SONTAG

The Collector: Benedicto Cabrera

Visitors strolling the grounds of Benedicto Cabrera's home will get a quick view of some of the Filipino painter's passions: Plants, sculpture and other remnants of the culture of the northern Luzon region pepper his four-hectare spread in Baguio.
Some recent additions to the landscape, such as the bonsai in the garden and carp in the pond, are gifts from admirers hoping to move up the long waiting list of buyers for the work of BenCab, as the famous painter is also known.
The artist's new compound, completed earlier this year, includes three contemporary-style concrete and glass structures. There's a hangar-like painting studio -- neat, yet filled with books and small random objects. Across from it is the cottage Mr. Cabrera, 67 years old, shares with his partner, Annie Sarthou. And a few steps away, his extensive collection of contemporary Filipino artworks and tribal art sits displayed in a personal museum that is open to the public. An inveterate collector, Mr. Cabrera says he no longer knows how many pieces he owns.

"With collecting you learn," says the perpetually curious artist.

Named a National Artist by the Philippine government in 2006 -- the highest recognition given to Filipinos who have made significant contributions to the development of Philippine arts -- Mr. Cabrera owns hundreds of archive-worthy antique materials on the Philippines, including maps and books and old photographs. Some have inspired his paintings, which are prized for their draftsmanship and reflections on Filipino identity. He also owns one of the largest collections of Northern Philippine tribal objects as well as hundreds of Filipino works of contemporary photography, painting and sculpture.

"I love looking at them," says Mr. Cabrera. "I find inspiration in them."

One of his most-treasured items is a small wooden model made by Arturo Luz (born in 1926) as a prototype for an outdoor sculpture that now stands in Manila. Mr. Cabrera first spied the miniature -- a modern interpretation of a tribal god called an anito -- in the early 1970s, when he visited the London home of Jaime Z[oacute]bel de Ayala, then the Philippine ambassador to the United Kingdom. Mr. Z[oacute]bel, whose family company commissioned the work, noticed Mr. Cabrera's interest in the Luz maquette and gave it to him.

Born in Manila, Mr. Cabrera trained at the fine arts department of the University of the Philippines. He moved to London in the 1970s, after meeting and marrying an Englishwoman; they had three children, now grown. He returned to his homeland in 1986, after a divorce, and settled in Baguio, a mountain retreat about a six-hour drive north of Manila.

His children, who live in Europe and the U.S., visit him once a year. They share his love for his collections and art. "The middle one, Mayumi, shifted to art now," he says. "She used to model and was taking psychology. But she has been drawing and now taking fine arts in Los Angeles."

Mr. Cabrera's own art keeps him busy. He recently had an exhibition at the Andrew Shire Gallery in Los Angeles. Some of his work is part of the Singapore Art Museum's exhibition "Thrice Upon a Time: A Century of Story in the Art of the Philippines," which runs until Jan. 31. Mr. Cabrera also is preparing for a one-man show of his drawings at his museum next year. And in June, he'll begin his second artist-in-residency at Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

Why do you have a museum as part of your home?

I want to put some of my things in a proper setting. I was inspired by some artists in Bandung [Indonesia]. But I want to display other things aside from my own work for people to admire, so I have tribal art and contemporary art.

When did you begin collecting?

I started collecting comics when I was young. When I got into the arts, I could not afford to buy books so when I used to come across articles on the arts in a magazine, I would cut it and then have it all book bound. It was a good reference. When I started to make money, in the 1960s, I was introduced to santos [statues of saints that date from the country's time as a Spanish colony, 1565-1898]....Maybe it was my affinity to sculpture that made me collect santos.

When I got married we traveled. We went to India, Kathmandu and I started collecting Oriental things like thangkas [Buddhist painted or embroidered artworks] and Buddhas. In the 1970s, when I was living in London, we started dealing in these things....We rented a stall in a flea market. This is where I met other collectors and I started concentrating on Filipiniana. Then you could get maps of the Philippines for cheap. My first map I got in Rome for a dollar. Now it is worth about 35,000 pesos ($755). It dates from 1575.

What happened to the santos?

I sold them [in the 1960s and 1970s before moving to England].

Do you miss them?

I do. I wanted to focus on maps, books and prints. I have travel books from as early as the 1630s. When I came back to live in the Philippines, I sold some of my maps to start life again....I was forced to sell because I didn't have much money. I have been attracted to Japanese ukiyo-e, woodblock prints. I started collecting and stopped....The price of the maps went up. You learn, and then you have to part with it sometimes.

How did you build a collection about the Cordilleras (the northern Philippine mountain region with tribal cultures from precolonial times)?

The postcards, photos and maps I came across in London. There were whole albums. These objects I started collecting when I was making money from my paintings, so this was in the late 1980s to early 1990s. But even before that I was already interested. I used to come across nice pieces but I could not afford them in the early days.

What attracts you to Cordillera art?

The sculptural quality and the culture that goes with it. They use [these objects] for rituals. I am also attracted to the patina. You can feel if it is old. In London I met a lot of dealers in tribal art. I was attracted to pieces from Benin and Nigeria. I said, "Filipinos also have tribal art."

Is tribal art-collecting popular in the Philippines?

Yes. There was a good collection that Imee Marcos [Ferdinand and Imelda's eldest daughter] bought. There are a number of collectors. But not everyone likes them. Some, because they are Christian, have to sell because it is considered "idolatry." But for me it is art.

What are your favorites in your collection of works by Filipino masters?

I like the Luz. And the Jos[eacute] Joya. The Cesar Legaspi. Early Lee Aguinaldo. Because of the stories behind them and because they were our first abstract paintings. They were done in the 1960s, at the height of abstract expressionism. This was when painters were painting not for buyers. At that time it was hard to sell works. Now many of our artists are [sold] at international auctions.

How did you become interested in the work of younger artists?

The pieces in my collection have some affinity to my work and what I'm interested in. Most of them are figurative. I go to exhibitions, particularly when it's their first, the works are still reasonably priced.

What attracts you aesthetically?

Skill: That is what is missing now. A lot modern art now is mostly conceptual. It is sloppy. I'm old school. I look for good composition...and I like artists who are innovative.

Name some young Filipino painters you like.

Roland Ventura is very skillful. He just draws so well. Some thought he made digital prints because his work is so fine. Elmer Borlongan paints from memory. He doesn't base it on photographs, which a lot of artists do now. Even I do it sometimes. I also like Mark Justiniani.

And photography?

I love photography. When I worked as a layout artist for [Manila's] Sunday Times magazine in the early 1960s, I got my first camera. Romy Vitug is in his 70s now. He's a cinematographer but he is very good at photography. I learned techniques from him, he learned composition from me. I like Emmanuel Santos and his narrative approach to photography. He uses a traditional film camera. I also have a collection of 60 pictures by [the late Filipino photographer] Eduardo Masferr[eacute]. He was selling them as postcards. I used to buy them for 2.50 pesos (about 13 cents) and they are original photos. Now reproduction prints are $300. He made images of the [indigenous Filipino] tribes in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Why are you purchasing some of your old paintings?

There was a time when I could not afford to keep my own work. I don't have any early work of my own. It was a struggle before, so I was able to buy a few back recently.

One you bought back was an early painting of a "Sabel," a female figure draped in rags. What does Sabel represent?

Sabel started as a symbol of the oppressed and conditions of the country where we have a lot of poor people. In the beginning, she was social commentary. I've used it to make a very Japanese style or almost abstract. It became my icon.

Why do you like plants?

