The George Lindemann Journal By George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal - "Miami artist who destroyed Ai Weiwei vase at museum gets probation, must pay $10,000" @miamiherald by David Ovalle

A Miami artist who smashed a valuable piece by celebrated artist Ai Weiwei at the Pérez Art Museum must serve 18 months of probation and pay back $10,000 in restitution.

In a plea deal announced Wednesday, Maximo Caminero must also engage in 100 hours of community service teaching art classes as a result of a self-professed act of protest.

“I was wrong,” Caminero said in a letter of apology released Wednesday. “I think about what I did every day and I find it hard to live with what I did because it still haunts me.”

In a case that stunned the art world, Caminero in February smashed a vase painted by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, who represented that the item was hundreds of years old. Police initially estimated the artwork was worth $1 million but the actual cost turned out to be much lower.

Caminero told the arresting officer that he smashed the artwork as a protest on behalf of local artists who he felt were slighted in favor of international artists at the new $131 million complex on Biscayne Bay.

The vase was part of a politically charged exhibition of Chinese culture and art.

The Beijing-born Ai Weiwei, 56, is a sculptor, designer and documentary-maker who has not been permitted to leave China following a 2011 arrest for his political activism. Ai Weiwei condemned the Chinese government for actions he saw as corrupt following a 2008 earthquake in Szechuan.

According to a Miami police report, Caminero ignored a security staffer’s order to put the piece down before smashing it.

He was charged with first-degree criminal mischief, a third-degree felony.

In his apology letter, Caminero stressed that he did not realize that, at the time he destroyed the vase, the museum was also exhibiting the work of five local artists. The museum is also planning a collection of six other local artists.

A lawyer representing the museum, Lilly Ann Sanchez, said “we’re glad this is finally over.”

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Digitizing Warhol’s Film Trove to Save It" @ntimes by RANDY KENNEDY

“Nico/Antoine” (1966), one of hundreds of Andy Warhol films. Credit Andy Warhol Museum

Andy Warhol wrote lovingly of his ever-present tape recorder. (“My tape recorder and I have been married for 10 years now. When I say ‘we,’ I mean my tape recorder and me.”) But for almost a decade beginning in the 1960s, his real boon companions seemed to be his 16-millimeter film cameras, which he used to record hundreds of reels, many of which are still little known even among scholars because of the fragility of the film and the scarcity of projectors to show them on.

Now the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Museum of Modern Art, which holds Warhol’s film archives, are beginning a project to digitize the materials, almost 1,000 rolls, a vast undertaking that curators and historians hope will, for the first time, put Warhol’s film work on a par with his painting, his sculpture and the Delphic public persona that became one of his greatest works. It will be MoMA’s largest effort to digitize the work of a single artist in its collection.

Patrick Moore, the Warhol Museum’s deputy director and a curator of the digitization project, said that the goal was, finally, to integrate Warhol’s film work fully into his career. “I think the art world in particular, and hopefully the culture as a whole, will come to feel the way we do,” Mr. Moore said, “which is that the films are every bit as significant and revolutionary as Warhol’s paintings.”

Warhol began using his first film camera, a 16-millimeter Bolex, in 1963. He spent more than two years shooting what became known as the “Screen Tests,” hundreds of short filmed portraits of celebrities, fellow artists, acquaintances and members of his inner circle, like Lou Reed and the socialite Edie Sedgwick, before moving on to longer, more narrative pieces. He made some 600 films of varying lengths, but only about a tenth of those have been available in 16-millimeter prints through the Museum of Modern Art.

While a few of Warhol’s movies are well known — among them, the feature-length “Chelsea Girls” from 1966 and “Empire” from 1964, a single-shot “antifilm” showing the Empire State Building for eight hours — the great majority have not been shown for years or have been available only through bootlegs of varying quality. Several years before Warhol’s death in 1987, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art joined forces to preserve and study the films, which often use the movie screen as a static canvas, a confessional or a window onto the seeming banality of everyday life. But the films’ visibility, even in the art world, increased only up to a point.

“A lot of people feel like they know Warhol’s films but only because they’ve read about them,” said Mr. Moore. “Fewer and fewer people have the ability to show 16 millimeter.”

