Art in America articles from March 2006

Art in America archives from March 2006

Austria to relinquish Klimt paintings.
March 1, 2006... In a dramatic conclusion to a nearly eight-year-long legal struggle that, along the way, has involved the Austrian government, the U.S. Supreme Court and murky doings in Nazi-occupied Vienna, an Austrian arbitration court ruled in January that...

Antiquities settlement on the horizon for the Met and Getty?(FRONT PAGE)
March 1, 2006... As Italy continues its dogged pursuit of antiquities looted from its soil, American museums are beginning to negotiate arrangements with Italian culture ministry officials to obviate legal actions like the one taken against the Getty Museum and...

Lost & found.
March 1, 2006... Winter brought mixed news on the European art-heist front, as one major work was recovered and a raft of others disappeared. Benvenuto Cellini On Jan. 22, an exquisite gold-and-ebony saltcellar by Benvenuto Cellini, stolen in 2003 from...

NYC armory transformation.(FRONT PAGE)
March 1, 2006... In January, the Seventh Regiment Armory Conservancy announced that a plan long in the works to convert the Seventh Regiment Armory at Park Avenue and 67th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan into a center for the visual and performing...

Journalist sues MOMA and NPR.(Museum of Modern Art (New York, New York))(National Public Radio)
March 1, 2006... Last year, veteran arts journalist David 'Arcy's 21-year-long association with National Public Radio came to an end following his controversial broadcast about an Egon Schiele painting that is the object of a Holocaust-ownership-related claim...

Duchamp's Dada Pissoir attack.(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... On Jan. 4, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain was vandalized while on view in the "Dada" exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris. Pierre Pinoncelli, a 77-year-old French performance artist, was arrested at the scene after hitting the work with a...

William Rubin, 1927-2006.(FRONT PAGE)(Obituary)
March 1, 2006... William S. Rubin, who died on Jan. 22 at age 78, was best known for his 15-year tenure as director of the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. He was responsible for an extraordinary series of exhibitions and...

On willful objects.(Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life)(What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images)(Book Review)
March 1, 2006... Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life, by Arthur C. Danto, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005; 384 pages, $27. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, by W.J.T. Mitchell, Chicago, University of...

Ecstasy now: a recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art updated the age-old theme of drugs and art.(REPORT FROM LOS ANGELES)
March 1, 2006... The word "ecstasy," once the near-exclusive property of sexual libertines and religious visionaries, has in recent years gained currency as the name of a psychotropic drug embraced by underground club-goers. The entertaining exhibition...

Critic's beat: a recent exhibition in a New York gallery presented working materials from the files of Kim Levin, a longtime art critic for the Village Voice.(ARCHIVES)
March 1, 2006... If collections are created through the deliberate decision to acquire certain objects, archives develop less intentionally. Generally, they are byproducts of the daily life of an institution or an individual, a sum of the items that accumulate...

Clamor and quiet: concurrent museum surveys of work by two important figures evoked contrasting impulses in postwar Japanese art.(REPORT FROM JAPAN)
March 1, 2006... Back in 1990, two very different traveling shows presented truths of contemporary Japanese art: "Against Nature" concentrated on artifice and energy while "A Primal Spirit" embodied serenity and profundity. The same expressive poles could be...

Boston light: daguerreotypes by Southworth & Hawes convey mid-19th-century America through its luminaries and ordinary citizens.(PHOTOGRAPHY)
March 1, 2006... A daguerreotype is a photographic image recorded by a fine deposit of metallic mercury on a very thin layer of pure silver laid onto a thicker copper plate. The polished plate is made light-sensitive by exposing the silver surface to fumes of...

Divided we stand: in a recent exhibition, Hans Haacke used patriotic symbolism to address his concerns about the internal conflict haunting the United States.
March 1, 2006... What if Hans Haacke's recent gallery exhibition "State of the Union," whose centerpiece was 50 stars on a floor-to-ceiling blue banner ripped down the middle nearly in two, had been at a major museum? It might well have provoked angry headlines...

Kiefer as occult poet: a currently traveling survey of Anselm Kiefer's work re-assesses his career, downplaying political controversy in favor of transhistorical mysticism.(Anselm Kiefer)
March 1, 2006... From the beginning, reaction to Anselm Kiefer's work has been polarized. His remarkable early success, and enthusiastic acclaim by museums and collectors, soon produced a backlash. The critical left (Benjamin Buchloh, notably) dismissed him as...

