Art Photos mixed

The Outsider...,
Photo by Malika F. Farman...,
France

What do Ben Affleck and Miss Universe have in common with the Frieze art fair? Quite a lot, it seems, given that all three now have ties to the entertainment and sports branding group WME IMG. In the run-up to Frieze New York’s fourth edition, which opens to VIPs on 4 May, the fair and the mega-agent announced a “new strategic partnership” last month.Few details are available, although parties close to the deal dismiss the view that it is an immediate, long-sought sale of the fair on the part of Frieze’s founders, Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover. Speculation about what the partnership really means for the fair franchise ranges from the likelihood of a new event on the West Coast to a possible new venue for Frieze in London.
Not so long ago, the combination of a glitzy global marketing agency and an upstart London art fair would have seemed incongruous. “Frieze was started by a group of people who had never organised an art fair before and had a naïve optimism about it. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did,” says Andrew Renton, the director of Marlborough Contemporary gallery. The partnership with WME IMG—itself a joint venture, created when two of the biggest talent agencies in the US merged in 2009—“potentially takes it to another level”, Renton says.

“It’s all about entertainment these days,” says Anthony Wilkinson, the founder of Wilkinson Gallery (C14). As the international art market has ballooned, artists themselves have become stars. Last year, United Talent Agency, which represents Harrison Ford and Gwyneth Paltrow, launched a fine arts division to fund artists’ projects, including a new documentary about Maurizio Cattelan that debuted in New York last week.

This new reality is evident in the Frieze tent. Theatrical projects include a live donkey (courtesy of Cattelan) and a generous pickpocket (masterminded by David Horvitz). Individual stands also provide diversions: a rotating cast of actors is due to perform Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculpture, a 60-second shot of performance art, at Lehmann Maupin (C13) on 4 and 5 May. On Art:Concept’s stand (B56), visitors can play a recreated 1963 board game by Jean-Michel Sanejouand and share the results on social media.


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Reading the 899 pages of Eva Hesse’s diaries from the 1950s and 1960s, which have been excerpted but never published in full until now, feels like eavesdropping on a young, ambitious woman’s psychotherapy sessions. While struggling to make great work, the late German-born, US-raised artist confesses to attacks of self-doubt and anxiety, acute fears of abandonment and, on occasion, fears of getting fat. She tracks her moods, winter colds, her PMS and the disintegration of her brief marriage to the sculptor Tom Doyle. Inspired, no doubt, by her ongoing therapy sessions, she also records her dreams. In her nightmares, a German shepherd and Nazi-like officers chase after her.Given their use as therapeutic tool, the diaries give an intimate but radically incomplete view of Hesse—one that makes her seem forever stymied as an artist. (When she is working, she is not writing as much.) The startlingly original, fragile-but-powerful sculptures and drawings that made her the subject of celebrated posthumous surveys (from the Whitechapel Gallery in London to the Guggenheim in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others) hardly even figure in the entries apart from an occasional shopping list, like: “2 wires + weights + tape + thin foam rubber”.



Eva Hesse in 1966. Photo by Gretchen Lambert. From Eva Hesse, a film by Marcie Begleiter, a Zeitgeist Films release.

Yet the publication of the diaries (in spell-corrected but otherwise unaltered form, says the editor Barry Rosen) is a welcome event, offering a portrait of a young artist determined to take a seat at a male-dominated table—or a spot in their shows. The book benefits from being read alongside a new documentary, now showing at Film Forum in New York, by Marcie Begleiter, who draws on Hesse’s diaries and correspondence as well as new interviews (with Nancy Holt, Sylvia and Robert Mangold and Lucy Lippard, among others). Together, the book and film show how, despite and because of her anxiety, Hesse made profoundly eccentric, often self-repeating, sculptures—by turns prickly, lumpy and loopy—that both speak to and stand apart from standard minimalist art of the 1960s.The film and journals cover some familiar ground: her travel by Kindertransport out of Nazi Germany to a detention centre in Amsterdam, aged two, her bipolar mother’s death by suicide when she was almost 10 and the brain tumour that killed her, aged 34, in 1970. But beyond these dramatic bookend moments, the book and film provide some new insight into the central relationships and preoccupations of Hesse’s life—which is, perhaps inescapably, part of how we read her art. Here are four of the most interesting discoveries.