Frame-by-frame transfer of the films, which is expected to take several years, will begin this month and be conducted by MPC, an Oscar-winning visual-effects company that is donating its time and services to the project.

(In connection with the project, a few pieces of unseen film will make their way into theaters well before the transfers are completed. “Exposed: Songs for Unseen Warhol Films,” a project commissioned by the Warhol Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Centers for the Art of Performance at the University of California, Los Angeles, will screen digital copies of 15 never-before-shown films in October and November, along with newly conceived, live musical accompaniment by musicians, including Tom Verlaine, Dean Wareham and Eleanor Friedberger.)

Film purists will undoubtedly mourn the migration to digital. In a review of “Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures,” a show of part of Warhol’s film work at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, Ken Johnson complained in The New York Times that seeing Warhol films digitally was “like seeing a movie on television, and that casts in doubt their status as works of art.”

Rajendra Roy, the chief film curator at the Museum of Modern Art and a self-described “unexpected analog guy,” agreed, saying that the right way to see Warhol’s films should always be on film, in part because he helped revolutionize the medium by upending or undermining so many of the conventions of moviemaking.

“I get really grumpy sometimes when things can’t be shown on film, but that said, these will become inaccessible very quickly if we don’t digitize them,” he said. “There are still many discoveries to be made, and that’s the exciting part of this project. Folks are looking at work in boxes of some of Andy’s film that probably hasn’t been seen since he shot it.”

Warhol documented so much of the New York art world of the 1960s that the films could also fill in crucial art-historical gaps about who was doing what, when and where. But curators hope that a more important benefit will be an awareness of how, long before phone cameras brought the quotidian and the personal fully into the realm of media, Warhol was already forging his own kind of YouTube. (He once deadpanned in an interview: “I think any camera that takes a picture, it comes out all right.”)

“He filmed everything around him,” said Geralyn Huxley, a curator of film and video at the Warhol Museum. “He went to people’s houses and filmed the dinners. He was basically a workaholic and the amount of film is unbelievable.”

But she added: “For all of the film out there, there’s very little of Warhol himself in any of it, actually. You get the sense that he didn’t really like to see himself on camera.”

An exhibit opening Aug. 8 at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach spotlights gold-related works from two dozen contemporary artists.

Rudolf Stingel, Untitled, 2012
Galvanized cast copper
Collection of Isabelle Kowal
Though gold has symbolized excess, putting it in an artwork also raises its market value. That paradox is a basic theme in 'Gold.' Many artists in the exhibit fuse the luxury of gold with low-end materials. This insulation board by Rudolf Stingel was marked up by museum visitors, cast in copper, and electroplated with gold, giving it a sense of permanence.

George Lindemann Journal - "  Miami Beach's Bass Museum of Art Looks at Gold" @wsj Jenny Che

An exhibit opening Aug. 8 at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach spotlights gold-related works from two dozen contemporary artists. Elmgreen & Dragset/Cortesi Contemporary, Lugano

From an ancient Greek vase depicting the mythical golden fleece to Andy Warhol's painting of Marilyn Monroe against a gilded backdrop, gold and art have been inseparable. Even those artists who have used gold to symbolize excess have raised their art's market value just by incorporating the precious metal.

That paradox plays out in some of the works on view in "Gold," an exhibition that opened Friday at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. The show spotlights gold-related works from two dozen contemporary artists with a number of provocative takes on the metal.

Gold "inspires things like power and passion and greed, and commemorates things like weddings and the Olympic Games," said curator José Diaz. "There's this jubilant aspect of gold, and dark, sinister references to gold."

The Florida exhibition highlights both aspects. Glenn Kaino's "19.83" uses gold to retell Tommie Smith's record-breaking run in the 200-meter at the 1968 Olympics. (The title refers to his time in seconds.) The installation features stills from the race and a gold-plated replica of the platform that Mr. Smith stood on when he received his gold medal and raised his fist in support of civil rights.

Brooklyn-based artist Fernando Mastrangelo addressed the paradox that works criticizing gold's value are worth more if they incorporate the metal. He took a splashy decorative medallion from the early 20th century and cast a new 6-foot version in crystal sugar and gold dragees (confectionary ornaments that are sometimes edible). "As an artist, you're placing your own work within that value structure" of gold, Mr. Mastrangelo said. By using low-end materials, he intends to undercut the value of the original medallion.