Rhythmic lines: Van Gogh's drawings.
March 1, 2006... Vran Gogh--or Vincent, as he preferred to be known--wrote to his art-dealer brother Theo in early September 1880, having recently decided to become an artist: "Now I look at things with different eyes than I did before I began to draw." (1)...

House of Huang: Paris-based Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping's eclectic sculptures and installations are the subject of a traveling retrospective now on view at MASS MoCA.
March 1, 2006... Rhetoric designed to inculcate fear and nationalism thrives on the representation of complex forces as a set of simple oppositions--Us vs. Them, Good vs. Evil, West vs. East. By contrast, "House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective,"...

The melancholy gang: Eugene Berman and his circle: Eugene Berman and the neo-Romantics are the focus of a museum exhibition currently touring the U.S. Infrequently shown in recent years, the artists seem newly relevant to contemporary trends.
March 1, 2006... The ongoing reassessment of 20th-century art prompted by curators, critics and art historians continues apace, spurred along by the 20/20 hindsight that comes with the new century. Adjustments to the art-historical canon of the period are...

Look again: surveying Richard Pettibone: in an exhibition that covers 40 years of work, Richard Pettibone is shown to be a maverick appropriator, an erudite if irreverent connoisseur and an enduring original.
March 1, 2006... From the perspective of the 1980s, when Sherrie Levine was re-photographing Edward Weston images and Richard Prince aimed his camera at the Marlboro Man, it was easy to think that appropriation was something radical, new and resoundingly...

At cross purposes: as initially entranced by Picasso's work as he was later dismissive of it, John Graham went on to pursue his own, ever more esoteric vision--both of painting and of the women who were his primary subject.
March 1, 2006... The Allan Stone Gallery's recent show of paintings and drawings by John Graham (1886-1961)--a mini-retrospective, really--gave us a rare opportunity to take a detailed look at one of the most interesting American artists of his time. John...

The heart at midnight: for over four decades, painter Bill Rice drew inspiration from the street life of New York's East Village. His rarely seen work was the subject of a recent exhibition.
March 1, 2006... It has been just over 20 years since poet Rene Ricard's article on New York painter Bill Rice ("An Art of Regret") appeared in the summer issue of Artforum. The feature opened with a reproduction of a Brice Marden drawing. Although Rice (who...

Mike Kelley at Gagosian.
March 1, 2006... NEW YORK Mike Kelley's transformation of this ordinarily sepulchral space was a technical feat, but the visual and auditory barrage of "Day Is Done," the artist's first show at Gagosian, was equaled by the humor and pathos of its subject...

Mona Hatoum at Alexander and Bonin.
March 1, 2006... With a poetic style related to both Surrealism and Minimalism, Mona Hatoum's sculpture over the last two decades has been a sustained meditation on the mortification of the body. A Beirut-born, London-based Palestinian, Hatoum gave up...

Michael Joo at the Bohen Foundation.
March 1, 2006... "Still Lives," the recent exhibition of sculpture and video at the Bohen Foundation by Korean-American artist Michael Joo, was captivating if enigmatic. Joo continued his use of animal forms and video, as well as his ongoing exploration of...

Christian Schumann at Leo Koenig.
March 1, 2006... Christian Schumann, formerly based in New York and now in Los Angeles, has undergone a stylistic shift as well as a geographic change. At this recent Chelsea show, Schumann, in a surprising departure from the crowded, boisterous compositions of...

Sergej Jensen at Anton Kern.
March 1, 2006... Although Sergej Jensen titled his first New York solo show "Paintings," there was scarcely any paint to behold in this exhibition. The Danish-born, Berlin-based artist instead presented 16 works made primarily from fabric (all 2005). Stretched...

Gary Kuehn at Esso.
March 1, 2006... The gestural activity central to Gary Kuehn's recent exhibition of scrolls and other paintings primarily involved impressions from inked lengths of rope or chain stretched between the artist and an assistant, one at each end of a panel or sheet...

