"Heir to 10,000 Picassos Is Ready to Cash Out" @nyt by Doreen Carvajal



MARSEILLE, FRANCE:  Since Marina Picasso was a child, living on the edge of poverty and lingering at the gates of a French villa with her father to plead for an allowance from her grandfather, Pablo Picasso, she has struggled with the burden of that artist's towering legacy.

When she was in her 20s and inherited the 19th-century villa, La Californie, as well as a vast trove of Picasso's art treasures, she turned the paintings to face the walls in resentment. Through 15 years of therapy, she dissected bitter family memories of her grandfather's perceived indifference and her brother's suicide. In her 2001 memoir, "Picasso: My Grandfather," she bared her pain and anger at the Picasso clan.

Now 64, Picasso acknowledges that she is expanding her rebellion by preparing to sell off many of his artworks to finance and broaden her philanthropy - aid for a pediatric hospital in Vietnam and projects in France and Switzerland benefiting the elderly and troubled teenagers.

And her unconventional sales approach is reverberating through international art markets, worried dealers and auctioneers accustomed to playing key - and lucrative - roles in the sale of renowned art. In an interview, Picasso said she would sell works privately and would judge "one by one, based on need," how many, and which, of the remaining Picasso works, of about 10,000 that she inherited, she would put up for sale.

Picasso has been regularly selling her grandfather's works for years to support herself and her charities. And since the death of her longtime dealer in 2008, she has tried various strategies in the market - auctioning two major paintings in 2013 and displaying a collection of nude drawings by her grandfather at Sotheby's in Paris last year.

But her decision to sell them on her own suggests a more aggressive effort to purge herself of her legacy. And while other Picasso heirs have occasionally sold works, Marina Picasso is the only one who seems to be "accelerating" the sale of art objects, said Enrique Mallen, an art history professor at Sam Houston State University in Texas who created the Online Picasso Project to track the art.

"It's better for me to sell my works and preserve the money to redistribute to humanitarian causes," Picasso said, speaking publicly about her new strategy for the first time while inspecting a hospital site in Marseille, where she is financing a psychiatric unit for teenagers in crisis. "I have paintings, of course, that I can use to support these projects."

The news of her unusual strategy is spreading in select circles by word of mouth, generating rumors and misinformation - including a recent tabloid report that she planned to sell off her grandfather's villa and seven major works. That is leading to speculation that she could flood the market and depress prices.

"Instead of having a dealer show them, it's been an open secret that there are works for sale and people have been asking other people if they would be interested," said John Richardson, a Picasso historian and biographer in New York. "I've been asked by odd people who tell me, 'We are in on a great deal, and Marina is selling all her stuff.'"

While bypassing dealers and auction houses in the sale of major works is not unusual, sellers going it alone can be at a disadvantage in trying to estimate the value of their own works and to vet the buyers and their source of funds. At the same time, with some auction houses increasing their fees, it can be a smart move in the end for a seller eager to make more money.

Marina Picasso, who inherited about 300 paintings among those 10,000 Picasso artworks - ceramics, drawings, etchings and sculptures are among the others - said she had not decided on the number to be sold and had no plan to put the villa on the market. But she knows which piece she will sell first: "La Famille," a 1935 portrait of a family surrounded by an arid landscape.

"It's symbolic because I was born in a great family, but it was a family that was not a family," Picasso said. By the time of his death in 1973, Pablo Picasso had created some 50,000 artworks and left behind a tangled brood of four children and eight grandchildren, as well as wives and muses, who have had a long-running battle over his estate and his legacy. Marina Picasso is the daughter of Pablo Picasso's son Paulo, and she has long kept her distance from the rest of the family. For years she was guided in her sales by Jan Krugier, a Swiss art dealer who curated and sold off many of the best works in her collection until he died in 2008.

She was disappointed, she said, by other sales routes, like a 2013 Sotheby's auction of two major paintings, including "Femme Assise en Robe Grise." The works drew $6.8 million, according to Sotheby's in Paris, but Picasso said she had expected more because buyers knew the money was going to support her charities.

Her timing is good: Last year, auction sales of Picassos were second only to those of Andy Warhol - $449 million last year in a $16.1 billion international market, according to Artnet, the New York-based art researcher.

While the sales will broaden Picasso's philanthropy, they will also help her move on from the burden of her family history, she said.

Picasso said that she had no photographs of herself with her grandfather and had none of his works until she received her inheritance. She recalled that he would fashion flowers out of paper for her, but she was never allowed to keep the trinkets.

Her father, Paulo, was the son of Picasso and his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, a Russian ballerina. Picasso said she still suffered from the memories of Paulo serving as her grandfather's chauffeur, among other lowly roles, and begging for money.

Her mother, Emiliénne, split from her father after a brief marriage and struggled with alcoholism. She relied on handouts from her ex-husband to raise Marina and her older brother, Pablito.

"I saw my father very little," Picasso said. "I didn't have a grandfather."

Her alienation from her grandfather and his entourage intensified after her brother was barred from Picasso's funeral in 1973 by the artist's second wife, Jacqueline Roque. A few days later her brother committed suicide by drinking bleach. Contributions from friends paid for Pablito's funeral, according to Marina Picasso, who supported herself then by working in a hospice for autistic and mentally ill children.

Pablo Picasso left no will when he died at 91, setting off a bitter struggle among his widow, children and grandchildren. Unexpectedly, Marina Picasso was named an heir and inherited a fifth of the estate, including the villa.

"People say I should appreciate my inheritance and I do," Picasso said, "but it is an inheritance without love."