Some artists in the show took the opposite route by elevating mundane objects of consumption. Dario Escobar's gold leaf-covered McDonald's cup from 1999 is on view, as is a gold-plated trash can from Sylvie Fleury.

From artist Chris Burden —well known for, among other works, a 1971 performance piece in which an assistant shot him in the arm—come bullets that appear even more menacing wrapped in 22-carat gold. French-born Eric Baudart has sprayed gold paint over stacked street posters, giving them a deceptively solid metal look.

In "Temptation" by the Danish-Norwegian duo Elmgreen & Dragset, whose work has been shown in such venues as London's Victoria & Albert Museum, an arm protruding from the wall clutches a bag of coins. The sculpture, made of resin and 24-carat beaten gold, was inspired by a relief mural, depicting a smiling man as he handed money to officials, outside an old tax collection office at the city hall in Munich.

It is a reminder of how people are expected to contribute to society, said Mr. Dragset in an email, but at the same time, "we all seem to have different opinions on what money represents and what a common good is and who should share in our riches."

For Carlos Betancourt, the beauty of gold underlines its power. His "Amulet for Light I (gold)" is a photograph, tinted gold, of his family's ornate Puerto Rican amulets. Mr. Betancourt's work focuses on memory. "These are personal objects that I have empowered with gold," he said.

Gold "never loses its value no matter how it's cast or used," said Mr. Mastrangelo. "So the artist almost becomes irrelevant in terms of gold. It's such a freaking cool material—if I had more access to it."

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George Lindemann Journal - "Isn't There a Better Way?" @wsj by Lee Rosenbaum

The 145-year-old institution has long suffered from financial difficulties and chronic mismanagement. Associated Press

In last week's courtroom drama over the fate of the endangered Corcoran Gallery of Art and its College of Art + Design, a crucial protagonist was missing from the petitioners' case for dismembering that venerable institution.

No one spoke for the art.

Charles Patrizia, the Corcoran trustees' lawyer, presented testimony by only three witnesses before resting his unconvincing case for divvying up the 145-year-old institution's financial, capital and artistic assets and real estate between George Washington University and the National Gallery of Art. This last-gasp gambit arose from desperate circumstances: The Corcoran has been seriously hobbled by chronic operating deficits and a revolving-door directorship, not to mention deferrals of necessary repairs and upgrades to its architecturally acclaimed Beaux Arts building.

Testifying for the trustees last week, in hearings held by District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Robert Okun, were Lauren Stack, the Corcoran's chief operating officer for the past three years, whose admitted lack of prior professional experience related to either art or museums may have contributed to the Corcoran's problems; Sean O'Connor, a development consultant to the Corcoran; and Steven Knapp, president of George Washington University, which stands to acquire the Corcoran's college and real estate. No Corcoran art professional was heard.

Also notably absent was Earl Powell III, director of the National Gallery. His institution, under the proposed arrangement, would be allowed to acquire whatever it wanted from the Corcoran's 17,000-piece collection of American and European art, which includes such touchstones as Gilbert Stuart's "George Washington," Albert Bierstadt's "Mount Corcoran" (named for the museum's founder), George Bellows's "Forty-Two Kids" and Edgar Degas's "The Dance Class."

The National Gallery has said it would probably keep more than half of the Corcoran's holdings, dispersing whatever it didn't want to other art museums and "appropriate entities," with preference for local institutions. This Washington-first policy helped secure the acquiescence of the D.C. attorney general, who is charged with defending the public interest and the charitable intent of donors. The Corcoran's landmark building would be left a selection of works "that are identified historically with the 17th Street landmark structure," according to the press release that announced the signing of the deal last May. Those works will be showcased in a token "Legacy Gallery"—an ironic appellation given the utter decimation of founder William Wilson Corcoran's legacy. The National Gallery would also get space in the Corcoran building for temporary exhibitions of modern and contemporary art.

When I asked Mr. Patrizia why he didn't call a witness from the National Gallery, he said that this was unnecessary because those who have legal standing to oppose the deal had "raised no issue about the capacity and ability of the National Gallery of Art to undertake and fulfill all of the responsibilities under the . . . agreement." That same reasoning would also have obviated the need to call Mr. Knapp, who spoke at great length.