In London I had very little space. With bonsai you can have many trees in one small space. You can bring it in and admire it. I train it and all that. I make the time. But now I have a forest so I don't add bonsai anymore....One collector realized I like bonsai. So he said: "I'll give you bonsai from China." He gave me 14. Wow. It's the Filipino utang na luob, where you have to return the favor. He got two paintings last year.
—Alexandra A. Seno is a writer based in Hong Kong.
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Miami Mania 2009

The long days are those that start the night before. So let’s begin in the dark, at a just-assembled picnic table on the back patio of the new "pop-up" Max Fish bar in a creepy Wynwood neighborhood rife with crackheads and whores and only a half-block away from the Ice Palace, abandoned this year by the NADA Art Fair and soon to be taken up by Helen Allen’s Pulse art fair.

Max Fish proprietor Ulli Rimkus had been lured to Miami by Al Moran, who publishes artist’s books (the latest by Don Attoe) and runs an art gallery named O.H.W.O.W. (and who himself plans to invade NYC with a bookstore at Waverly Place and East 7th Street in the Village in February 2010).

A Brooklyn artist named Krink was using old-fashioned fire extinguishers to spray long loopy swaths of yellow and blue paint on the tall whitewashed walls of the Fish building, the spray arcing over the roof (toward the cop car parked out front?) and running down the back façade like a living thing. "He’s famous for making fat writers," Ulli said, in reference to graffiti markers that draw a thick line (I think).

Inside the Fish, the bar surface was decorated with a giant print of a snow-covered tree by Seton Smith, which had been coated with a thick layer of epoxy and looked rather like marble, and the walls decorated with geometric wallpaper and a large assortment of artworks, including a striking dual portrait of Dash and Agathe Snow.

Sitting and gossiping at one of the picnic tables, Rimkus and I drew the attention of some 20-somethings, who pronounced us a "perfect couple" and took some pictures. I always wanted to grow up to be a curiosity for the party set.

The next morning’s schedule started at 10 am, and included an unveiling by Shepard Fairey of a street-long mural project on NW 2nd Avenue in Wynwood (missed it), a press conference in the "collector’s lounge" at Art Basel Miami Beach (missed it), and the preview for Ink Miami 2009 at the Suites of the Dorcester Hotel, which I made my destination.

On the way I ran into Robert Lynch, Nora Halpern and Katherine Gibney of Americans for the Arts, down in Miami to lobby the assembled art lovers -- they still want artists to get tax deductions for donating their own works to nonprofits -- and to huddle with Miami cultural affairs chief, Michael Spring, who is a boardmember.

The night before they had attended the Art Miami opening gala, which featured a Los Angeles band named OK Go performing on guitars decorated by Fendi with neon and feathers. Very Vegas.

On the way I stopped at the Catalina Hotel, home to the Verge art fair --but all was quiet, as the event debuted the next day.

For its part, Ink was up and running with its brunch, giving away iced cans of Illy Cappuccino along with the pastries. Energy drinks, often in small "booster" sizes, turned out to be a leitmotif of Miami art week events and gift bags. A jittery art dealer is a good art dealer.

Ink’s dozen or so print dealers include Glenn Dranoff from New York, who frankly noted that "of 50 things I have only six are prints." This included a suite of four Jasper Johns color etchings from his 1987 "Seasons" portfolio, priced at $150,000. "It’s ready to go into a collection," he said.

Next door was Jim Kempner Fine Art, where his gallery director Dru Arstark was touting delicate stipple-pen portraits, done with a Bic, of everyday African-Americans by Craig Norton -- "I bought one myself!" (they’re $3,500). Norton is doing an 88-figure installation of Civil Rights images for a benefit at the Museum of Television and Broadcasting, now known as the Paley Media Center, in February 2010.

Arstark was also enthusiastic about a new suite of color photos by Steve Giovinco, her husband, depicting the two of them as an alienated couple. A fiction, one suspects. "I put the camera on a ten-second delay," Giovinco said, "so I never know what’s going to happen." They’re $2,500, in editions of five.

Next door I met Margaret Miller of GraphicStudio at the University of South Florida in Tampa, the largest school-based print program in the country. It was GraphicStudio that produced those unique cyanotypes by Christian Marclay, bluish x-ray-looking grids of stacked cassette tapes or tangles of loose recording tape. Collectors love ‘em, and they’re selling like hotcakes at $14,000 and $30,000 -- buyers include the Boston MFA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan and the Whitney.

Marclay is holding back a suite of 14 new images for his 2010 show at the Aldrich Museum of Art, and is also working with GraphicStudio on a 50-foot-long scroll-score, based on the "zap and pow" sound effects of Japanese comics, for a show at the Whitney next spring. It will be performed by a voice choir.

Also on hand was David Norr, curator of the USF’s museum, which is officially named the Institute for Research in Art, for public-private-partnership-type reasons that escape me, even though Miller explained it all in detail. Norr’s current show, "New Weather" -- it’s about "the atmosphere in the studio," he said -- includes Diana Al-Hadid, who has showed in New York with Perry Rubenstein Gallery and who is doing a project with GraphicStudio as well.

After idling away the morning at the print fair, I directed my feet toward the Convention Center for Art Basel Miami Beach, which was having a day-long preview. The show seems larger than ever, and presents, as everyone knows, an all-but-endless spectacle of art and money. Funny, there’s so much art that it seems almost random, while the money is invisible, though it’s why everyone is there. We all construct our own narratives as we go, like picking out messages in alphabet soup.

I had just decided to plumb the mysterious appeal of painterly painting via large works by Emilia and Ilya Kabakov and Georg Baselitz at the booth of Galerie Thaddeaus Ropac when I came upon Curt Marcus, who I first met 30 years ago when he worked at Grace Borgenicht Gallery. Marcus was genuinely psyched, not least because he had just returned from a trip to Marrakesh and the hip nightclubs of London with his 19-year-old musician son.

One definite change for the better at ABMB: the fair has given up on the shipping-container village at the beach, and instead placed the young dealers in booths around the square center of the convention-floor proper. Here was much interesting young work, including a working (electronic) piano made from barn wood by Brent Green, an artist from Central Pennsylvania, though when I started to play chopsticks he stopped me, saying that dealer Andrew Edlin promised to make any such two-fingered virtuoso buy the thing (it’s $35,000).

I spotted an unfriendly art-blogger dogging my steps, and hastened away, stopping further along at a booth filled with large raucously colored bobblehead constructions -- a giant fried egg with a pair of oversized Jockey shorts, a papiér-mâche King Kong climbing the Empire State Building while surrounded by mouse balloons -- works by Agathe Snow, presented by Lower East Side dealer James Fuentes. They’re $12,000-$17,000, and financier Asher Edelman has already spoken for the sculpture with Homer Simpson’s head.

I jumped in my rented Dodge Charger -- the smallest vehicle available, honest -- and headed across the causeway to Miami proper, in search of Scope and Art Asia. Ever thorough, when several byways beckon, I’ll be sure to take all the wrong ones first, and instead I found the sprawling building in Wynwood rented, for the fourth year now, by Pierogi from Brooklyn and Hales Gallery from London.

Four young art dealers were sitting in a row of chairs in front of the door -- funny, but not an artwork -- and I had the large exhibition all to myself. Very impressive, including the works by the 52-year-old Hew Locke, a London-based artist who grew up in Ghana, where he became fascinated with the trappings of empire. Thus, a vast portrait of a "puppetmaster" made of beads and gold braid on black wool, adorned with images of samurai swords, the Scottish lion and a griffin ($50,000), and smaller, densely tinsel-and-plastic-jewel-encrusted portraits of the Queen ($16,000).