John Chamberlain at PaceWildenstein.
March 1, 2006... In their exuberant couplings, reflective surfaces, expressive palette and remarkable way of being in the world, John Chamberlain's recent sculptures show the generosity of spirit that has buoyed his practice for 50 years. They inaugurated...

Michael S. Riedel at David Zwirner.
March 1, 2006... In this irreverent year-end exhibition, Berlin-based Michael S. Riedel appropriated and deconstructed recent paintings by his countryman Neo Rauch that had occupied the same gallery late last spring. Riedel confidently approached Rauch's...

Brigid Berlin at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller.
March 1, 2006... Chelsea girl and Warhol superstar, Brigid Berlin is increasingly recognized as a conceptual artist of no mean stature, as this gathering of boldface-name material from her archive served to document. A daughter of the head of Hearst...

Mike Bidlo at Francis M. Naumann.
March 1, 2006... In the catalogue essay for Mike Bidlo's show, "Erased de Kooning Drawings," Robert Rosenblum describes a 2003 performance in which Bidlo displayed what appeared to be a drawing by de Kooning that he then silently erased, stopping only when the...

Jonathan Santlofer at Pavel Zoubok.
March 1, 2006... Blending fact and fiction in paintings and works on paper, the artist and novelist Jonathan Santlofer explores art-historical moments as they might have been, liberally supported by the manufacture of ephemera. using a variety of mediums and...

Shirin Neshat at Barbara Gladstone.
March 1, 2006... The video installations of Shirin Neshat often employ stylized formal devices to poetically address social relations in fundamentalist Islamic societies. Since their first appearance in 1997, Neshat's dual-screen projections of stark,...

Sarah Morris at Friedrich Petzel.
March 1, 2006... With a high level of access made possible by her success in the worlds of art and film, video artist and painter Sarah Morris takes a CinemaScope 35mm camera to Hollywood for her fifth film, a 26-minute montage titled Los Angeles. Projected...

Ken Schles at Lucas Schoormans.
March 1, 2006... Ken Schles's first book of photographs, Invisible City (1988), captured a time and place in the cultural history of New York's Lower East Side: the graffiti on brick facades, an ashtray and a pack of smokes, a black-stockinged woman romping...

Mike Disfarmer at Edwynn Houk and Steven Kasher.
March 1, 2006... In the category of artistic "finds," Mike Disfarmer was a legend even before two simultaneous exhibitions of his vintage prints went on view this fall. The work of the Heber Springs, Ark., portrait photographer, who died in 1959, was first...

John Ferren at Katharina Rich Perlow.
March 1, 2006... The colorful hard-edge paintings in this attractive show represented the last body of work by John Ferren (d. 1970), who began to execute it after a 196364 stay in Beirut and elsewhere in the Middle East, Pakistan and India (as the first...

Anne Tabachnick at Lori Bookstein.
March 1, 2006... A student of Hans Hofmann, Nell Blaine and William Baziotes, Anne Tabachnick (1927-1995) pursued figurative ends through controlled, cerebrally expressive means. Her considerable achievement included some two dozen solo shows and notable...

Radcliffe Bailey at Jack Shainman.
March 1, 2006... While Radcliffe Bailey's use of deep frames and Plexiglas glazing in these new paintings suggests the tradition of the reliquary, the frames also help maintain the works' physical integrity and support their structure. He calls them "cabinets,"...

James Hayward at Cue Art Foundation.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2006... This was California painter James Hayward's first solo exhibition in New York in 16 years. The show, curated by fellow artist Mike Kelley, consisted of 12 monochrome paintings, each titled Abstract and assigned a number. All the works are oil...

Daniel Zeller at Pierogi.
March 1, 2006... Daniel Zeller's latest series of meticulous drawings would be appealing to anyone who has ever lost track of time thumbing through antique maps, or found themselves lingering over scientific reproductions of cellular diagrams. Appropriately...

Mark Heyer at Lohin Geduld.
March 1, 2006... Nineteen small-scale oil-on-panel paintings constituted Mark Heyer's first solo show with the gallery. His landscapes and figure groups have a naive, limned quality that is captivating and entertaining. In a modicum of space--the largest work...