In the end, she learned from her past.

"It was really difficult to carry this celebrated name and to have a difficult financial life," Picasso said. "I think because of it I developed my sense of humanity and my desire to help others."

Olivier Widmaier Picasso, a grandson descended from the artist's mistress Marie-Therese Walter, who published his own biography of Picasso, holds a more benign view of his grandfather's legacy. As for Marina, with whom he tangled when he tried to brand Citroen cars with Picasso's name, he said he understands her anger, but thinks it is misplaced.

"We need to be honest," he said. "Pablo Picasso was not the cause of all of this. Her mother had exclusive custody. Picasso didn't want to give money to her mother because he worried she wouldn't spend it on the children. So he paid directly for their schooling."

He said he was surprised to learn about Marina Picasso's sales approach.

"All the heirs have always worked with major dealers, like Picasso did in his life," he said. "They know the market and the buyers and work to avoid any bad moves."

In the 1970s, when the estate was split to pay off taxes, "La Famille" was considered one of the most valuable because its realistic style was so unusual, he said.

"The scale is enormous and it is obviously an important work," said James Roundell, a dealer with Simon Dickinson Fine Art in London, who says it is worth "in the millions" of dollars.

Picasso has not publicly disclosed what she hopes to earn.

Picasso, who has five children, three of them adopted from Vietnam, said that selling more of Picasso's art to expand her charities is a fitting use. In just the last year, she has donated 1.5 million euros (roughly $1.7 million) to the Hospital Foundation of Paris and France. Some went to the psychiatric emergency unit for teenagers, and Picasso also financed a project for elderly patients in long-term hospital care.

"I live now in the present," she said. "The past rests in the past. But I will never forget, never. I respect my grandfather and his stature as an artist. I was his grandchild and his heir, but never the grandchild of his heart."

"With Self-Portrait of a Lifetime, Picasso Returns to Paris Pedestal" @nytimes by HOLLAND COTTER

Inside

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    PARIS — “Give me a museum and I’ll fill it,” Pablo Picasso reportedly said. Whether he did say it or not, it sounds like him, serial overproducer. And in a gray, leaf-drifting October here he’s as good as his word. The Picasso Museum, which closed for expansion in 2009, has finally reopened at more than twice its former size, but years overschedule and wrapped in a swirl of intrigue.

    For the news media, the renovation project has been a gift. Work on the Baroque mansion that houses the museum, the world’s largest Picasso collection, dragged scandalously on and on. Budgets ballooned. There were shocked firings (Anne Baldassari, the museum’s director was dismissed), high-level hissy fits and ad hominem attacks galore. Who could ask for more?

    The art-loving public could. The museum, which debuted in 1985, is a popular draw. No matter how many great individual Picasso works there are in London, Madrid or New York, in its museum Paris has the artist himself, early and late, in major and minor mode. No wonder anxious crowds lined the sidewalks and swarmed the front door here for the public opening on Saturday.

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    The renovated Picasso Museum, closed since 2009 for renovation, finally reopened on Saturday in the Hôtel Salé, a Baroque 17th-century mansion. Credit Ed Alcock for The New York Times

    Once inside, what do they get? Fabulousness — and frustration. On the unqualified positive side, there are more than 400 Picasso works encompassing his career, along with a gemlike selection of pieces he owned by artists he loved: Chardin, Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin, Braque, Miró, Matisse and Henri Rousseau. And in a sense, even his own work here represents a personal choice.

    In breadth, texture and spirit, the exhibition is like no other. It is utterly different from, say, the large selection of Picassos in “Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection” now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met show is a classic lineup of trophy masterpieces. What’s at the Picasso Museum is closer to a sublime teaching collection, with scraps and masterworks mixed together. The goal here is less to monumentalize an artist or a style than to tell a complex story of how art is made by one person of protean energy over a specific stretch of time.

     

    Picasso was a lifelong self-collector who kept examples of his art that he couldn’t or didn’t want to relinquish: juvenilia, pictorial notes to self, finished favorites, and souvenirs of loves and traumas gone by. He left this archive, or accumulation, to family members when he died in 1973. They sifted it and gave a vast amount to the French government in lieu of paying inheritance tax. It is this collection, essentially shaped by the artist himself, that the museum is built on.

    Given such richly personal material, it’s too bad the new presentation at the Picasso Museum — officially the Musée Picasso Paris — isn’t telling that story more persuasively. Architecture is part of the problem. The museum’s 17th-century home, the Hôtel Salé, in the historic Marais district, with its garden, courtyard and two-story, sculpture-encrusted entrance hall, has never been ideal for showing art.

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    A visitor viewing some of the museum’s 437 works on display, which include not only ones by Picasso but works by artists he admired. Credit Ed Alcock for The New York Times

    The interior is choppy, with smallish spaces, dead ends, and illogical connections. The original 1980s renovation laid a white-walled Corbusian gloss over this without achieving a sense of unity. The new design, by the architect Jean-François Bodin, is basically a magnified version of the old plan. There’s more space — four floors of galleries, including a vaulted basement and loftlike attic with exposed beams and views of surrounding rooftops — but their order is still hard to navigate.

     

    An impression of discontinuity is compounded by the idiosyncratic arrangement of art devised by Ms. Baldassari, who stayed on the job just long enough to organize the inaugural show. The main installation, on the first and second floors, begins with a few paintings by the adolescent Picasso in Spain, where he was born in 1881, and others from his first stay in Paris when he was barely out of his teens. The shift is dramatic: Murillo-style realism one year, the equivalent of psychedelia the next.