A more plausible explanation is that no arts professional could have convincingly argued that the dispersal of the Corcoran's collection and the dissolution of its museum adhere to the donor's intent "as nearly as possible," which is the defining requirement for a cy-pres petition, such as the Corcoran's, to be granted. Mr. Corcoran's 1869 deed, from which the trustees of his institution are now seeking to deviate, explicitly mandates "the perpetual establishment and maintenance of a Public Gallery and Museum" to house his holdings. But the redefined Corcoran would cease to be a museum and most of Mr. Corcoran's art would permanently leave the building.

This case bears some resemblance to previous cy-pres proceedings over another collector-founded art gallery and school—the Barnes Foundation. Both court fights involved opponents' charges that the institution's life-threatening financial difficulties were caused, in part, by its own mismanagement.

But there is one crucial difference: The Barnes's court-allowed move to Philadelphia kept that institution's celebrated collection completely intact. The Corcoran's proposal would break up an American art trove that ranks with that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, as described by Darrel Sewell, former longtime American-art curator at the PMA. In written comments to the attorney general, Mr. Sewell asserted that "like the collection of Albert C. Barnes," the Corcoran's trove "is unique and could not be replicated today. As a totality, it has meaning and significance beyond the individual works."

How, then, might the Corcoran and its collection survive and thrive?

Two witnesses called by Andrew Tulumello, the lawyer for the opponents of the George Washington University/National Gallery of Art plan, suggested options: Wallace Loh, president of the University of Maryland, is willing to reopen his failed negotiations with the Corcoran to forge an alliance that he said would maintain the Corcoran's independence and provide financial support. Philanthropist Wayne Reynolds, former chairman of Ford's Theatre in Washington, renewed his previously spurned quest to become the Corcoran's board chairman. This time, he named 23 deep-pocketed potential board members and supporters who he said would help jump-start the Corcoran's financial recovery under his leadership. As reported by the Washington Post, he indicated he might sell works "nobody ever sees" to fund new acquisitions, particularly of contemporary art.

But suggesting that the Corcoran should now entertain the same suitors it previously had reason to reject is probably a nonstarter. Instead of negotiating from weakness, the Corcoran should first focus on how to build on its strengths. Bolstering the board with munificent members is crucial. Notwithstanding his power play, Mr. Reynolds is to be thanked for identifying hot prospects.

As occurred with the endangered American Folk Art Museum and Detroit Institute of Arts, the Corcoran's near-death experience has put potential funders on notice that it's now or never. Mutually beneficial alliances with established institutions (including less sweeping arrangements with George Washington University and the National Gallery of Art, or perhaps with others, such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum) should be pursued, but only if they enhance, not eviscerate, the Corcoran.

First and foremost, the Corcoran Gallery needs a dynamic, experienced director who believes in the institution, embraces challenges and has a compelling creative vision. A director's search was under way before the trustees settled on an interim leader, Peggy Loar. The search should resume with renewed urgency.

David Levy, the Corcoran's president and director from 1991 to 2005, whose failed capital campaign for a pricey Frank Gehry addition was a serious blow to donor confidence, suggested a way forward in a 2012 Washington Post opinion piece. The Corcoran, he said, should position itself as "Washington's museum, serving this unique metropolitan region . . . while creatively reaching out to its inner-city neighborhoods." Washington-area artists should be an integral part of this local strategy.

The Corcoran already has cash to keep it afloat while navigating through rough waters, including about $35 million that, if Judge Okun approves the current deal, would be handed over to George Washington University for renovations, and some $8 million to $10 million to be used for donor-restricted purposes. Mr. Knapp testified that about $25 million would suffice to fund the most desperately needed repairs and upgrades.

For now, the courtroom drama continues, with additional witnesses to be called by the deal's opponents. If Judge Okun does the right thing, he'll rule that the Corcoran's proposal doesn't meet the basic requirements of cy-pres. It needs to devise a better plan to fulfill Mr. Corcoran's stated goal of "encouraging American genius."