After driving around several blocks several times, I found Scope and Art Asia, which share space in another sprawling, many-roomed facility. At the entrance was veteran journalist Anthony Haden-Guest, who promised performances of his inflammatory verse at the Standard Hotel every night at 8 pm. "Just don’t call it poetry," he said.

Right inside the front door was the booth of Jonathan LaVine, whose artists -- he specializes in exceptionally accomplished illustrators like AJ Fosik, Jeff Soto and award-winning comic-book cover artist James Jean, whose images were adapted by Prada for its fashion line -- have an enviable surfeit of skills. The thing about illustrators, they can draw anything (while Mark Rothko could just make those big squares of color).

Nearby, Jacob Karpio, the madcap dealer from Costa Rica, was highlighting a video of "surfing in Cuba" -- cars driving down flooded streets with kids hanging onto their bumpers -- and the serene poured-paint abstractions of L.A. surfer artist Andy Moses. "I’ve sold two," said Karpio, referring to the surfing video, which goes for $8,000. As for Moses, his painting is $22,000 -- and has been featured in Surfer’s Journal magazine.

Scope has enlisted the efforts of several curators this year, and before I got much further, Scope director Jeffrey Lawson called one of them on his cell and arranged an impromptu tour of "Truly Truthful," a show of pan-Asian art -- 30 artist from 15 countries -- assembled by the estimable Leeza Ahmady, an Afghanistan-born curator who lives in New York and works for Asia Society.

"Truly Truthful" suggests a quest for a deeper honesty, and listening to Ahmady’s impassioned remarks made me realize that not only are curators charged with finding new art, but they also must buttress their discoveries with words. One of Ahmady’s choices, a black-and-white video of a Western bicycle that its Afghan owner had set on fire, she described as emblematic of resistance to civilization via colonization.

I couldn’t help but waste her time, but eventually her waiting companions came and dragged her away to go to the ABMB vernissage. Me, I was hearing the siren call of a whole list of publicist-abetted events at swanky hotels along Collins Avenue, including something involving Bruce High Quality Foundation promoted by Vito Schnabel, but I couldn’t find a parking place.

Better luck was had at the Delano Hotel, where you couldn’t even go inside unless you were on a guest list. Something called AnOther Magazine was throwing a party on the roof, with a buffet, alcoholic punches and a DJ. I beat it out of there in short order, but not without collecting copies of the mag, which is quite thick and published in male and female versions. Wonder which one to open first?

WALTER ROBINSON is editor of Artnet Magazine.

U.S. Marshals seize art from Swiss art dealer

Dec. 3 (Bloomberg) -- A dozen U.S. Marshals and police officers were among the first visitors to the Art Basel Miami Beach fair yesterday as they seized paintings by Fernand Leger, Joan Miro, Edgar Degas and Yves Klein following an insurance dispute between two dealers.

Late this afternoon the feuding dealers said that they had tentatively resolved their dispute and that the seized paintings would be back tomorrow. They would not discuss the terms of the proposed settlement.

The paintings were confiscated from the fair at the convention center in Miami Beach, Florida, about 90 minutes before the V.I.P. opening at noon yesterday for thousands of invited guests including casino mogul Steve Wynn, billionaire investor Wilbur Ross and designer Calvin Klein. The fair opened to the general public today and ends on Sunday.

The works had hung in the booth of Zurich-based Galerie Gmurzynska among paintings and sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Robert Indiana and actor Sylvester Stallone.

Artworks have never been seized by authorities in Art Basel Miami Beach’s 8-year history, said Sara Fitzmaurice, a fair spokeswoman.

“We were there to execute a private federal court order,” said Barry Golden, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshal Service, Southern District of Florida. “Artworks were seized.”

Art Basel Miami Beach hosts over 250 galleries from 33 countries. About 10 satellite fairs coincide with the bigger show, which is the largest and most prestigious modern and contemporary art fair in the U.S. in terms of exhibitors.

The seizure was connected to a lawsuit filed in New York Federal Court on July 13 by Edelman Arts Inc. as assignee of XL Specialty Insurance Corp. Edelman Arts is a New York gallery run by former Wall Street investor Asher B. Edelman.

Edelman, in conjunction with XL Specialty Insurance, which assigned its claim to Edelman in exchange for moneys owed, sued Galerie Gmurzynska over a damaged Robert Ryman painting. Ryman is known for his white minimalist surfaces.

The lawsuit alleged that in 2007 Edelman consigned Ryman’s 1985 “Courier I” to Gmurzynska for sale at Art Basel Miami Beach and was insured for $750,000. The work was returned with a “deep indentation,” or “gouge” according to the lawsuit, and the defendant refused to pay the insured value.

‘Reprehensible Motives’

The suit claims an additional $250,000 for “willful conduct of defendant” and “reprehensible motives and such wanton dishonesty as to imply a criminal indifference to civil obligations.” The suit resulted in a default judgment for the plaintiff for about $765,000.

“We had a judgment against Gmurzynska for damages done to a work of art and executed the judgment on behalf of the insurance company,” Edelman said in a telephone interview from his booth at the Art Miami fair across town.

Edelman accompanied the marshals. The Ryman work was not on display at Gmurzynska. The seized artworks, which are not owned by Edelman, reflect about 10 times the value of the judgment, the standard amount confiscated for auction, he said.

Assisting Marshals

“I was assisting the marshals by valuing the paintings,” said Edelman, who also made time at the convention center to buy an Agathe Snow sculpture featuring cartoon character Homer Simpson from Lower East Side dealer James Fuentes.

Gmurzynska’s lawyer, Peter R. Stern of McLaughlin & Stern LLP, declined to discuss ownership of the seized artworks, and it is unknown whether they are gallery inventory or works on consignment.

“The gallery was totally surprised by the events that occurred,” said Stern. “Edelman Arts, unbeknownst to the gallery, obtained a default judgment against my client without warning. The marshals appeared. The gallery is attempting to clarify the matter.”

Edelman said the artworks would be auctioned by the U.S. Marshals to pay XL, Edelman Arts and lawyers’ fees, with any surplus going to Galerie Gmurzynska.

The four paintings are valued at more than $6 million, according to sources familiar with the works. Comparable works by Degas alone have recently sold at auction for about $7 million. The confiscated Degas painting depicts jockeys on horseback.

Resolved Dispute

“The parties have in principle resolved the dispute,” said Stern this afternoon. “The paintings are expected to be back on the walls of the gallery space tomorrow.”

“In principle they have offered to pay what they owe and at that time I will release the paintings,” said Edelman. The seized artworks are being held in a Miami storage facility, according to Edelman. “My intent is simply to get paid what is owed to my insurance company.”

Edelman said he expects payment on Friday.

Gmurzynska’s booth attracted even more attention as the fair opened. Gallery consultant Princess Michael of Kent, clad in a lavender suit, chatted with clients and visitors at the booth.

Stallone held court in the back half of the stand, where his colorful expressionistic paintings hung on a wall. It is the actor’s first gallery show.

As photographers’ flashbulbs exploded around the stand, the Los Angeles-based Stallone discussed his work, admitting he was intimidated to exhibit in close proximity to his artist heroes like Colombian artist Fernando Botero.

“I wouldn’t exactly say I have a following,” Stallone said in an interview. He said he usually gives his paintings as gifts to relatives, but two paintings had sold by the afternoon, each priced between $40,000 and $50,000.

The Party Returns to Art Basel Miami Beach

In the early throes of the recession last year, Art Basel dialed down the partying—but this year the bacchanalia appears to be coming back.

