Fine Arts News

Coca-Cola (3) was one of many of Warhol's pop art pieces, which celebrated popular culture and consumerism in post-World War II America.

Courtesy of Christie's
Coca-Cola (3) was one of many of Warhol's pop art pieces, which celebrated popular culture and consumerism in post-World War II America.
Courtesy of Christie's

On Tuesday, artist Andy Warhol's oversized and iconic Coca-Cola (3) will hit the auction block at Christie's, and to borrow an old slogan from the company, It's The Real Thing.

Warhol painted the 6-foot-tall black-and-white canvas in 1962 as part of a series of four Coke bottle paintings. According to Ted Ryan, archivist and historian at the Coca-Cola Co., Warhol had the paintings in his studio and invited his friend, Emile de Antonio, to come by and give him feedback.

"I think he was told No. 3 is it — just throw away No. 1," says Ryan, who added that Warhol had been struggling with different art styles at the time. "It wasn't until he did the series of Coke bottles and got the feedback ... that he found his genre."

Ryan says the artist chose the Coke bottle because of its ubiquity, pointing to a quote from Warhol himself:

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke ... All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it ... and you know it."

The artist later went on to depict other American brands, including Brillo, Campbell's Soup, General Electric, Heinz and Kellogg.

The Coke painting, which has been part of a private collection since 1995, could sell for more than $40 million — another Warhol piece, Coke Bottle (4), sold for $35.4 million a couple of years ago.

Coca-Cola itself holds more than 20 pieces of Warhol art. Ryan says the company never sent a cease-and-desist order to the artist asking him to stop using the company's logo and other trademarks, but rather they "acknowledged each other from afar."


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Museum director Alex Rueger (L) and Dutch artist Jeroen Krabbe stand in front of Vincent van Gogh's long-lost Sunset at Montmajour at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The 1888 landscape painting from the height of the Dutch master's career had been abandoned for years in a Norwegian attic on the belief that it was a forgery.

Art has been in the news a lot lately.
This past week a painting by Francis Bacon sold at Christie's for more than $142 million. This is the most money ever paid for a single artwork at auction. Last summer we learned that the venerable and now defunct New York art dealer Knoedler and Company had sold 40 paintings purporting to be by Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning and others that were actually counterfeits made by a man in a Queens garage studio. Last week a trove of art looted by the Nazis — hundreds of paintings — was found in an apartment in Munich.
We sometimes think of paintings as like autographs. It's only Mick Jagger's autograph if he signed it, with his very hand. And it's only a Vermeer, say, or a Rothko, if Vermeer or Rothko themselves actually made the pictures.
This makes good sense when it comes to autographs. A signature is a person's mark. By affixing our mark, we sign the deal; we make the commitment; we write the check. An autograph matters because it certifies.
But none of this is true of paintings.

We value paintings for their own qualities. If we also admire the painter, this is only because he or she managed to make objects whose value is otherwise manifest.

Perhaps, then, we should think of painting, not on the autograph model, but on what I'll call the architecture model.
Le Corbusier doesn't have to have built the structure for it to be an expression of his artistic accomplishment. And so with painters. It isn't the dubious magic of the artist's touch that is significant. What matters, rather, is the distinct achievement of the artist's conception, a conception than can be realized in different ways.

This idea shouldn't be too strange. It is widely known that Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens and other Great Masters ran workshops (factories) where assistants did significant portions of the actual labor. And no one seriously expects that Jeff Koons actually made the stainless steel "Balloon Dog Orange," which this week sold at auction for close to $60 million.

But there are borderline cases. Several months ago I discussed art historian Benjamin Binstock's remarkable proposal that a number of Vermeer's paintings were probably made by his daughter, who had labored, for a time, as his apprentice. Let us suppose that Binstock is right. Does this mean that these Vermeers are not Vermeers, that they are fakes? Well, it means that they were not painted by him; he did not apply the paint to the canvass. On the autograph conception, they aren't Vermeers. But on the architectural conception, quite possibly (not necessarily), they are. Maybe Vermeer found a new way to make paintings, a new method? He used his daughter!

This proposal has been advanced by the art critic Blake Gopnik. From Gopnik's standpoint, Vermeer's daughter's paintings are his paintings — making a host of assumptions about the facts of the case — because they are the realization and working out of the father's project.
It is an overly narrow and parochial conception of authorship — something like the autograph conception — that gets in the way of our appreciating that artists can do things, and make things, without actually doing them and making them.

Gopnik pushes this argument to its extreme in his recent NYT essay "In Praise of Art Forgeries." Forgers, Gopnik proposes, can be an art lover's friend.