    But the time frame quickly grows confusing. The collection’s earliest painting, “The Barefoot Girl,” from 1895, turns up two galleries away with some near-abstract 1930s sculpture. Elsewhere, a pairing of the “blue” self-portrait from 1901 with a sketchy moon-face one from 1972 makes sense in a compare-and-contrast way. But putting them with the 1914 Cubist “Man With a Mustache” and a bronze head from 1958 doesn’t, unless you’re saying that all Picasso male heads are self-portraits, which they aren’t.

    The trouble is, Ms. Baldassari doesn’t say anything at all about the choices she’s making. Labels with information are absent. The unstated idea, in curatorial vogue at the moment, is that art speaks for itself, end of story. But this isn’t so, and hasn’t been since the 18th century, when most art was still about politics and religion and pitched to a privileged insider audience. Art has changed; audiences have changed, widened. Today, no single body of shared knowledge can be assumed. Viewers need help, and deserve the choice to avail themselves of it.

       
     

    By way of compromise, Ms. Baldassari shapes the show around a few loose themes. Under the label “Primitive” she has brought together an astonishing array of small paintings and drawings that demonstrate, step by audacious step, how “Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon” came into being in 1907. Under “War Paintings,” we see the 1937 “Guernica” simultaneously coalescing and sending sparks out in future directions.

    Much of the museum’s collection, though, is from an in-between period, the late 1920s to the early 1930s, when Picasso was coming off his post-World War I “classical” phase, getting his radical mojo back, and beginning to think of himself as a surrealist. It was tough going. The new work didn’t sell too well — possibly that’s the reason he kept so much of it — and you can see why: It’s strong, aggressive stuff. Everything is teeth and genitals, penetrations and impalings. Bodies, mostly female, are crudités of detached limbs. Picasso appears repeatedly in the alter-ego of the Minotaur, an Ovidian sex machine.

    Work from his sex-and-violence phase feels right at home in Paris this fall. An exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, “Sade: Attacking the Sun,” is a tribute to the Divine Marquis and an orgy of erotically tortured figures. (The Picasso Museum lent paintings to the show.) At the Pompidou Center, Marcel Duchamp makes all sorts of slice-and-dice moves on the human form in a fine-tuned show of his paintings. And the Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy has brought his elaborately offensive “Chocolate Factory” to Monnaie de Paris, a former mint, where blonde-wigged workers of various genders turn out edible versions of sex toys and Santa Clauses.

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    When Mr. McCarthy installed a big blowup sculpture of one of the sex toys — he coyly titled it “Tree” — in the Place Vendôme, he was slapped by an offended local, opening a window on a reactionary side of French politics usually hidden from short-term visitors. But it’s there, always has been, and Picasso, the insider who was always an outsider, knew this.

    All together, you can learn a tremendous amount about him in the Picasso Museum show, not least that he could be a truly terrible artist. Maybe the biggest revelation, though, comes on the top floor, when you catch your first glimpse of a Cézanne landscape Picasso once owned, and instantly sense what’s been missing from the two floors below: focus, concentration, a point of repose, warmth like a light in a tunnel, a fire in a hearth, a vigil lamp in a church.

    The comparison of Cézanne to Picasso we see here is of painter to cartoonist, of steady walker to competition dancer. It’s hard even to imagine Picasso painting landscapes — though he did; there’s one nearby — because, judging by this jumpy show, he doesn’t know how to be quiet, to sit there, stop spewing, do nothing, look long. Yet I can imagine him entering the gallery, as we do, nerves keyed up, and seeing Cézanne with a jolt of relief. It’s fitting that after Picasso died at 91, he was laid to rest in the garden of his summer home, a chateau not so different from the Hôtel Salé, but in the South of France, in view of Cézanne’s beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire. Not that he was particularly sentimental about the connection. He was territorial to the end. “Cézanne painted these mountains and now they are mine,” he is said to have boasted. And Paris owns Picasso, or a comprehensive chunk of him, and whatever the failings of the Picasso Museum, that’s just a fact.

    "All 43 Works From Bunny Mellon’s Collection Sell at Sotheby’s Auction" @nytimes by CAROL VOGEL

    "All 43 Works From Bunny Mellon’s Collection Sell at Sotheby’s Auction" @nytimes by  CAROL VOGEL

    A 1932 painting by Georgia O’Keeffe sold on Monday for $3.1 million. It had adorned Bunny Mellon’s Virginia dining room. Credit 2014 The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

     

    Rachel Lambert Mellon, better known as Bunny, spent her lifetime collecting whatever caught her eye, from antique porcelains and shaker baskets to abstract paintings by Rothko and Diebenkorn. Her legendary taste and style, from an era long gone, proved irresistible for scores of collectors who descended on Sotheby’s York Avenue salesroom on Monday night to see 43 “masterworks,” as the auction house called them, bringing prices that were well past anyone’s expectations.

    “History, legend, taste — you had everything tonight,” Lionel Pissarro, a great-grandson of the painter Camille Pissarro and a Paris-based art dealer, said after the auction.

    Artwork spanning 400 years attracted bidders from 32 countries and four continents. The evening brought $158.7 million, topping a high estimate of $121 million. All 43 works sold. Among the stars: a 1970 abstract canvas by Mark Rothko of intense blues and greens that brought nearly $40 million, twice its high estimate, and several paintings and drawings by Richard Diebenkorn, including “Ocean Park No. 89,” which sold for $9.6 million, below its high estimate of $12 million.

    The auction on Monday was the first in a series devoted to the art and objects that Mrs. Mellon, and her husband, Paul Mellon, had lived with and loved.