Art collectors, dealers, celebrities and hangers-on have a dizzying number of social events to choose from, with everyone from art dealer Larry Gagosian to cyclist Lance Armstrong throwing dinner gatherings and parties. (Sleep is apparently optional, with many starting as late as 11 p.m. and a few winding down as the sun is coming up.) A year ago, with galleries and artists stressed about a sales downturn, the mood was more subdued, veterans say.

Guests watch Santigold perform at an event hosted by Jeffery Deitch at the Raleigh Hotel in Miami Beach.

Late Wednesday night, singer Santigold, in a sparkly top and silver pants, performed underneath al fresco chandeliers at the Raleigh Hotel in South Beach at a bash thrown by New York art dealer Jeffrey Deitch. Throngs of partiers sat at VIP tables or stood in the sand underneath palm trees, holding their stiletto heels and sweating in the late-night humidity while sipping pink Campari cocktails. "There's no compromise," said Mr. Deitch of his annual Art Basel fetes, which always feature an up-and-coming musical act. "We go all the way with parties."

Earlier that evening, guests like Scott Stapp, lead singer of rock band Creed, and hip-hop/fashion mogul Russell Simmons posed for photos at a party on a balcony at the Mondrian South Beach Hotel.The host, Mr. Simmons, who collects works by artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Barbara Krueger, was raising money for his charity, Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation. He said he'd been inundated with calls from friends wanting to know where the cool events were this year. "I get a lot of young-party-people emails," he said.

Also there was Morgans Hotel Group CEO Fred Kleisner, who said that unlike in 2008, his hotels, including the starkly designed Mondrian, are fully booked for Art Basel, with more dinners and parties scheduled.

Wandering through Convention Center on Wednesday afternoon, magazine publisher Jason Binn scrolled through his BlackBerry calendar ticking off the half dozen parties he'd RSVP'd for that evening, including one hosted by rapper Dr. Dre and another by Sylvester Stallone. "I can't even eat dinner while I'm here, there's too many parties," he said. This year feels different than last year, he said, with more exclusive and VIP-studded parties.

One of his magazines, "Ocean Drive," hosted a guest-listed affair at the Sunset Island home of fashion photography collector Gert Elfering. On Wednesday morning, at least a dozen workers hung artwork and rearranged furniture in the collector's minimalist home, once owned by the late Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees. As they hung artwork—including a wall-sized face relief sculpture of Buddha made of a cow's hide—Colombian artist Efren Isaza put the final dabs of paint on his digitally altered photographs, which depict models with elongated features. His images, along with several live models dressed in origami sculpture outfits that he designed, would be the centerpiece of the party, with one standing on a platform in the middle of the home's ocean-view infinity pool. "Everybody has a Damien Hirst," said Mr. Elfering. "I want to do something no one's ever seen before."

Thursday night's options included an event hosted by Lance Armstrong to celebrate the opening of "Stages," an art exhibit to raise money for his cancer foundation, which was expected to draw guests such as Nike CEO Mark Parker. There was also a Tequila Casa Dragones brand launch party to take place aboard a sailboat. For the first time this year, the Box, a Manhattan burlesque club and celebrity hot spot, moved its operation down to Miami's Nikki Beach nightclub for the week, bringing body painters, aerialist acrobats and "a divine chanteuse." (Basel VIPs received jewelry-box invitations that cooed seductively when opened.)

Basel regulars said that smaller, more intimate dinners and cocktail parties were more prevalent this year. Heiress and designer Nadja Swarovski hosted a dinner and after-party at the W South Beach. Collectors Aby Rosen and Peter Brant also hosted a dinner there, with an after-party thrown by 23-year-old art dealer Vito Schnabel, son of artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel. Friday night at the W: the Sex Pistols.

The most conservative hosts this year may be Art Basel's corporate sponsors, which include UBS, NetJets and Cartier. For the past couple of fairs, Cartier constructed a freestanding geodesic dome for VIPs across from the Convention Center. This year, the luxury jeweler hosted a dinner and a cocktail party, but built their lounge inside the Convention Center, with a large gold and bejeweled column designed by architect Alessandro Mendini. UBS also has a lounge for VIPs at the fair but says it's cut back on parties this year. NetJets isn't having a big bash, either.

Write to Candace Jackson at candace.jackson@wsj.com
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank?

ART’s link with money is not new, though it does continue to generate surprises. On Friday night, Christie’s in London plans to auction another of Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets: literally a small, sliding-glass medicine cabinet containing a few dozen bottles or tubes of standard pharmaceuticals: nasal spray, penicillin tablets, vitamins and so forth. This work is not as grand as a Hirst shark, floating eerily in a giant vat of formaldehyde, one of which sold for more than $12 million a few years ago. Still, the estimate of up to $239,000 for the medicine cabinet is impressive — rather more impressive than the work itself.

No disputing tastes, of course, if yours lean toward the aesthetic contemplation of an orderly medicine cabinet. Buy it, and you acquire a work of art by the world’s richest and — by that criterion — most successful living artist. Still, neither this piece nor Mr. Hirst’s dissected calves and embalmed horses are quite “by” the artist in a conventional sense. Mr. Hirst’s name rightfully goes on them because they were his conceptions. However, he did not reproduce any of the medicine bottles or boxes in his cabinet (in the way that Warhol actually recreated Brillo boxes), nor did he catch a shark or do the taxidermy.

In this respect, the pricey medicine cabinet belongs to a tradition of conceptual art: works we admire not for skillful hands-on execution by the artist, but for the artist’s creative concept. Mr. Hirst has a talent for coming up with concepts that capture the attention of the art market, putting him in the company of other big names who have now and again moved away from making art with their own hands: Jeff Koons, for example, who has put vacuum cleaners into Plexiglas cases and commissioned an Italian porcelain manufacturer to make a cheesy gold and white sculpture of Michael Jackson and his pet chimp. Mr. Koons need not touch the art his contractors produce; the ideas are his, and that’s enough.

Sophisticated gallery owners or curators normally respond with withering condescension to worries about the lack of craftsmanship in contemporary art. Art has moved on, I’ve heard it argued, since Victorian times, when “she’d painted every hair” was ordinary aesthetic praise. What is important today is not technical skill, but skill in playing inventively with ideas.

Since the endearingly witty Marcel Duchamp invented conceptual art 90 years ago by offering his “ready-mades” — a urinal or a snow shovel, for instance — for gallery shows, the genre has degenerated. Duchamp, an authentic artistic genius, was in 1917 making sport of the art establishment and its stuffy values. By the time we get to 2009, Mr. Hirst and Mr. Koons are the establishment.

Does this mean that conceptual art is here to stay? That is not at all certain, and it is not just auction results that are relevant to the issue. To see why works of conceptual art have an inherent investment risk, we must look back at the whole history of art, including art’s most ancient prehistory.

It is widely assumed that the earliest human art works are the stupendously skillful cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet, the latter perhaps 32,000 years old, along with a few small realistic sculptures of women and of animals from the same period. But artistic and decorative behavior emerged in a far more distant past. Shell necklaces that look like something you would see at a tourist resort, as well as evidence of ochre body paint, have been found from more than 100,000 years ago. But the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts are much older even than that. I have in mind the so-called Acheulian hand axes.

The earliest stone tools are choppers and blades found in Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, from 2.5 million years ago. These unadorned tools remained unchanged for thousands of centuries, until around 1.4 million years ago when Homo ergaster, Homo erectus and other human ancestral groups started doing something new and remarkable. They began shaping single, thin stone blades, sometimes rounded ovals, but often in what to our eyes are arresting symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop forms. Acheulian hand axes (after St.-Acheul in France, a site of 19th-century finds) have been unearthed in their thousands, scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa, wherever Homo erectus roamed.