Sometimes, they give us works that great artists simply didn't get around to making. If a fake is good enough to fool experts, then it's good enough to give the rest of us pleasure, even insight.

Why suppose that a work is a fake or a copy just because the artist himself didn't actually make it? What makes a fake a good one is that it realizes, or investigates, or approximates, an artist's contribution. It makes a move in a space of possibilities opened up by him or her. It is the very fact of the forgery's success that ensures that what the forger is doing is relevant and, potentially, a contribution to the original artist's work.

Gopnik invites us to think of the faker as a kind of faithful assistant who just happened to arrive after the artist's death, or who set himself to work without the artist's explicit permission.

This idea is an important one. It applies pressure to the idea that we know what it is for a painting to be a Vermeer or a Koons. Authorship, like the wider notion of agency itself, is fraught and delicate. And it is one of art's jobs to explore this.
Nevertheless, it is important to remember that, in the real world, we do not ever come up against forgeries that duplicate the qualities of their originals; we only ever come up against forgeries that seem to do this.
Yes, they may fool the experts, as Gopnik says. But only for now.

I don't mean to suggest that the experts will always get it right eventually, thanks to a kind of infallibility of expertise. Although there is actually something to this. Not because experts are so smart, but rather because forgers usually deploy devices that are only designed to pull the wool over the contemporary crowd; in the passage of time, significant stylistic difference emerges. (This familiar point was noted by Peter Schjeldahl, in his somewhat unfriendly response to Gopnik in The New Yorker).

No, the deeper point is that we need to guard against misunderstanding what it means for an expert, or anyone else, to get it right.
Judgments in matters of art are themselves only ever works in progress, revising themselves in light not only of an ongoing engagement with the work, but also a continuing dialogue with other artists and thinkers, past and present. What the art historian Meyer Schaprio called "critical seeing" is something we cultivate, spread out in time. From that standpoint, getting fooled about what you are seeing, needn't be a failure at all; it is, rather, a moment in an ongoing process.

Which takes us back to Gopnik's insight. He's right that our engagement with a forgery can enable us to achieve insight into the work and conceptions of the artist who has been copied. But not because it fools the experts. But precisely because, in time, it can't.

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Anselm Kiefer's Velimir Chlebnikov, a series of 30 paintings devoted to the Russian philosopher who posited that war is inevitable, is on display at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

MASS MoCA
Anselm Kiefer's Velimir Chlebnikov, a series of 30 paintings devoted to the Russian philosopher who posited that war is inevitable, is on display at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
MASS MoCA

Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945, in the Black Forest of southwest Germany, just as the Third Reich was collapsing.

"I was born in ruins, and for me, ruins are something positive," Kiefer says. "Because what you see as a child is positive, you know? And they are positive because they are the beginning of something new."

That history is always present in Kiefer's sculptures and paintings. One of the major figures in post-World War II German art, Kiefer has works in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Australia, among many others.



Narrow are the Vessels is made of concrete, rebar and rubble. Neighbors objected to the work when the owners, Andy and Christine Hall, displayed it in their front yard.


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  Radiante, Olga Albizu
  
  Man on Fire, Luis Jiménez
  
  
  Pariah, Marcos Dimas
  
  
  
  Malcolm X #3, Barbara Chase-Riboud

When the Whitney Museum of American Art announced the artists for its 2014 biennial, people took to the Internet to chime in about who's been included and who's been left out; the last biennial had been blasted for ignoring Latino artists. But when a new show opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum featuring only Latino artists — "Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art" — it was blasted for other reasons.
"Meaningless," wrote critic Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. In a review of the Smithsonian show, Kennicott was referring to the label "Latino art." (Yes, his word choice ticked off a lot of people, but more on that shortly.) Kennicott's point was that by grouping art by ethnicity, throwing together works by artists of different styles, periods and backgrounds, "you get a big mess."

Speaking to NPR, Kennicott defended his critique of the Smithsonian show:

"If we look at the art included in this exhibition, it includes everything from a Cuban exile who spent a lot of time in Paris and worked in a very cool, lovely, abstract style to Mexican-American artists who were doing a very political kind of art in Los Angeles. And one begins to wonder if there is, in fact, a lot in common between what they're doing."

So is there such a thing as "Latino art" or "Asian art" or "African-American art"? Are they "racial hang-ups," as African-American artist Raymond Saunders put it in his 1967 essay "Black is a color"? Or are they necessary categories that force white-run museums, publishers and concert halls to recognize artists of color?
These questions are at the heart of the debate ignited by Kennicott's word "meaningless."