    Mrs. Mellon, who died in March at 103, and her husband, the son of the financier Andrew W. Mellon, were celebrated philanthropists. The couple had either donated or bequeathed world-class artworks to many museums such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which received more than 900 works, including Cézanne’s “Boy in a Red Waistcoat.”

    But there was still a lot left over, and on Monday night Sotheby’s was selling a personal selection of artwork that decorated the couple’s five homes, including Oak Spring Farms, the 2,000-acre estate in Upperville, Va., where Mrs. Mellon spent the last years of her life. The next Mellon auctions will feature everything from a blue diamond pendant to furniture, porcelains, baskets and even a fire truck.

    Throughout her life, Mrs. Mellon was a passionate supporter of Rothko. Besides the canvas of blues and greens the sale also featured one from 1955, “Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange).” Eight bidders competed for the painting, which had been estimated to bring $20 million to $30 million and sold to the Nahmad Gallery for $36.5 million.

    (Final prices include the buyer’s premium: 25 percent of the first $100,000; 20 percent from $100,000 to $2 million; and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

    Diebenkorn was another artist Mrs. Mellon championed. Eight examples of his work — paintings as well as works on paper — were up for sale. Among the best of them was “Ocean Park No. 89,” a 1975 painting from the artist’s celebrated series, this one an abstract image of a sunset. Valentino, the fashion designer who was sitting in the front row, snapped up the painting for $9.68 million. It had been estimated to sell for $8 million to $12 million.

     

    Mrs. Mellon was known for her love of blue — in her choice of porcelains, wall coverings and furniture, but also paintings. Lucio Fontana’s “Concetto Spaziale (Blu)” from 1968 was estimated at $300,000 to $400,000 but was bought by a telephone bidder for $965,000. It had hung in the bedroom of Mrs. Mellon’s 70th Street townhouse in Manhattan.

    A spare painting of a barn that Georgia O’Keeffe painted during a 1932 visit to Canada that adorned Mrs. Mellon’s Virginia dining room was bought by another telephone bidder for $3.1 million, above its high $2.5 million estimate.

    Mrs. Mellon was a well-known horticulturalist who redesigned the White House Rose Garden at the request of her friend Jacqueline Kennedy in the early 1960s. Many works had a botanical theme, like a tiny still life of flowers by the Dutch Golden Age painter Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, which sold for $4.6 million, above its high $4 million estimate.

    The auction included several examples of furniture by Diego Giacometti (brother of the famous sculptor Alberto Giacometti), whom Mrs. Mellon met through her friend, the fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy. She commissioned him to make bronze furniture and sculptures for her homes. Not fond of his usual bronze patina, she asked him to paint them off-white especially for her. Two coffee tables that featured birds were in hot demand. One, from 1970 that was expected to bring $200,000 to $300,000, sold for $1.7 million; another that was expected to sell for $150,000 to $200,000 was purchased for $1.4 million.

    “It’s all in a name,” Rachel Mauro, a Manhattan dealer, said as she was leaving the sale. Many other dealers hope that names like Warhol, Twombly and de Kooning — which fill the mega contemporary art auctions later this week — will have as much allure.

    "Art Selling Like Hot Cakes in New York Auctions" @wsj by Kelly Crow

    Warhols Triple Elvis silk-screen left sold for 82 million to a phone bidder on Wednesday Soon afterward his Four Marlons sold for 696 million                                          

    Warhol’s ‘Triple Elvis’ silk-screen, left, sold for $82 million to a phone bidder on Wednesday. Soon afterward, his ‘Four Marlons’ sold for $69.6 million. Reuters

    The art market just had the biggest two weeks in its history.

    Since Nov. 4, collectors have flocked to the world’s chief auction houses in New York to buy more than $2 billion of art, a historic high in which 23 works sold for more than $20 million apiece. (In 2009, Christie’s International sold only six artworks for that much all year.)

    Night after night at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the titans of the world’s far-flung industries squeezed like sardines into packed auction salesrooms to compete for hundreds of artworks created by the world’s best-known Impressionist, modern and contemporary artists.

    To win, bidders often had to splurge: Billionaire investor Steve Cohen paid Sotheby’s $101 million for an Alberto Giacometti bronze chariot sculpture; other bidders at Christie’s paid $82 million for an Andy Warhol silk-screen of a gun-toting Elvis Presley and $65 million for Édouard Manet’s portrait of pretty woman with a parasol.

    On Wednesday, Christie’s conducted the biggest auction in history when it sold $853 million of contemporary art in a two-hour span.

    Len Riggio , chairman of Barnes & Noble, said he intended to bid on a few items in Christie’s sale, but rivals outpaced him. “I feel like I’m surrounded by gladiators in this shiny big arena,” he said. “Everyone wants to put their money somewhere, but what are these guys going to do, buy another house or keep $3 billion in the bank? No, they all want to put a little bit in art.”

    When it comes to what collectors want, Sotheby’s chief executive Bill Ruprecht said they want “blue blue blue,” meaning blue-chip masterpieces by name-brand artists like Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol who trade widely and often enough at auction to represent this market’s version of a Dow Jones Industrial Average. Seconds after Christie’s sold Warhol’s “Triple Elvis” for $82 million to a phone bidder on Wednesday, the house sold another Warhol portrait of actor Marlon Brando, “Four Marlons,” for $69.6 million. Both Warhols are wall-power large—“Elvis” stands nearly 7-feet high—and convey the Pop artist’s signature silk-screen style

    On Wednesday, Christie’s conducted the biggest auction in history when it sold $853 million of contemporary art in a two-hour span.