The sheer numbers of hand axes indicate a rate of manufacture beyond needs for butchering animals. Even more curious, unlike other prehistoric stone tools, hand axes often exhibit no evidence of wear on their delicate blade edges, and some are in any case too big for practical use. They are occasionally hewn from colorful stone materials (even with decoratively embedded fossils). Their symmetry, materials and above all meticulous workmanship makes them quite simply beautiful to our eyes. What were these ancient yet somehow familiar artifacts for?

The best available explanation is that they are literally the earliest known works of art — practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects, contemplated both for their elegant shape and virtuoso craftsmanship. Hand axes mark an evolutionary advance in human prehistory, tools attractively fashioned to function as what Darwinians call “fitness signals” — displays like the glorious peacock’s tail, which functions to show peahens the strength and vitality of the males who display it.

Hand axes, however, were not grown, but consciously, cleverly made. They were therefore able to indicate desirable personal qualities: intelligence, fine motor control, planning ability and conscientiousness. Such skills gained for those who displayed them status and a reproductive advantage over the less capable. Across many thousands of generations this translated into both an increase in intelligence and an evolved sense that the symmetry and craftsmanship of hand axes is “beautiful.”

Aesthetically pleasing hand axes constitute an unbroken Stone-Age tradition that stretches over a million years, ending 100,000 to 150,000 years ago, about the time that their makers’ African descendants, now called Homo sapiens, started to become articulate speakers of language. These humans were probably finding new ways to amuse and amaze one another with — who knows? — jokes, dramatic storytelling, dancing or hairstyling. Alas, geological layers do not record these other, more perishable aspects of prehistoric life. For us moderns, the arts have come to depict imaginary worlds and express intense emotions with music, painting, dance and fiction.

However, one trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: the pleasure we take in admiring skilled performances. From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall — where now and again the Homo erectus hairs stand up on the backs of our necks — human beings have a permanent, innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts.

We ought, then, to stop kidding ourselves that painstakingly developed artistic technique is passé, a value left over from our grandparents’ culture. Evidence is all around us. Even when we have lost contact with the social or religious ideas behind the arts of bygone civilizations, we are still able, as with the great bronzes or temples of Greece or ancient China, to respond directly to craftsmanship. The direct response to skill is what makes it possible to find beauty in many tribal arts even though we often know nothing about the beliefs of the people who created them. There is no place on earth where superlative technique in music and dance is not regarded as beautiful.

The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist. That’s why looking through the history of conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes about Cadillac tailfins and early fax machines were once amusing, and the same can be said of conceptual works like Piero Manzoni’s 1962 declaration that Earth was his art work, Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” (a chair, a photo of the chair and a definition of “chair”) or Mr. Hirst’s medicine cabinets. Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.

In this respect, I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.

But that doesn’t mean we need to worry about the future of art. There are plenty of prodigious artists at work in every medium, ready to wow us with surprising skills. And yes, now and again I walk past a jewelry shop window and stop, transfixed by a sparkling, teardrop-shaped precious stone. Our distant ancestors loved that shape, and found beauty in the skill needed to make it — even before they could put their love into words.

Denis Dutton is a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the author of “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.”

Michael Anderson at Marlborough Gallery

Enrique Chagoya

Enrique Chagoya also seeks to describe alternative cultural histories: “I integrate diverse elements: from pre-Columbian mythology, Western religious iconography, ethnic stereotypes, ideological propaganda from various times and places, American popular culture, etc. Often, the result is a non-linear narrative with many possible interpretations.” Working on amate bark paper, in the tradition of ancient codices (pictorial histories from pre-Colonial Central America) Chagoya creates current historiographies, depicting contemporary political happenings and figureheads engaging in symbolic battles. His multimedia works serve as humorous and incisive critiques of the cultural and political power-struggles taking place on the American continents, while referencing both ancient and contemporary aesthetic traditions. In Pyramid Scheme , Chagoya re-imagines Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans as a delectable collection of “Cannibulls” flavors like “Freddie Mac n’ Cheese” and “Mergers, Acquisitions and Lentils,” while in a codex titled Illegal Alien’s Guide to Political Theory political power brokers portrayed as self-absorbed superheroes frolic alongside traditional depictions of indigenous peoples.

Take Home a Nude

The 18th Annual Take Home a Nude ® Art Auction & Party

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

at Sotheby's

An evening honoring John Currin

6 - 9 pm silent & live auction

9 pm dinner

Mike Perry

Women Gain Power in New York Arts, Report Says

NEW YORK—Between leading boards, helming multimillion-dollar fundraising campaigns, chairing galas, and handing over six- and seven-figure checks themselves, women are stepping up and taking a greater role in running New York City's cultural institutions, according to Crain's New York Business.

“Whether boards are accepting women in more powerful positions or whether women have control over more money than they used to, they are definitely becoming more prominent, particularly in the arts,” fundraising consultant Toni Goodale told Crain's.

The report looks at women who sit on the boards of prestigious New York institutions and/or have ponied up huge gifts to them, such as Museum of Modern Art President Marie-Josée Kravis; Agnes Varis, managing director of the Metropolitan Opera and vice chairman of the Jazz Foundation of America; New York Public Library Chair Catherine Marron; and Laurie Tisch, who sits on the executive committee of Lincoln Center.

"I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life."- Frank Stella

Frank Stella,(American, b.1936) American printmaker and painter Frank Stella was born on May 12, 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts. Stella attended Princeton University, graduated in 1958 and moved to New York City.
Influenced by Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and frequent visits to the New York art galleries, Stella began to paint. He developed the firm belief that a painting was a "flat surface with paint on it - nothing more" and created a technique of planes of color and lines in collage-like compositions which quickly gained him recognition in the art world at the early age of 25. Stella married art critic Barbara Rose in 1961. They would remain together for eight years before separating in 1969.
By the mid-1960's Stella began working with print making as a medium, utilizing screen printing, etching and lithography. By 1970 he received a retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the youngest artist to ever receive such an honor. Many of his prints incorporated several different techniques to create one unique effect. In 1973 he had a print shop installed in his home in New York. Stella is still an active artist living in New York.

Annie Leibovitz Woes Shed Light On Art Loans

By Ula Ilnytzky, Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK — Photographer Annie Leibovitz has won an extension on a $24 million loan in a financial dispute that threatened her rights to her famous images.
Leibovitz and Art Capital Group announced Friday that the 59-year-old photographer had been given more time to repay the loan. The two sides didn't say how long the extension would last.

The loan's deadline passed on Tuesday. Leibovitz would have had to repay it or lose the rights to photographs that she had put up as collateral.

Art Capital had sued for repayment in July but said Friday that it had withdrawn the lawsuit and that Leibovitz could retain the copyright to her work.

Last year, Leibovitz put up as collateral three Manhattan townhouses, an upstate New York property and the copyright to every picture she has ever taken — or will take — to secure the loan.

Leibovitz portraits have graced the covers of Vanity Fair, Vogue and Rolling Stone.

Art Capital is a Manhattan-based company that issues short-term loans against fine and decorative arts and real estate.

Art Capital consolidated all Leibovitz's loans in September 2008. The company said Leibovitz needed the money to deal with a "dire financial condition arising from her mortgage obligations, tax liens and unpaid bills to service providers and other creditors."

Its lawsuit charged she had breached a December sales agreement with the company, granting Art Capital the right to sell the collateral before the loan came due. The lawsuit claimed the photographer refused to allow real estate experts into her homes to appraise their value and blocked the company from selling her photographs.

Art Capital has estimated the value of the Leibovitz portfolio at $40 million, and real estate brokers say her New York properties are worth about $40 million.