"I was pretty stunned," says New York-based artist and filmmaker Alex Rivera. So he posted some angry comments about Kennicott's review on his Facebook page. Rivera told NPR that he and other artists have seen these reviews before. "Every so often there's a show, kind of like the one at the Smithsonian, that gathers our work together and gives it a venue," Rivera says. "And every time that happens, there's a review that says putting our work together is a bad way to organize art." Yet, Rivera says, critics rarely review the work itself. Rivera also notes that critics do not question such equally broad categories as "American" or "European" art.

It was a lively Facebook thread with several people in the Latino arts community chiming in. Artist Judithe Hernández wrote, for example: "When was the last time the Guggenheim, Whitney or MOMA, exhibited contemporary Latino American artists?"

Even Kennicott chimed in. "I was kind of the skunk at the party in those discussions," he says. "But I was interested because it was a good conversation." Kennicott was so interested, he invited Rivera to square off with him in The Washington Post.

Someone who didn't weigh in on the volatile discussion was Smithsonian curator Carmen Ramos. It took her three years to put together "Our America." With 92 artworks by 72 artists who have roots throughout Latin America, it's an extensive survey that covers the period from the mid-20th century to the present.

Ramos fully agrees the term "Latino art" is extremely broad. It's also extremely rich, she says, yet many of the artists in the Smithsonian show — regardless of style — have been ignored by mainstream museums. "We use the term 'Latino art' as a construct, as a handle, really, to talk about an absence in the way that we think about American art and culture. That's why the word 'presence' is in the subtitle. Presence is the opposite of absence," Ramos says.

But that brings up a larger issue: Are museums doing an artist a favor or a disservice when they group shows together around ethnicity or gender rather than aesthetics? Adrian Piper believes it's a disservice. She's a conceptual artist whose work is in the collections of major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She recently demanded that a film of hers be removed from a show of black performance art. Piper preferred not to be interviewed, but she sent NPR the email she sent to the show's curator. In it she wrote that "as a matter of principle," she does not allow her work to be exhibited in "all-black shows," because she believes these shows "perpetuate the segregation of African-American artists from the mainstream contemporary art world."

“ I would love to be in a universe where we don't need to have culturally specific museums because we do have a diverse museum world that represents all of us. ... But I don't live in that society right now.

- Arlene Davila, New York University


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Eugen Darie has admitted to being part of a Romanian gang that stole seven works by masters including Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse from a Rotterdam museum last October.

After admitting to one of the most surprising art thefts in recent history, two men have been sentenced to 6 years and 8 months in prison. They are part of a Romanian gang that stole seven works by masters including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin from a Rotterdam museum last autumn.

The value of the stolen art was estimated at more than $24 million when officials obtained insurance for the paintings. The thieves tripped the Kunstahl museum's alarm, but the thieves worked quickly and escaped before police arrived. The works have not been recovered; some were destroyed, officials say.

A Romanian court issued prison sentences Tuesday for Radu Dogaru and Eugen Darie, who pleaded guilty to the theft last month. Other charges and court cases are ongoing — including an effort to hold Dogaru's mother, Olga responsible for burning several of the paintings. She had apparently become worried that police were closing in on her son.

From Reuters:

"The works stolen were Picasso's Tête d'Arlequin, Matisse's La Liseuse en Blanc et Jaune, Monet's Waterloo Bridge, London and Charing Cross Bridge, London, Gauguin's Femme devant une fenêtre ouverte, Meijer De Haan's Autoportrait and Lucian Freud's Woman with Eyes Closed.
Romanian experts believe that three out of the seven paintings have been destroyed by fire. They said nails used to fasten the canvases to their wooden frames, recovered from the ashes in Dogaru's house, had been a crucial piece of evidence."

The idea of a thief destroying valuable art is "not surprising," as Robert Wittman, the former head of the FBI Art Crimes Team, told NPR this summer.

"And the reason that is," Wittman told NPR's Jacki Lyden, "is because, usually, the gangs that are involved in these things are not art thieves. They're just basically common criminals. They're good thieves, but they're terrible businessmen. And so they don't know what to do with the material after they steal it."
Wittman also noted that if the authorities' version of events is correct, Dogaru's mother isn't the first thief-mama to get antsy and destroy her son's loot. He cites the case of Stephane Breitwieser, who in 2002 was accused of stealing more than 200 pieces of art from European museums.

"As the French police closed in" in 2002, Wittman says, "his mother became upset, took all the material and threw it into a canal."
She also cut and hacked apart the art — in some cases forcing the remains down her kitchen sink's disposal.