    Len Riggio , chairman of Barnes & Noble, said he intended to bid on a few items in Christie’s sale, but rivals outpaced him. “I feel like I’m surrounded by gladiators in this shiny big arena,” he said. “Everyone wants to put their money somewhere, but what are these guys going to do, buy another house or keep $3 billion in the bank? No, they all want to put a little bit in art.”

    When it comes to what collectors want, Sotheby’s chief executive Bill Ruprecht said they want “blue blue blue,” meaning blue-chip masterpieces by name-brand artists like Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol who trade widely and often enough at auction to represent this market’s version of a Dow Jones Industrial Average. Seconds after Christie’s sold Warhol’s “Triple Elvis” for $82 million to a phone bidder on Wednesday, the house sold another Warhol portrait of actor Marlon Brando, “Four Marlons,” for $69.6 million. Both Warhols are wall-power large—“Elvis” stands nearly 7-feet high—and convey the Pop artist’s signature silk-screen style

    ‘I feel like I’m surrounded by gladiators in this shiny big arena. ’

    —Len Riggio, chairman of Barnes & Noble

    Mark Rothko, who painted hundreds of rectangular abstracts, also fared well in these sales, including an untitled indigo version that Sotheby’s sold for $40 million on Monday, twice its high estimate. The following day, the same house sold another Rothko, “No. 21 (Red, Brown, Black and Orange),” for $45 million. (Estimates, unlike final sale prices, don't include the auction houses’ commissions.)

    But collectors also glommed onto rarely seen works that stood out like gems, like a placemat-size Jasper Johns “Flag” from 1983 that Sotheby’s sold for $36 million, over its $20 million high estimate. Manet’s 1881 “Spring” portrait of a woman walking in a park also sold well in part because the work was the last painting Manet ever submitted to Paris’s taste-making Salon. The J. Paul Getty Museum paid $65.1 million for it at Christie’s on Nov. 5.

    The art market cycles through good years and bad like the broader financial markets—art values notoriously crashed in 1990 and plummeted briefly in 2009—but in recent seasons, art prices have only gone one direction: Up. Dealers say that is because an influx of newly wealthy international buyers, from Chinese tech entrepreneurs to Brazilian bankers to Middle Eastern oil barons, have entered the art marketplace over the past decade. Most arrive seeking to store their extra cash in any art they can find at auctions and art fairs; others hope to reap the social cachet that comes with owning world-class art. Investors and speculators have also joined in, seeking to profit by buying and selling artworks like stocks.

    Once the historic domain of merchant princes and popes, fine art has become attainable for the modern-day millionaire—an asset or currency that merits a place alongside stocks in an investment portfolio.Around 76% of art buyers surveyed earlier this fall by ArtTactic, a London-based auction watchdog, and auditor Deloitte Luxembourg said they are “increasingly acquiring art and collectibles from an investment standpoint,” compared with 53% two years ago.

    Unlike Europeans, U.S. collectors have long been comfortable discussing art in investment-grade terms, and Americans now buy more art than anyone else on the planet—particularly the trophy pieces in these major seasonal auctions, according to Dublin-based art economist Clare McAndrew. Last year, art sales in the U.S. totaled more than $22 billion, up 25% from the year before, according to Ms. McAndrew’s latest Art Market Report. Moreover, buyers in the U.S. also took home around half the million-dollar artworks offered at auctions world-wide, she added.

    China continues to emerge as the next great purchasing power, though. Xin Li, a former model who now works for Christie’s and often represents collectors from mainland China, won for a client a $17.5 million Willem de Kooning and a $16.9 million Gerhard Richter during Christie’s sale on Wednesday. A Lucian Freud portrait, “Julie and Martin,” also sold for $17 million to a young Asian man at Christie’s dressed in a black, silk-lapel suit.

    No wonder collectors wishing to sell their art trophies at auction lined up to consign pieces into these November auctions. Dallas collector Howard Rachofsky said he sold a pair of pieces (he declined to say which) in large part because the mood remained reassuringly chipper—and because the auction houses offered to buy his artworks if no one else did. “I thought my works were overpriced,” he said, “but they did well—and there were other things I wanted that sold for too much.”

    Longtime New York dealer and former Sotheby’s auctioneer David Nash said the market feels bloated and “hyperinflated” to him, but he saw few signs of a market bubble about to burst—yet. All but five of the 80 lots offered in Christie’s $853 million sale found buyers. On Monday, Sotheby’s sold 100% of the offerings in its estate sale of Rachel Lambert Mellon, better known as Bunny. Such “white glove” sales are a rarity in the industry.

    “Every season, I say the prices can’t get any higher, and then they do,” Mr. Nash said.

    George Lindemann Journal - "The Art World’s High-Roller Specialist" @wsj by Kelly Crow

    Christies Xin Li with Pens-The Two Celestial Bodies by Hong Kyoung-Tack                   

            

    In mid-October, Christie’s art expert Xin Li—a former professional basketball star and model from China’s Manchuria region—was escorting billionaire collectors through the Louvre in Paris. Days later, she popped up in Hong Kong to wine and dine tech millionaires at the auction house’s showroom. Now, Ms. Xin is in New York to field phone bids during the season’s major fall auctions, which started Tuesday and continue through next week.

    “I’m never in one place for more than 10 days,” said the 38-year-old deputy chairman of Christie’s Asia. “I can’t be.”

    Ms. Xin is a leading player in the art business’s central game right now: a race to match a small number of $10 million-plus masterpieces with a small number of mega-collectors, who are increasingly coming from Asia.