Roland Flexner at Caren Golden.
March 1, 2006... Every one of the 25 small (7 by 5 1/2 inches) untitled ink abstractions by Roland Flexner in "Nocturne," his third exhibition at Caren Golden, demands and repays close scrutiny (all untitled, 2005). The works' uniformity of size, medium and...

Lordy Rodriguez at Clementine.
March 1, 2006... For about a decade, Lordy Rodriguez, a Filipino-born artist raised in Texas and living in California, has been drawing maps, state by state, of his own version of America. In these drawings, which at first glance very convincingly mimic actual...

Jaye Moon at Newman Popiashvili.
March 1, 2006... At least from the time Duchamp created his Boite-en-Valise, refashioning the suitcase as a portable museum, artists have produced luggage that comments, ironically or sincerely, on topics ranging from art and design to the excesses of consumer...

Emily Cheng and Ran Hwang at 2 x 13.(exhibitions of paintings inspired by Buddhism )
March 1, 2006... Emily Cheng is an American artist of Chinese descent and Ran Hwang is a Korean who has lived in the United States since 1997. "Refresh!" their two-person exhibition, curated by the critic Lilly Wei, explored from its Western perspective...

Herman Cherry at David Findlay Jr.
March 1, 2006... Herman Cherry (1909-1992) once said that, for him, colors are humanoid things: they meet, separate, have weight or lightness, are warm or cold, sympathetic or antagonistic. An exhibition last season featuring 15 paintings the artist made...

Ron Milewicz at George Billis.
March 1, 2006... Ron Milewicz's third show at Billis, of recent paintings, included several of an industrial stretch of New York City landscape that unfolds toward the distant, crenellated skyline of Manhattan. Turning his back to the residential blocks of...

Jack Youngerman at the Drawing Room.
March 1, 2006... Over the course of a career spanning more than 50 years, Jack Youngerman has created a focused and resonant vocabulary of abstract images. Those images, inspired by the forms and processes of the natural world, and informed equally by the high...

Greg Mencoff at Bernard Toale.
March 1, 2006... Boston-based Greg Mencoff may have in mind carved furniture, architectural moldings, frame stock and skeleton engineering when he builds his small-to-medium-size finely crafted wall-hung sculptures made primarily of painted wood. Yet these...

Siebren Versteeg at Rhona Hoffman and Polvo.
March 1, 2006... Siebren Versteeg is a multimedia artist who, in addition to writing his own software code, co-opts online media and commercial databases to create hi-tech works that critique the very sources he usurps. In two recent exhibitions, Versteeg...

Bill Haveron at Gerald Peters.
March 1, 2006... Bill Haveron is a narrative artist who tells two kinds of stories in three distinct styles. The artist spent much of his 1960s childhood in a honky-tonk run by his parents in Huntsville, Tex. For paintings that depict this world, he employs a...

Kim Moss at Phil Space.
March 1, 2006... For his first one-person show, Santa Fe-based artist Kim Moss filled the gallery's walls with recent oil-on-canvas landscape and still-life paintings, ranging in size from 12 by 16 to 58 by 56 1/2 inches. Enhanced by their wide black wooden...

Pegan Brooke at R.B. Stevenson.
March 1, 2006... The focal points of Pegan Brooke's oil paintings of the last two decades were images of shells, bones, bits of wire and stones that she'd collected on city streets and beaches. Now, she has in effect plucked those little relics off the surface,...

Raymond Saunders at Stephen Wirtz.
March 1, 2006... Raymond Saunders's work is about passion--the passion for making paintings, which for this artist has remained unabated since his first solo show in his native Pittsburgh in 1953. His work as a collagist, in particular, can be traced back to...

Mark R. Smith at Elizabeth Leach.
March 1, 2006... In this exhibition of lively fabric-collage paintings and stuffed-vinyl sculptures (all 2005), Mark Smith addressed the spontaneous, ephemeral communities that emerge at concerts and sporting events. Temporarily united in esthetic experience,...

Maurizio Pellegrin at various venues.
March 1, 2006... Maurizio Pellegrin's "Isole," which took place in eight major Venetian museums simultaneously, including the Doge's Palace and the Correr Museum, was an unprecedented undertaking for a contemporary artist working in that storied city....

Art schools.(Directory)
March 1, 2006... NEW ENGLAND The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University Office of Admissions 700 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02215 617-585-6710 or Toll Free 800-773-0494 x6710 www.aiboston.edu * admissions@aiboston.edu ...