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  Hence We Come, Norman Lewis
  
  
  
  A Slave Carrying Her Fate In Her Hands," Frances

Seventeen-year-old Tonisha Owens stared wide-eyed at the faded script on an 1854 letter. It was once carried by another 17-year-old — a slave named Frances. The letter was written by a plantation owner's wife to a slave dealer, saying that she needed to sell her chambermaid to pay for horses. But Frances didn't know how to read or write, and didn't know what she carried.
"She does not know she is to be sold. I couldn't tell her," the letter reads. "I own all her family and the leave taking would be so distressing that I could not."

That letter is among hundreds of documents, artifacts and artworks that make up the Kinsey Collection, which covers 400 years of African-American triumphs and tragedies. Bernard Kinsey and his wife, Shirley, began acquiring pieces more than 35 years ago and have said that Frances' letter speaks to the reality and greed of slavery.

Owens, a junior at Reginald F. Lewis High School, says it sent her a powerful message about the things African-Americans can do, sometimes under extreme duress.

"We accomplish so many things," Owens marveled. "They went through slavery and still accomplished. So we can't say, 'I'm tired, I don't feel like doing this.' That's not an excuse."

Owens was among a group of students touring an exhibition of the collection at Baltimore's Reginald F. Lewis Museum. The collection has made its way around the country, including a stint at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. A small portion of it is currently on display at the Epcot Center at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla.

Skipp Sanders, executive director at the Lewis Museum, says he has a particular interest in students seeing the exhibition. He also thinks it is important for people, especially African-Americans, to understand that the legacy of what black people have done is part of the fabric of American history.
"We've all, I think, even currently, gotten a sort of distorted picture of what American history is and how this contribution has to be woven in and through it," Sanders says.

He says he gets emotional viewing the original documents on display here, including the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case. There's also a final page, complete with the different-colored signatures of the Supreme Court justices, from the decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. But one of his favorite pieces is a letter written in 1942 by Zora Neale Hurston in which she decisively rejects an unwanted suitor.

"If you will be decent enough to die," Hurston writes, "I will buy me a red dress, send myself some flowers of congratulation and come to your funeral."

Bernard and Shirley Kinsey, along with their son Khalil, have chosen to share their collection because they say it spotlights not black pain, but the strength and resilience of African-Americans. Bernard Kinsey says he wants to end what he calls the "myth of absence," where the accomplishments of African-Americans aren't acknowledged.

"What we're saying," he told a group of journalists and admirers in Orlando, "is we want to put African-Americans in the dialogue, put us in the stories, 'cause if you get used to not seeing us, you start thinking that's OK, when it really isn't OK."

The Kinsey family is also very focused on what the collection means to young people who aren't learning about this history in school. Alexander Bullock, 17, says the exhibition changed his mind about a lot of things.

"It shows more of the people you don't hear about, or you don't really read about, or that the teachers don't talk about," Bullock says. "Everybody talks about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. .... But you don't really hear about the people they don't talk about, who didn't really get their names out there."

Bullock's classmate Dominic Gilliam, 16, was both stunned and inspired by the things he learned.
"When you just look at all these things, we have just as much power as anybody else," Gilliam said.
The Kinsey Collection is on display at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore through March 2014.


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b michael

Courtesy of b micheal America

After a brief career on Wall Street, veteran designer B Michael followed his calling to the world of fashion. He got his start as a millinery designer for the '80s soap opera Dynasty. Soon after, he began designing couture gowns leading him to work with an extensive client list that includes Cicely Tyson, Angela Basset, Lena Horne, Whitney Houston, and Cate Blanchett — to name a few.

After spending decades in the business B Michael says, "Every successful story will tell you they've had to reinvent themselves."

He sat down with NPR's Michel Martin to share the wisdom he's gathered over the years and what it takes to break into the fashion industry as a person of color.

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The boats of For Those in Peril on the Sea, by artist Hew Locke, hang in the entrance hall of the Perez Art Museum Miami, which opens this week.

Daniel Azoulay/Perez Art Museum Miami

Outside the glittering new Perez Art Museum Miami, finishing touches were still being applied late last month to the spacious plazas and gardens surrounding the $220 million building. Next door to the art museum, a new science museum is also going up. When it's all complete, the 29-acre Museum Park will provide a focus and a gathering spot on Biscayne Bay for those who live in, work in and visit downtown Miami.

The Perez building, designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, has been described, and often, as stunning. It's notable for its spare, rectangular lines and expanse of glass windows — the largest hurricane-impact-resistant glass windows in the world — and for the 70 hydroponic gardens hanging from every side. They were designed by French landscape artist Patrick Blanc, and they're self-watering.


The distinctive museum building, designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, has already been hailed as a success for the city.