Pace Law School Professor and intellectual property lawyer Horace Anderson said the "messiness" of the Leibovitz case may make other lenders think twice before making loans in similar situations.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Austrian Family Seeks Return of Vermeer Sold to Hitler

The heirs of a prominent Austrian family want the government to return a famous seventeenth-century painting that they say was sold by force to Adolf Hitler in 1940, reports Agence France-Presse via Der Standard. Count Jaromir Czernin had sold Flemish painter Johannes Vermeer’s masterpiece to the Nazi dictator “to protect the life of his family,” states his descendants’ attorney, Andreas Theiss.

Czernin’s wife was of Jewish origin and he was also the son-in-law of Austrian leader Kurt von Schuschnigg, who was toppled by the Nazis. Hitler acquired the painting for 1.65 million reichsmarks, Der Standard said. But the family’s attorney said a new expert appraisal found that the painting was sold for no more than one million reichsmarks, or “a fraction of its value.” The Art of Painting, which Vermeer created in 1665, has been on the walls of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum since 1946. It is the Flemish master’s largest painting.

“We are convinced that the Austrain republic will treat this case in an open and honest manner,” Theiss said, adding that he had filed the request on August 31. The culture ministry confirmed Saturday that it had received Theiss’s request and would transmit it to a committee tasked with issuing opinions on restitutions. The painting has been owned by the Czernin family since the nineteenth century. The family had already asked for the painting to be returned in the 1960s, but their requests were rejected on the basis that it had been sold voluntarily and at an appropriate price. Jaromir Czernin had tried to sell the painting in 1938 for one million dollars to an American collector, but his plan was thwarted by the German invasion of Austria and Hitler’s opposition, Theiss said. Hitler had expressed interest in acquiring the painting as early as 1935 to put it in the Führer Museum which he planned to build in the Austrian city of Linz.

Hidden Treasures

Tucked away in a cellar in Bahrain is one of the largest collections of Islamic art in the world. It is the life’s work of Abdul Latif Jassim Kanoo – and now, for the first time, the public will be able to see it, when a new exhibition hall opens at the Beit Al Qur’an museum. Hamida Ghafour had a sneak preview.

In a darkened room of Abdul Latif Jassim Kanoo’s museum in Bahrain, a single spotlight picks out the brilliant blue tones of an exquisite vase painted with gentle scenes of rural Chinese life. It is an unusual piece, Kanoo explains, because it was made by Iranian pottery makers mimicking Chinese porcelain.

It is a rare and valuable item, but for Kanoo there is another more personal story attached to it.

He bought the pot in London but was not allowed to board the aeroplane because it was too big.

“The only way was to buy it a seat,” he says. “So it was me in one seat, Mrs Kanoo on the other side and the pot in between. We told people it was our child.”

The Iranian pot is among the hundreds of treasures that are part of an upcoming exhibition to open during Ramadan at the new Dr Abdul Latif Kanoo Hall at the Beit Al Qur’an museum in Manama, which he founded.

It is no ordinary exhibition, however. Kanoo has spent 50 years travelling around the globe and amassing one of the largest private collections of Islamic art in the world, much of it rarely or never seen in public.

One afternoon shortly before the hall opened I got a sneak preview of his incredible collection of Islamic treasures.

In his office he reaches into his safe and takes out four opaque plastic containers. He opens one and places in the palm of my hand an exquisite cup heavy for its small size.

“Are these emeralds and rubies?” I ask, touching the inlaid jewels. Yes, he says. It is a 16th century Mogul cup carved from a piece of rock crystal.

We try on a couple of Mogul archer rings, which were worn by Indian warriors in battle to protect their fingers when the bow was pulled. They are made of pale green jade studded with rubies, and I wonder if the archers were worried about losing a ruby when they fired arrows.

“I must catalogue these,” he mutters.


Kanoo rummages around the boxes for his collection of Islamic coins. He has one from every year of the Islamic calendar, except for the first year in which the young Muslim empire began minting coins, Hijri 77 (696AD).

“There are only eight in the world. I couldn’t afford it, the last one I saw was selling for US$200,000 to US$300,000 (Dh1.2 million to Dh1.8 million),” he says.

The basement of the Beit Al Qur’an Museum houses the Kanoo’s private collection of Islamic art.

When he steps out of his office to chat with his secretary he jokingly adds, “Don’t steal anything.”

Kanoo is in his 70s – he does not have a precise age because he was born in Bahrain at a time when the Bedouin did not keep such records – and is a scion of the Kanoo dynasty, one of the great merchant families in the Gulf who made a fortune in shipping, travel and oil, among other things, a century ago. Arabian Business last year estimated the family’s wealth at US$6.1 billion (Dh37 billion) and ranked them number nine in the top 10 richest families in the Middle East.

Kanoo, however, has never been involved very much or interested in the family business. He has divided his life between his family, his work as an engineer and his private passion as an art lover.

He is an avuncular, jovial figure who loves talking about his five grandchildren, teasing his secretary and calling the room in which he keeps his treasures “the dungeon”.

“Should we go to the dungeon?” he asks when he finishes speaking to his secretary. The dungeon is the basement of the Beit Al Qur’an museum where he stores the bulk of his personal art collection.

There is a special lift to take him to the basement but no one can find the key so he walks downstairs instead. A nondescript door leads to a large semicircular room with a massive pillar in the middle that is part of the supporting foundation of the building. A gorgeous wall of framed miniature paintings, Indian, Turkish and Iranian, dating from the 15th to 17th centuries, greets us.

“This one is very rare,” he says, pointing to a domestic Indian scene set against a subdued backdrop of gold and silver.

Kanoo feels that the new Abdul Latif Kanoo Hall and its contents – stored in the basement – will be an opportunity to show his gratitude for a life well lived.

It is hard to know where to look first. There are pieces of pottery laid out on the floor; glass, jewellery and metal objects behind cabinets, sculptures; embroidered textiles and clothing laid out on tables and on the floors. Paintings, four or five deep, are leaning against the walls.

There are many paintings by Bahraini artists, some of which he admits he bought out of duty rather than admiration for the work. “I like to support the arts scene here,” he explains. It is an Aladdin’s cave of priceless and exquisite treasures spanning several hundred years of Islamic arts.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London would be envious, I say. It has 400 objects in its Islamic gallery; Kanoo’s is much bigger.

He won’t give an exact figure – “I don’t know, really. I don’t have and don’t give numbers” – but in 2007, a selection of 5,000 items was on display in Abu Dhabi.

“There are few in the world with a collection like this. David Khalili has one,” he says, referring to the British-Iranian billionaire and art dealer whose collection was valued at US$900 million (Dh5.5 billion) by Forbes magazine.

Kanoo specialises in works from the 8th to 13th centuries and most of the collection has been purchased from auction houses in London and New York. But he also likes to trawl through Spanish markets in search of pieces from Muslim-ruled Andalusia.

“Every item I can tell you where and how I got it and whether they ripped me off or I ripped them off,” he says, laughing. He is too discreet to reveal what his collection is worth or what his favourite piece is. “All these things are my babies, my sons and daughters, how can I choose a favourite?”

Kanoo’s love of collecting began as a child when he picked up coins and shells on the beaches of Bahrain. But his interest took a more serious turn when he travelled to England to study. He earned a degree in engineering from Imperial College London and when he wasn’t learning, he was travelling to Europe’s capitals with his family, visiting its great museums including the British Museum, the Natural History museum and the Louvre in Paris. These visits left a deep impression on the young man from an island which had just started its modernising phase after the discovery of oil in 1932.

“The West has the nicest museums but all the content came from the Middle East, from Egypt in particular, from Muslim countries. So I was determined when I went back I’d make a museum if not equal but better that will display many things.”