    Xin Li was a fashion model in Paris pictured here in 1999                                 

    Next Tuesday, Sotheby’s will offer a top-heavy sale of contemporary art in which nearly half of its estimated $320 million sale total is tied up in eight of its 79 lots. The priciest, a red-and-black Mark Rothko, “No. 21 (Red, Brown, Black and Orange),” is estimated to sell for at least $50 million. There is also an avocado-green Andy Warhol silk-screen of Elizabeth Taylor sporting a swath of turquoise eye shadow, “Liz #3 (Early Colored Liz),” that is expected to sell for $30 million or more.

    Over at Christie’s, the emphasis on blue chips is even more pronounced. Its Wednesday sale, where Ms. Xin said she may be bidding on at least a half-dozen major works, is estimated to bring in at least $600 million, the house’s highest-ever presale expectation. During the recession, these auction houses only offered a handful of $10 million-plus works across a two-week sale series. Next week, a quarter of Christie’s offerings are estimated to cross that bar—including examples by Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Francis Bacon, Cy Twombly, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Jeff Koons.

    The price increases matter because they are buoying the entire art market, experts say. Nearly $60 billion in art changed hands last year, second only to sales in 2007 and up 8% over 2012, according to art economist Clare McAndrew. “A significant part of the uplift of the market was due to higher-priced works, rather than simply more works sold,” she wrote in a March report.

    http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-art-worlds-high-roller-specialist-1415314210

    Bass Museum of Art Receives Donation of $1 Million

    Bass Museum of Art Receives Donation of $1 Million

    Diane and Alan Lieberman

    The Bass Museum of Art announced over the weekend that art collectors and patrons Diane and Alan Lieberman—who own the South Beach Hotel Group—have donated $1 million to the museum. The funds will support the museum’s exhibitions of contemporary art and education programs, according to director George Lindemann. A host to year-round exhibitions, the museum's planning an internal expansion in June of next year, working with architects Arata Isozaki and David Gauld. Said Alan Lieberman of the donation, “Miami Beach has been my home for the past twenty-five years. My business is here and I have raised my family here. I want to give back to this community that has given my family so much.”

    Bass Museum Gifted $1 Million at 50th Anniversary Gala

    During the 50th anniversary gala for Miami’s Bass Museum of Art, trustee board president George Lindemann announced that the museum had received a donation of $1 million from Diane and Alan Lieberman, owners of the South Beach Hotel Group. “Miami Beach is a creative and forward thinking city, and we are so fortunate to have such visionaries as the Liebermans as patrons,” Lindemann added. This gift seems particularly well timed given the museum’s forthcoming internal renovation: Beginning in June of 2015, architect David Gauld and design consultant Arata Isozaki will work within the existing structure to expand programmable space by 37 percent.

    "Detroit Mum on Proposal to Use Its Art as Collateral" @nytimes by MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

    Photo
    The collection in the Detroit Institute of Arts was appraised at 81 billion by Art Capital an investment firm that is offering loans collateralized by the art
    The collection in the Detroit Institute of Arts was appraised at $8.1 billion by Art Capital, an investment firm that is offering loans collateralized by the art.Credit Andrew Burton/Getty Images

    On Wall Street, there is the art of the deal. In Detroit, there is the deal of the art.

    As Detroit prepares to defend its plan next week to exit bankruptcy, city leaders have received an unusual offer: Why not mortgage all the Van Goghs, Picassos and other works in the Detroit Institute of Arts? A company called Art Capital, which makes loans backed by artwork, has told the city it is willing to lend it up to $3 billion, roughly 10 times the exit financing Detroit is now contemplating, using the museum’s art as collateral.

    The city’s response: silence.

    Detroit already has plans for the art. Donors have promised hundreds of millions of dollars to put the collection under new ownership — safe from the bankruptcy creditors — and to help the city’s retirees. Detroit had a big hole in its pension fund when it declared bankruptcy last year, which made the retirees unsecured creditors, subject to painful cuts.

    By rolling up the art and pensions in a single deal, known as the grand bargain, Detroit hopes to keep its treasured collection intact while also getting more money to the retirees.

    But there is a problem: The grand bargain may be illegal. Bankruptcy law calls for equally ranked creditors to be treated the same way, yet the grand bargain would, in the view of some creditors and critics, effectively sell the art to a bankruptcy-proof entity at a below-market price, then steer all proceeds to the retirees, leaving other unsecured creditors in the lurch.

    Detroit is poised to go to court on Tuesday to begin urging a judge to approve this deal, which has been backed by unions, retiree groups and pension funds, many of which agreed to cuts to avoid even deeper ones. The most vocal opponents are creditors that would receive the least relief under the city’s plan.

    Art Capital’s proposal makes the case, indirectly, that the court should reject the plan — which would force the city back to the drawing board and could imperil fragile agreements.

    “The museum is owned by the city, and the city is, in fact, in bankruptcy. That asset lawfully should be available to assist in the plan of exit,” said Ian Peck, Art Capital’s chief executive. “But we also believe that this art is a national treasure and should be preserved as such.”

    That, he explained, is why his firm would lend against the art instead of trying to sell it. Under his proposal, the art would still be Detroit’s as long as the city made good on the loan. The interest rate would be reasonable because the collateral — the art collection — has such tremendous value: $8.1 billion, according to an appraisal Art Capital commissioned.

    “We believe that our proposal strikes a balance between the realities of the situation,” Mr. Peck said.