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Norman Rockwell's 1951 painting Saying Grace sold for $46 million Wednesday — a record for the artist.

Three Norman Rockwell paintings sold for a combined total of nearly $58 million at a Sotheby's auction Wednesday. The three paintings, which had long been displayed in a Massachusetts museum named for the artist, were among 10 Rockwell works sold at auction today.

By far, the star of the bunch was the 1951 masterpiece Saying Grace, which sold for $46 million — a record for Rockwell's art. The price includes a buyer's premium. The AP says the artist's previous record of $15 million had been set by Breaking Home Ties at a 2006 Sotheby's auction.

The famous Saying Grace depicts a woman and boy bowing their heads in prayer at a table in a bustling restaurant, as other patrons pause for a moment to look on.

Before the auction, Saying Grace had been expected to garner between $15 million and $20 million. The painting by the beloved Saturday Evening Post illustrator has been exhibited in more than a dozen museums around America.



Rockwell's The Gossips, seen here in a detail view, sold for nearly $8.5 million Wednesday. To see the full painting, click the image.


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Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring is one of 15 17th century Dutch paintings on view at New York's Frick Collection through early 2014.

Some years ago, I wrote a poem called "Why I Love Vermeer," which ends "I've never lived in a city without a Vermeer." I could say that until 1990, when Vermeer's exquisite painting The Concert was one of the masterpieces stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It's still missing. The French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, who loved that Vermeer, put together a show called Last Seen, a series of photographs of the empty frames of the stolen paintings, combined with comments on the paintings by people who worked at the museum. It's a haunting and elegant show, though seeing this exhibit, which is now on view at the Gardner, then walking through the rooms with the empty frames still in place, made me feel more melancholy and hopeless than ever about this enormous loss.

One consolation for me is to see all the other Vermeers I can. No city in the world has more of them — eight — than New York. But right now there's even one more. Through Jan. 19, at the Frick Collection — my favorite museum in New York, partly because of its own three Vermeers — there's a show of 15 paintings on loan from the Mauritshuis, the great Dutch museum in The Hague. The centerpiece of the show is one of the world's most beloved paintings: Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring. Cleaned and restored since I first saw it, it's even more breathtaking than I remembered.

“ The young girl, wearing a blue and yellow silk turban, is just turning her face to watch you entering the room. She may even be slightly distracted by someone else a little off to your right, maybe someone she knows better than you.

- Lloyd Schwartz

At the Frick, it gets a room all to itself. The young girl, wearing a blue and yellow silk turban, is just turning her face to watch you entering the room. She may even be slightly distracted by someone else a little off to your right, maybe someone she knows better than you. Her mouth is slightly open, as if she's just taking a breath and is about to say something. The light falling on her is reflected not only on her earring but in her large shining eyes ("Those are pearls that were his eyes," Shakespeare's Ariel sings in The Tempest) and on her moist lips. There's even a little spot of moisture in one corner of her mouth.

Art historians tell us that this painting was not intended as a portrait, but was a type of painting — a study of a figure in an exotic costume. But there's something so particular about this girl's beauty and expression, she seems much more than just a model. Her presence is totally palpable. She's right there, in the room with you and radiating unique and individual life.

In the next room are 14 more paintings from The Hague, including Carel Fabritius' magical little goldfinch, the painting from which Donna Tartt gets the name of her latest novel, and Jacob van Ruisdael's small but expansive landscape of the bleaching fields outside the city of Haarlem (a sublime picture that's more than two-thirds sky), plus four marvelous Rembrandts. But there's really only one reason so many people are lining up to see this show.

You can also see the Frick's own Vermeers. This is a rare occasion when all three are exhibited together, on a wall that allows you to see them more closely and in better light than in their usual locations. The poignant Officer and Laughing Girl is my personal favorite, but so is the ravishing Mistress and Maid, in which a woman wearing another pearl earring, writing a letter, is interrupted by her maid handing a letter to her — maybe from the same person she's just been writing to?

I still needed to see more Vermeers, and there are five more at the Metropolitan Museum, half a mile up Fifth Avenue. For the first time all of them, including another painting of a young woman with a huge pearl earring, have also been gathered into the same room. It's a rare chance to see so many Vermeers together, to compare the subtle and sometimes dramatic differences.

One more thing: the scholarship on Girl with a Pearl Earring reveals that the pearl isn't really a pearl. No pearl that big has ever come to light. No oyster could be big enough. So the famous pearl is probably just glass painted to look like a pearl. But of course the pearl — the pearl of great price, perhaps — is a visual metaphor for the girl wearing it: glistening, radiant, a creature brought to life by light itself. Or if not the girl, then Vermeer's painting of her.


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