Ms. Rosenbaum writes on art and museums for the Journal and blogs as CultureGrrl at www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Corcoran’s Merger Plan Draws Fire in Court Hearing" @nytimes RANDY KENNEDY

WASHINGTON — Two widely divergent views of the financial troubles of the Corcoran Gallery of Art — which is seeking legal permission to alter its trust and dissolve itself through a merger with the National Gallery of Art — emerged in sometimes contentious testimony in the District of Columbia Superior Court on Wednesday.

The Corcoran, one of the nation’s oldest privately supported museums, has struggled for years to raise money. But the opponents of the merger plan — who include students at its art college and employees who say they could be harmed by the dissolution — during the hearing depicted a board of trustees that in recent years has done little to try to turn around the institution’s fortunes and has squandered money on consultants while not following their advice.

Andrew S. Tulumello, the opposition’s lawyer, cited a 2008 consultant’s study that found, as he described it, “that something was broken with fund-raising at the board level.” In the years after the study, the board never filled all 18 seats that its structure allowed. As Mr. Tulumello depicted the situation during his questioning of the museum’s leadership, the trustees seemed to function more as caretakers for an institution that was already assumed not to have a future.

Harry F. Hopper III, the museum’s chairman, who testified for a second day in support of the plan to dissolve the Corcoran as a stand-alone museum, said that a broken fund-raising mechanism was a symptom, not a cause, of troubles at the gallery. Years of poor finances, which had led to serious structural problems with the museum’s building, a landmark near the White House, became a spiral, scaring off significant donors. The recession, he added, made the climate for giving even more difficult.

“I personally had conversations with a lot of high net-worth individuals that were not presented to the board because they were not willing to step in because of the financial stress of the institution,” said Mr. Hopper, a venture capitalist. Of the gallery’s decision to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on management consultants, he added, “The only way that we could get our hands on the situation — where we had a bank put us in default and freeze accounts — was to have a SWAT team come in from an outside firm.”

Earlier financial problems were only a “fire drill” for what the gallery encountered over the last several years, he said.

Mr. Hopper defended the board’s work to stabilize the museum. “When it looked like the institution was just having trouble finding the runway to exist, I think we did a pretty good job,” he said.

The plan for the National Gallery to absorb the Corcoran and for George Washington University to take over the Corcoran’s art college has been presented by officials of the three institutions as the only way to keep the heart of the Corcoran’s collection intact and to salvage its legacy.

Thus, the Corcoran is seeking court permission to alter the 1869 deed of its founder, the banker William Corcoran, who gave his collection and money for the “perpetual establishment” of a “public gallery and museum.” Opponents contend that the Corcoran would exist as little more than a name under the merger and that its historic building would no longer function as a museum.

Under the deal, announced in May, the Corcoran would cede its collection of more than 17,000 pieces, rich in American art, to the National Gallery, which would preserve a “Legacy Gallery” within the Corcoran’s building on 17th Street, and organize its own exhibitions of modern and contemporary art there.

Works that the National Gallery could not accommodate would be dispersed to other institutions, with a preference for keeping them in Washington. The Corcoran’s building would become the property of the university, which would use it for classes for students of the Corcoran College of Art + Design.

Judge Robert D. Okun will continue to hear testimony in the case Thursday and next week.

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The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Tom Friedman: ‘Paint and Styrofoam" @nytimes by ROBERTA SMITH

“Toxic Green Luscious Green,” a 2014 work by Tom Friedman in his show “Paint and Styrofoam.” Credit Tom Friedman and Luhring Augustine, New York

The artist Tom Friedman tends to blow our minds and then move on, rarely repeating himself. (A starburst made of toothpicks or a realistic fly, having seemingly alighted on the corner of a pedestal, come to mind.) Nearly each artwork is some one-off feat of concept, technique and common materials. So it’s unexpected to see Mr. Friedman staying in one place as he does here and to realize that the effect is even more intense.

This show is suffused with the tension of trying to reconcile what you see with the exhibition’s title: “Paint and Styrofoam.” Whether painting or sculpture, every work in this show uses these two materials. Their names buzz around in your head with almost no place to land, as you try to figure out where one material stops and the other begins, or what you are looking at in the first place. This is especially true of the monochrome, seemingly abstract paintings that line the walls. (Fittingly, one work consists of a tiny eyeball wedged into a corner, easy to overlook.)