He put his engineering degree to good use after graduation and worked for a short time in Saudi Arabia and then Kuwait where he built bridges and schools. Upon returning to Bahrain he got a job at the ministry of housing and was instrumental in planning and building many of the kingdom’s neighbourhoods.

One of his greatest accomplishments, he says, is the Beit Al Qur’an museum which he founded in 1990 and which is built entirely with donations from the public. The nucleus is his own spectacular collection of Qurans written on a range of materials from the skin of a gazelle to a grain of rice. The collection is unrivalled: there is the first translation into Latin, completed in 1535, and the first ever printed Quran produced in Germany in 1694.

“When you expose yourself to those beautiful collections in the West I thought, ‘How can they look after them in the West but not us in the Middle East?’ I’m grateful to European institutions, they did us a favour. Now, thanks to them, people have an understanding of the development of items and materials like textiles, carpets.”

The Kanoo family business started in 1890 when Haji Yusuf bin Ahmed Kanoo, a general merchant, began importing goods from Asia and Europe. It expanded to Saudi Arabia and later the UAE, and is now owned by the sixth generation of the family.

Like the Italian merchant dynasties, such as the Medicis who patronised the Renaissance in 15th century Italy, the Kanoos are playing a role in fostering and developing the arts in the young nations of the Gulf.

Kanoo’s daughter-in-law, Hoda Kanoo, founded the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation and has brought classical music and opera to the capital, while her husband, Mohammed, is an artist and co-owner of Ghaf, the first contemporary art gallery in Abu Dhabi.

When Kanoo began collecting Islamic art 50 years ago, it was not considered very important and only a few people were interested in buying. In the past 20 years perceptions have changed dramatically. The market has taken off – and so have the prices. A watershed moment came in 1997 when a Qatari sheikh paid £3.6 million (Dh21.9 million) for a 10th-century bronze fountainhead from Italy or Spain, the highest ever paid for a piece of Islamic art.

Kanoo says acquiring pieces is becoming difficult and expensive.

“I used to get miniature paintings for £500-£2,000 (Dh3,000-Dh12,000) but now they talk about £50,000 (Dh300,000).”

Most of the world’s major museums have had a usually small Islamic art collection, kept in a dusty, little-visited corner, but that is also changing. The Victoria and Albert in London has 400 permanent objects in its new Jameel Gallery. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is refurbishing the Islamic art galleries, which are scheduled to re-open in 2011 for its permanent collection of 12,000 objects. The Louvre will display its 2,000-item collection in a new gallery in the renovated Cour Visconti, which is expected to open next year.

Does he believe in returning artwork to its country of origins?

“It’s not about how it is or where it is,” he says. “Human civilisation shouldn’t be anchored in one unit but set in places where people can appreciate them. It is about preserving human history.”

His eyes notice a brilliant vase with a floral pattern from the Iranian Safavid period sitting on a plinth.

“Why is this here? It can fall. Here hold it,” he gives it to me as he moves the plinth to a corner and sets the vase on the carpeted floor where it won’t be knocked over.

You get a sense that Kanoo doesn’t take all this too seriously.

“These are my grandchildren’s, I made them sit down and paint,” he points to some framed crayon drawings. They are hung next to a 14th-century Turkish blue-glazed ceramic that was once part of a chandelier in a mosque.

He has tried to pass on his love of collecting fine things to his five grandchildren and indeed there is an entire antechamber in the basement devoted to the little things he has bought them when they were small children. There are spiders set in amber, rock crystals or just shells picked up in London’s markets.

“When we go to Portobello in London I’d give them money and they’d go and buy something. They’d say, ‘I’d like this rock,’ and I’d say, ‘It’s too expensive,’ and they’d say, ‘Please?’ Well, how can I refuse the beautiful Noor?” he says, referring to his granddaughter.

We wander back upstairs. He admits he has spent all his money on art. “That’s what my wife complains about,” he says with a laugh.

One year Prince Charles visited Beit Al Qur’an and Kanoo displayed a collection of Bahraini pearls. He cheekily borrowed a necklace belonging to his wife – without asking her permission.

“We had dinner with Prince Charles later that week and before leaving he said to my wife, ‘Your husband has been very naughty,’ and told her what I did.’ She just said, ‘What can I do with him?’”

The museum is closed for the summer, so specialists can carry out conservation work on the manuscripts.

In the new Abdul Latif Kanoo Hall, the public will now be able to see some of the fruits of a lifetime’s collecting.

“What can I do with it all? Lock it in a room? I want the public to appreciate it. I want people to know we have some of the most beautiful collection of Islamic art in the world. The tip of the iceberg will go on display. The idea is to have exhibitions which will not be permanent. It will be for three, six months to a year perhaps. We will specialise only in rings, or perhaps textiles or glass. It will rotate so people can appreciate the contents. I personally choose what will be on display but of course I have people who help me.”

One of the rarest items is an unglazed clay jug made in Iran in the 9th or 10th century. It is in perfect condition and the workmanship gives a hint to the style of Islamic art that would develop later on.

A favourite is an extremely rare silk carpet which covered the floor of a Moghul ruler’s private quarters. “It is so small so we know it was used in his home. Otherwise they would have used a very big carpet.”

The museum and its contents will be an opportunity for Kanoo to show his gratitude for a life well lived, he says.

“I am a man who is simple, straightforward, loves everything around me. I don’t carry ill feeling, always I look at the positive side, not the negative side. I have achieved everything I want to achieve.”

He looks content.
by Matt Kwong DUbai, UAE

Corporations rent their collections to Museums

By ROBIN POGREBIN. PEOPLE admiring Thomas Moran’s tranquil “View of Fairmont Waterworks, Philadelphia” (from about 1860) or Childe Hassam’s bucolic “Old House and Garden, East Hampton” (1917) in the show on American Impressionism at the Millennium Gate Museum in Atlanta this summer might be surprised to learn the identity of the curator: Bank of America.

Since the 1960s, when Chase Manhattan Bank assembled one of the first major corporate art collections under the guidance of its president, David Rockefeller, banks and other large companies have been acquiring fine art as a way to give their offices a cultured, dignified aura. Over time many companies have expanded these collections — with in-house curators to oversee them — and lent works to museums and other exhibition spaces, mostly for marketing reasons.

But a few corporations, including JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and UBS, have occasionally gone a step further, lending out complete shows. And Bank of America has lately gone further still, creating a roster of ready-made shows that it provides to museums at a nominal cost to them— essentially turnkey exhibitions.

Traditionally museums have been loath to allow the sponsors of an exhibition a significant role in curatorial decision making — particularly when the sponsor is a corporation, given the potential taint of commercialization and artistic compromise. And most major museums still draw the line there.

“What is crucial is curatorial independence,” said Glenn D. Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, “the ability of a curator to make his or her own decisions about what would constitute an exhibition.”

Mr. Lowry said his museum would show a corporate collection only if the majority of what was on show was donated, as was the case with the museum’s UBS show in 2005. “That’s our safeguard,” he said. “We’ve had real input because it’s a gift to the museum. What’s going to be displayed is not going back on the market.”

Rodney M. Cook Jr., president of the National Monuments Foundation, which owns the Millennium Gate, said he was unconcerned about the potential commercial implications of mounting a Bank of America show. “Is there a problem with enhancing the value of a great collection?” he said. “The quality of this collection I would say enhances the museum more than the museum enhances the collection. It’s some of the greatest pictures in America history. If our new museum can improve on the value of the bank’s collection, God bless America.”

Given the economic downturn, which has forced the cancellation, postponement or prolonging of exhibitions across the country, more small and midsize art institutions may be increasingly open to ready-made shows.