International Association of Art Critics (AICA).(Awards & Grants)(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... John Russell was recently honored by the U.S. chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) for his contribution to the field of art criticism. Among other posts, he was chief critic of the New York Times from 1982 to 1990. His...

Lynne Cooke, curator of the Dia Art Foundation, and Vasif Kortun, curator of Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul, are winners of the 2006 Award for Curatorial Excellence.(Awards & Grants)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2006... Lynne Cooke, curator of the Dia Art Foundation, and Vasif Kortun, curator of Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul, are winners of the 2006 Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in...

Jamaica-born, Brooklyn-based Dave McKenzie has been awarded the 2005 William H. Johnson Prize.(Awards & Grants)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2006... Jamaica-born, Brooklyn-based Dave McKenzie has been awarded the 2005 William H. Johnson Prize. The $25,000 annual prize is given to early career African-American artists by the Beverly Hills-based William H. Johnson Foundation for the Arts.

Joan Mitchell Foundation.(Awards & Grants)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2006... The Joan Mitchell Foundation has given 25 grants to painters and sculptors. Artists receiving $25,000 each are Ray Abeyta, Manuel Acevedo, Sachiko Akiyama, Chris Ballantyne, Willie M. Birch, Rosalyn Bodycomb, Steven Deo, Mark Dion, Wei Dong,...

Obituaries.(ARTWORLD)(Obituary)
March 1, 2006... Nam June Paik, 73, video art pioneer, died Jan. 29 in Miami Beach after a long illness, as this issue went to press. A full obituary will appear in the April issue. Bill Rice, 74, artist, actor and director, died Jan. 23 in Manhattan of...

Mimmo Rotella 1918-2006.(ARTWORLD)(Obituary)
March 1, 2006... Italian artist Mimmo Rotella died Jan. 8, in Milan, following a long illness; he was 87. Rotella was best known for his decollages, artfully torn multilayered wafers of advertising posters that he scavenged from the streets. In his early works,...

Drawing Center to South Street?(ARTWORLD)(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... In mid-December, the Drawing Center announced that it had found a tentative new location at New Market, on Pier 18 on South Street, alongside the South Street Seaport on the East River in Lower Manhattan. The site would allow the institution to...

Fire at Art in America's offices.(ARTWORLD)(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... On the night of Saturday, Jan. 21, a five-alarm fire broke out in Art in America's office building at 575 Broadway, which also houses two other Brant Publications titles (Interview and The Magazine Antiques), as well as offices for the...

Plug pulled on arts program.(ARTWORLD)
March 1, 2006... The state-run Missouri Arts Council recently announced that it has cancelled part of its arts-funding program. Beginning in July, it will cease to distribute annual grants from its Capital Incentive Program (CIP) to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of...

Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art + Design.(People)(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... Paul Greenhalgh is the new director and president of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art + Design in Washington, D.C. For the past five years he served as president of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and was previously...

Cleveland Museum of Art.(Timothy Rub appointed)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2006... Timothy Rub, director of the Cincinnati Art Museum for six years, has resigned to become director and CEO of the Cleveland Museum of Art. He will oversee completion of the Cleveland Museum's $258-million renovation and Timothy Rub. ex-pansion...

Guggenheim Museum.(Alexandra Munroe appointed)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2006... Alexandra Munroe, vice president of arts and culture at the Japan Society gallery in New York from 1998 to 2005, has been named senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum, a newly created position. She guest-curated the 1994 survey of...

Lucas Schoormans Gallery.(People)
March 1, 2006... Marcia Vetrocq, senior editor at A.i.A. for seven years, recently left to become director of Lucas Schoormans Gallery in New York.

$101-million gift to Princeton.(Princeton University)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2006... Art collector, philanthropist and automobile insurance maven Peter B. Lewis recently gave $101 million to his alma mater, Princeton University. The funds will be used to develop the school's creative and performing arts curriculum and to launch...

Donor blows whistle on Met sale.(ARTWORLD)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2006... As a number of U.S. art museums continue to put major works from their permanent collections up for auction again this year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was recently stopped from selling at least one piece, a large abstract steel sculpture...