Behind one powerful woman is another powerful woman

While the support from some big (male) guns of minimalism like Mel Bochner and Sol LeWitt certainly helped advance Hesse’s reputation, feminist critics starting with Lippard have worked tirelessly to carve out a place for her in 20th-century art history. But working more quietly behind the scenes, without art history expertise, is Eva’s older sister, Helen Hesse Charash, now in her 80s. She is the one who held Eva’s hand when they took the Kindertransport train out of Nazi Germany and has long overseen the estate, represented by Hauser & Wirth. Her appearances in the documentary show just how thoughtful Hesse Charash has been with her younger sister’s legacy, starting with a clip in which she handily dispels the myth of the artist as a tragic, 19th-century-style heroine. “There were times she felt helpless, but she had gutsiness right from the get-go,” Hesse Charash says. All great artists should be so fortunate to be remembered with complexity and clarity both.

Hesse’s marriage to Tom Doyle was violent

Many critics identify Hesse’s painful stay in Kessig, Germany in 1964-65 with her new husband, the sculptor Tom Doyle, as a seminal period. During this time, she is said to have grown from a painter into a sculptor, literally picking up ropes off the floor of the studio—a former weaving factory—to make new work. The standard story also describes how the implosion of her turbulent marriage caused a redoubling of her own sense of purpose at work. The journals make it clear there was physical violence as well. He broke a wooden bed frame. He pushed and shoved. And on October 19 1964, he poked her eye. “[P]ain terrible. The under lid of my upper lid is hurt and I feel emotionally depleted. How wasted these times are for me. And if only they would not recur,” she writes. Doyle appears in the film briefly and sheepishly chalks up their rough relationship to his drinking. “Our private life was not so great, but our working life was very good. Except I drank a little too much then, you know, I was drinking a lot, and that wasn’t so good.” Hesse Charash, her sister, says in the film: “She always says, it’s art that pulled her through. Personally, I think she fell apart, and professionally she forced herself to go on.”





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One of the most spectacular art installations planned for New York, a project known as the 14th Factory, was due to launch later this month at 23 Wall Street, the lavish former HQ of JP Morgan & Company. The seven-storey extravaganza would have featured works by more than 30 artists, but the spectacle never got off the ground because there were “all sorts of hurdles to get the project moving”, says the man behind the venture, Hong Kong-based artist Simon Birch. He raised more than $3m, but stresses that “production costs rose at the last minute which caused delays. The decision to delay wasn't taken lightly.” Birch remains unbowed though, saying: “I'm off to Los Angeles and Hong Kong to look for alternatives and also see if we are able to go ahead in New York at a later date, or in an alternative venue there.” His final thoughts? “The 14th Factory has been an adventure, a journey, so perhaps this is just the part of the story where it's darkest before the dawn.”


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Happy Sunday
Photo by Felicity Berkleef

Laurence Stephen Lowry, The Black Church, 1964 (est. £120,000-£180,000)

The late Sixties icon and TV star, Cilla Black, was passionate about the paintings of L.S. Lowry, the artist famous for his grainy, grey depictions of northern industrial Britain in the 20th century. The Scouse singer quietly acquired*three works by the Lancashire-born artist, which*go under the hammer at Sotheby's London on 13 June (Family Group, 1938; The Black Church, 1964; The Spire, 1949). "Introduced to buying art by [her manager Brian] Epstein, from the start Cilla bought what she loved and could relate to, drawn to Lowry in particular as he was the painter of the very world she grew up in," a Sotheby's press statement says. Cilla Black's sons describe how they grew up with the paintings which hung in their living room.

"The third Lowry they bought, The Black Church, was actually a surprise for mum that dad bought for her 50th birthday. By then he knew which particular works by the artist would appeal to her and the ‘Black’ in the title had additional resonance," they add. The three paintings have a total estimate of £520,000 to £830,000.

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Simple Morning of My Landscape
Photo by Bertoni Siswanto

Hermann Ludwig Heinrich, Count (later Prince) of Pückler-Muskau (1785-1871) was an aristocrat, officer, landowner, womaniser, fortune hunter, dandy and traveller. The publication of his letters (1830-32) about his experiences looking for a wealthy wife while visiting numerous country houses in England (where he was affectionately known as Pickling-Mustard) was a German and British best-seller that paid for the massive “picturesque” development of his estate, Muskau, in Upper Lusatia (now astride the Neisse River between Germany and Poland). He published his gardening ideas, heavily indebted to Humphry Repton, in Remarks on Landscape Gardening in 1834, but in 1845 he sold the estate and began all over again at Branitz, near Cottbus, where he was buried in a pyramid of his own design. A show at the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, tells this story in documentary and art-historical detail. On the roof terrace will be a Pückler-Muskau-inspired garden.


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In my dreams
Photo by Sherin Atrouni

Spring Festival
Photo by Jae Youn Ryu