“It relieves the pressure of having to always initiate shows,” said Holly Block, executive director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which recently mounted “Collected Visions: Modern and Contemporary Works from the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection,” featuring about 70 works by some 60 artists, to commemorate the bank’s 50 years of collecting. “It’s very costly, and there’s not a lot of money out there right now for exhibitions. Last year was very, very hard for us to raise money. So anywhere we can create partnerships and consortiums, it’s a win-win situation.”

Ms. Block said the show also allowed the Bronx Museum to fill two galleries that otherwise would have been closed during the show’s two-month duration because of budget constraints, and to exhibit work it would not have otherwise been able to obtain. “This was an incredible opportunity,” she said. “It’s the first time we had Andy Warhol at the Bronx Museum.”

In conjunction with the show JPMorgan Chase also donated Martin Wong’s 1981 acrylic on canvas, “Brainwashing Cult Cons Top TV Star.”

Started two years ago, the Bank of America program placed 12 shows in 2008 and has placed 10 so far in 2009, with 10 more scheduled for 2010 and 6 for 2011. And there is a waiting list.

“At first we were calling museums,” said Rena DeSisto, the bank’s global arts marketing and philanthropy executive. “Now the calls are coming in to us.”

Ms. DeSisto said the bank had initially hoped to place its shows in big museums, to build credibility, but has come to realize that its collection could instead play an important role in serving institutions with fewer resources.

“Smaller community museums with more need began to ask for our program,” she said. “They just don’t have the deep pockets, and they don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘We don’t do corporate collections,’ nor do they frankly have the snobbery about it.”

At the Millennium Gate, which opened a year ago, Bank of America’s Impressionism show, which runs through Dec. 6, was hugely important to efforts to build an audience. “It’s been a great way to introduce ourselves to the city,” Mr. Cook said. “Our curators would have had to start from the beginning to catalog everything and pack and ship it, whereas the bank has all of this already done.”

From March 8 to July 19 the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey mounted “The Wyeths: Three Generations,” an exhibition of work by N. C., Andrew and Jamie Wyeth that was put together by Bank of America. At the museum — a 95-year-old institution with a collection of some 12,000 works — the endowment is down 20 percent since last year, and there have been two rounds of layoffs.

Lora S. Urbanelli, the museum’s director, said the show allowed the museum to present work it otherwise could not afford. “For us to put together a show on Wyeth would have been very expensive,” she explained, given the high cost of shipping, insurance and education materials, practically all of which Bank of America covered. The show was one of the museum’s most successful, Ms. Urbanelli said, attracting more than 80,000 visitors.

“The fact that we were able to do this exhibition so easily, especially when we’re under financial pressure, has been great,” she said.

The Association of Art Museum Directors has no policy governing shows organized by corporations and “would not be against it,” said Michael Conforti, the association’s president, “as long as the people involved felt comfortable themselves that a show complied with their curatorial standards.”

What museums need to be conscious of, art experts say, is creating the impression that these exhibitions enhance the value of corporate collections that might one day come to market. “A museum has to think very seriously about taking those shows,” said John Ravenal, president of the Association of Art Museum Curators and curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “The museum, by virtue of its stature and its public role, gives legitimacy or confers a certain kind of validity to these collections when it exhibits them.

“If the collection isn’t a promised gift to the museum, then there is the potential for the museum to be used to unwittingly increase the value of a collection, whether its individual or corporate.”

If a corporation is contributing funds to a museum that shows its collection, “then it looks as if the museum’s exhibition program is for sale,” Mr. Ravenal said. “They don’t want to look like they’re selling their reputation.”

As for concerns that a bank would impose its curatorial tastes on the museum, Ms. Urbanelli of the Montclair Art Museum said Bank of America selected the works in the Wyeth show, but the museum had some say in their installation. “We were able to filter it through our own curatorial staff,” she said. “I don’t feel like we made any kind of compromises at all. If anything, they provided us with a wonderful opportunity — helped us to do something we would not have been able to do ourselves.”

Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, said he would be unlikely to accept a show put together by a corporation in part because it supplants the role of the museum’s curators. “The reason the museum exists is to make exhibitions on its own,” he said. “You have people on staff who consider themselves to be historians with highly nuanced receptors, and it’s not healthy to duplicate that by hiring out to somebody else.”

To be sure, importing a corporate-organized show might be expected to create tension between the curators at the company and those at the host museum. But Sergio Bessa, the director of curatorial and education programs at the Bronx Museum, said that his institution’s collaboration with JPMorgan “was very collegial,” and that the show gave the museum access to blue-chip artists.

“We saw an opportunity instead of a takeover,” he said. “I actually have quite a lot of respect for their vision. I was amazed: How did Chase get paintings by this painter and that painter?”

The curators at corporations and museums may be equally qualified in terms of expertise, art experts say, but their responsibilities differ. “The point of a corporate collection is to burnish the reputation of a corporation,” Mr. Ravenal said, and corporate curators are therefore “involved in that agenda.”

Given the current state of the economy and the considerable expense of maintaining and storing art, corporations might be expected to want to sell all or part of their collections, and many smaller companies are doing some divesting. Bank of America considered selling off its entire collection of about 60,000 pieces — all gathered through acquisitions of other banks with art collections — even before the downturn. But the bank determined that there were other marketing benefits to be gained from the collection.

“We have determined that a sale would result in an overall loss or a break-even, and that it is better used as a community support and marketing tool,” the bank’s Ms. DeSisto said: associating the bank with arts patronage and charitable giving, providing access to prospective clients in museum trustees and donors, offering opportunities for client entertainment.

Bank of America said its cost per exhibition can range from $5,000 to $25,000, depending on how far the artwork needs to be transported, and Ms. DeSisto said the expenditure — which she declined to quantify — has paid off.

“The income we have generated through increased business is superior to any income we could generate from selling the collection,” she said. “Attracting even one individual client can cover the entire cost of lending a turnkey exhibition.”

“Art has a very emotional pull,” she added. “If you are an art lover who supports your local museum, you are going to become positively inclined to the company that helps your museum thrive.”

Other banks too have recognized the potential for such intangible dividends. “It’s not about collecting as an investment strategy,” said Gary Hattem, president of the Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation in New York, which administers the bank’s philanthropic activities in the United States, Latin America and Canada. “It’s really about being fully engaged in the communities in which we do business.”

Deutsche Bank, with a collection of about 56,000 pieces, has made art “a major part of our identity as a bank,” said Liz Christensen, the company’s curator for the Americas. Work from the collection, including pieces by prominent artists like Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist, is displayed in the public areas of the bank’s headquarters and in branches in 41 countries. And the reach of that identity is extended by its shows, like the coming “Beuys and Beyond,” featuring about 50 works on paper by Joseph Beuys and his students from the Düsseldorf Art Academy, which will travel over the next two years to museums in five countries, possibly including the United States.

Bank of America, which has four to five exhibits lent out at any one time, has a show of 30 watercolors of the American West painted by Alfred Jacob Miller in the early 1840s headed for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., next year. It is then bound for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, followed by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Peter C. Marzio, director of the Houston museum, said he was comfortable with the collaboration. “There are people in the art field who think that somehow businessmen are evil, and you shouldn’t deal with them, but they have no trouble taking their money,” he said. “I’ve always thought that was the ultimate hypocrisy. You almost can’t do a contemporary art show without borrowing from some gallery, and those paintings are for sale. So it’s the ultimate in commercialism, if you want to look at it that way.

“I’m a big proponent of it,” Mr. Marzio added. “I prefer to see the art out there.”