    Details of Art Capital’s proposal came from a term sheet, marked “proprietary and highly confidential,” that was provided to The New York Times by a person opposed to the grand bargain. Terms were said to be subject to negotiation, but the city will not negotiate.

    “The city supports and is committed to the grand bargain,” said Bill Nowling, a spokesman for Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn D. Orr. “I am sure there are many suggestions on how the D.I.A. collection can be monetized, but outside of the grand bargain, such discussions are academic.”

    To exit bankruptcy, Detroit has requested proposals for a loan of up to $300 million that would be secured by the city’s income taxes. Mr. Nowling said that the responses were still being studied and that information about the final amount and other terms would not be available until after the trial had started.

    Art Capital is proposing a loan that would range from $500 million to $3 billion, which could be cut up into different maturities and repayment schedules. Interest rates would be based on the benchmark rate known as Libor plus 5.5 to 8.5 percentage points, which analysts say would be reasonable for a bankrupt city that is preparing to repudiate some of its debt. Art Capital’s supporters say its loan would have the advantage of not tying up an essential city tax stream in the event of a default because it would be heavily collateralized by the artwork.

    Both loan options would be repaid by the city’s revenue streams, like income, property and casino taxes.

    Art Capital, a firm that made headlines four years ago for a troubled loan to the photographer Annie Leibovitz, first appeared in the Detroit bankruptcy last April, when one of the city’s bond insurers, the Financial Guaranty Insurance Company, offered the names of several parties who were interested in the art collection. Financial Guaranty is slated to receive one of the worst settlements of the bankruptcy and has been trying to show that the grand bargain is not the only game in town.

    On Tuesday, it and another bond insurer, Syncora Guarantee, were ordered by Detroit’s bankruptcy judge, Steven W. Rhodes, to work with the bankruptcy’s chief mediator on their many objections to the way Detroit hopes to handle their claims.

    Most of the “expressions of interest” that Financial Guaranty received were from prospective buyers, but Art Capital proposed an art-backed loan of just $2 billion at the time. Mr. Peck said it was impossible to set precise terms without a credible appraisal. At that point Judge Rhodes gave Financial Guaranty limited permission to work with the museum on an appraisal.

    Photo
    Works at the Detroit Institute of Arts include murals by Diego Rivera
    Works at the Detroit Institute of Arts include murals by Diego Rivera.Credit Carlos Osorio/Associated Press

    Perhaps the most striking thing about Art Capital’s current proposal is the appraisal. It covers some 60,000 works, spanning in time from Mesopotamia to Mark Rothko and representing cultures from around the world. In addition to extensive Islamic, African, Chinese and Native American art, there are European masterpieces by Bruegel, Cézanne and Matisse, among others, and a unique gallery where the walls are covered with murals by Diego Rivera, depicting auto manufacturing.

    “It is one of the country’s few encyclopedic art museums,” wrote Victor Wiener, who runs an appraisal firm, in the report commissioned by Art Capital.

    It was completed on July 25, just days after the creditors’ votes on Detroit’s exit plan were tallied. A majority of the city’s retirees voted to accept the plan. For many, it was a wrenching decision because the money available through the grand bargain would not make them whole. The donations coming from philanthropic organizations, companies and the state add up to $816 million, spread over 20 years.

    Just before the creditors’ votes were due, Detroit presented its own estimate of the collection’s value, by Artvest Partners, an art investment firm. It found that, while the collection might be worth $2.8 billion to $4.6 billion, Detroit would never get that much on the market. Such a huge sale would flood the market, driving down prices, and Detroit’s bankruptcy might turn off serious investors, Artvest said.

    For those reasons, Artvest estimated that a liquidation might fetch as little as $850 million — a figure not too far off the grand bargain amount. If retirees were still sitting on the fence at that point, the conclusion may have helped them decide how to vote.

    Mr. Wiener’s appraisal surfaced only after the voting, but gives a much different view. In addition to finding that the art was worth $8.1 billion, or nearly double the high end of Artvest’s range, it lists what appear to be flaws in Artvest’s thinking.

    Far from steering clear of a sale of Detroit’s collection, it said, art buyers would come flocking because the works were assembled at a time when Detroit was booming and able to attract curators of worldwide renown.

    “Collectibles from museums and other significant collections perform much better at auctions than similar objects lacking notable provenance,” Mr. Wiener wrote, citing many examples.

    Detroit has filed a motion with the court to have Mr. Wiener rejected as an expert witness.

    David Skeel, who teaches bankruptcy law at the University of Pennsylvania, said that while the new appraisal left many questions unanswered, it served as a challenge to Detroit’s numbers on the eve of the trial.

    “It’s extraordinary that you’d have appraisals that are this far apart,” he said.

    That does not mean curtains for the grand bargain, said James E. Spiotto, a bankruptcy lawyer who consults with cities. But the vastly different art numbers could be a signal for Detroit to slow down and give its exit strategy the straight-face test.

    “Remember, there’s a great impetus, as you get to the end of a Chapter 9 bankruptcy, to confirm the plan,” he said. “But more important than confirming the plan is doing the right thing.”

    George Lindemann Journal - "Taking Wing in a Time of Extremis" @nytimes By HOLLAND COTTER

    George Lindemann Journal - "Taking Wing in a Time of Extremis" @nytimes By HOLLAND COTTER

    Slide Show|9 Photos

    Jim Hodges’s Emotional Palette

    Jim Hodges’s Emotional Palette

    CreditStewart Cairns for The New York Times

    BOSTON — In the 21st century, we tend to talk about new art in terms of medium and style: Performance is back, painting is back, Pop is back, and so on. But for roughly a decade, from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, the emphasis was on ideas and emotions. As racial and gender politics navigated the culture wars, and the toll taken by AIDS grew overwhelming, content often trumped form. In a lesson learned from feminism, personal history and feeling were O.K. Even spirituality, which the New York art world handles with tongs, became an admissible subject.

