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
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