    Jim Hodges’s career as an artist began in that in-extremis time. Mr. Hodges was shaped by it and helped shape the art that came out of it. Gay, raised Roman Catholic, living in the AIDS war zone that was New York City, he favored craft-based forms, ephemeral and found materials, and images — flowers, butterflies — traditionally associated with mortality and transience. You’ll find all of this in “Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take,” a taut career survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art here. You’ll also find work that expands beyond the historical moment to which this artist is usually critically confined.

    Mr. Hodges was born in Spokane, Wash., in 1957, studied art in regional schools and graduated with an M.F.A. in painting from the Pratt Institute in New York in 1986. At that point, he lost interest in painting, a shift that seems more or less to have coincided with his coming out. He says in the catalog interview that he was “lost in the hugeness of painting,” was unable to find a singular voice in it. And he needed that voice urgently. He was changing, and so was the subculture he was now fully part of. Both were under serious threat.

    Some of the earliest things in the show are experiments in addressing these realities. For the 1989 piece called “Deformed,” he sliced a scuffed-up Bonwit Teller shopping bag along its seams, splayed it out and pinned it to the wall to form a cross. The bag itself carried some gay coding: Andy Warhol had once designed window displays for this women’s department store. The cross has an obvious religious connotation but also suggests a medical emblem, the Red Cross. The bunches of violets printed on the bag (not pansies, as they are identified in a wall label) become both floral tributes and funeral bouquets.

    A small 1993 collage, made from store-bought plastic decals, of an eagle descending among butterflies was intended as a homage to a friend, the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS three years later. (In 2008 Mr. Hodges turned the collage image into a large stained-glass sculpture, also in the show.) And a 1992 installation called “What’s Left” was conceived with his own possible demise in mind.

    It consists of a pile of his clothes — jeans, shoes, briefs, black leather belt — lying on the gallery floor as if dropped in a quick undressing, for sleep, for sex, for a shower. The impression of spontaneity is countered, though, by an additional element: a spider web, woven from fine metal chains, that stretches over the pile, implying that the wearer had long since vanished.

     

    Over the years, Mr. Hodge’s work has been routinely identified, and sometimes dismissed, as a lament over AIDS, but this is not his only subject. Childhood is another. “Good Luck,” from 1987, is nothing more than a black wool ski mask cut open and flattened out. Hung high on a wall, it peers down, scary-funny, like a Halloween spook.

    The tall curtain of stitched-together nylon, chiffon and silk headscarves called “Here’s Where We Will Stay” (1995) is an elegant shout-out to his mother and grandmother, who taught him to sew. It also evokes a gay kid’s captivation with the hidden world of delicate fabrics stored away in his mother’s scented bureau drawers. And the mnemonic power of scent itself summons the presence of Mr. Hodge’s own mother in an installation he made after her death in 2006.

    Called “The Dark Gate,” it’s a big walk-in, sepulcherlike wooden box encasing a circle of sharp steel spikes. Each spike is meant to suffuse the air with his mother’s favorite perfume and the scent that Mr. Hodges was wearing the day she died. The piece is overdetermined to the point of heaviness (and I picked up no trace of a scent). But as part of a larger idea of recapturing childhood, and the sting of seductions and losses that start early and never really stop, it makes sense.

    A decade earlier, the artist had, in a roundabout way, returned to painting, or something like it. In 1997 he glued a mirror to a canvas, smashed it with a hammer and exhibited the cracked results. Thereafter, he created a more controlled fracture effect by piecing together small squares of mirrored glass into mosaic panels. These panels reappear here and there in the galleries, refracting light, disco ball fashion, and creating distorted images of quite different works from other decades.

    The curators — Jeffrey Grove of the Dallas Museum of Art, Olga Viso of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Anna Stothart of the Institute of Contemporary Art — have arranged the show by theme rather than date, a good idea. This gives the episodic visual texture of Mr. Hodges’s career a sense of consistency, which, indeed, it has. The natural world, it turns out, is a binding presence through 30 years. It’s there early, and gently, in the flowers and butterflies, and dramatically — operatically, even — in “Untitled (One Day It All Comes True),” finished last year: a mural-size picture of a roiling cloudscape embroidered entirely from thousands of scraps of blue denim.

    What, exactly, are we seeing? Nuclear clouds or Constable clouds? End times or a universe coming, Romantically, into being? Much of Mr. Hodges’s art walks an anxious line between fatalism and uplift. He seems to be, by temperament, a mourner, but one with edges and elbows. He has a shrewd sense of humor, a way of mocking himself through materials: all those recycled jeans, and all that crazy hands-on sewing! And if work slips around from one form to another, how refreshing to see someone not turning out product.

    In the end, he makes no great claims for his art. His career is less like an orchestrated score than like a diary of doing and being. It’s easy to point out the influence of other artists on him — James Lee Byars, Roni Horn, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, Paul Thek and Richard Tuttle — and Mr. Hodges is the first to name them. Less well documented is the extent to which he has been a role model for a younger generation. If some of the art in his retrospective comes across as wanly familiar in its effects, it’s because so many people have learned from him since the post-plague years of the late 1990s, though you probably wouldn’t see that if you weren’t aware of, or didn’t care about, that history.