Minus the show’s title, other sculptures are determinedly, but also conventionally, trompe l’oeil, especially the wood stool, guitar and disconnected microphone of “Moot” and the purple (Jeff Koons-like) balloon of “Purple Balloon.” But “Pepto Bismol Pink” — an attenuated ganglion of vaguely intestinal shape — deviates. A divot in its white pedestal reveals Styrofoamish blue, probably before you even focus on it.

Each of the paintings has a different subject, effect and surface, and a title alluding to its particular secrets. The cream-colored “Kid” presents a fastidious canvas weave, a strip frame, a big swipe of paint and a tiny ball (a recurring motif), intimating a smiling (or smiley) face. The swirling brushwork of the dark blue “Night” yields part of van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” just as the artist’s visage can be found in the bright yellow of “Self Portrait.”

And so on, from one vision-testing surface to the next. The simplest is “Blue Styrofoam Seascape,” whose central ridge coalesces into a perfectly atmospheric horizon. And Mr. Friedman breaks free of flatness in “Blue” and “Toxic Green Luscious Green,” creating bas-relief pileups of objects, trash and words that include Styrofoam peanuts — previously a favored material — and other references to his singular career.       

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Tracey Emin's controversial artwork My Bed is to return to the Tate after selling for £2.2m earlier this month.

Count Christian Duerckheim, the piece's new owner, has agreed to loan the work "for a period of at least 10 years", said Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota.

The 1998 work features an unmade bed and a floor littered with empty vodka bottles, cigarette butts and condoms.

It was shortlisted for the 1999 Turner Prize and bought for £150,000 in 2000 by the art collector Charles Saatchi.

Count Duerckheim, a German industrialist, described the piece as "a metaphor for life, where troubles begin and logics die".

"I am absolutely delighted that Count Duerckheim has agreed to loan such an important work," said Sir Nicholas.

"We look forward to displaying the work [and] creating an opportunity for visitors to see a work that now has iconic status."

Emin made My Bed in her London council flat in 1998

Speaking last month, Emin said she was hopeful that My Bed would end up in a museum after it was sold at auction.

"The best possible result is that an amazing benefactor buys it and then donates it to a museum," she told the BBC News website.

Following the announcement, the artist said she "could not be happier" and that she would "cherish" installing the piece at its new home.

"I have always felt My Bed belongs at Tate. And now it will be," she said.

According to the Tate, My Bed - created by Emin in her council flat near London's Waterloo station - is an "unconventional and uncompromising self-portrait [that] gives a snapshot of the artist's life after a traumatic relationship breakdown".

Details of when and where the piece will go on display will be announced in the autumn.

Born in 1944, Count Duerckheim has been collecting since the 1960s and owns one of the leading collections of international contemporary art.

My Bed was acquired by White Cube gallery owner Jay Jopling on the industrialist's behalf, the Tate revealed on Tuesday.

George Lindemann Journal - "A Sculpture King Meets the Sun King" @wsj by Mara Hoberman

'The Entry of Apollo,' a Jean-Michel Othoniel fountain-sculpture, awaits transport to its outdoor Versailles location. Philippe Chancel

A building that once housed the pharmacy of French King Louis XIV has recently brimmed with activity again—this time, involving blown-glass orbs, steel pipes and curious nozzles. Since January, the Paris-based sculptor Jean-Michel Othoniel has turned this vaulted chamber on the periphery of Versailles' grounds into his makeshift studio.

When the artist finishes installing the three resulting fountain-sculptures later this summer, they will become the first new permanent artworks in the palace's gardens in more than 300 years.

Since 2008 Versailles, the lavish regal complex about 18 miles west of central Paris, has held temporary art exhibitions inside its 17th-century gilded ballrooms and manicured gardens. These shows have featured contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami. Mr. Othoniel's commission—part of the total renovation of a garden originally designed by the famed royal landscaper André Le Nôtre —is meant to stand the test of time.

"As an artist, and a French artist in particular, there is something very special about making a mark on the land that Le Nôtre and Louis XIV designed," Mr. Othoniel said of his fountain-sculptures, made of about 2,000 bowling ball-sized gilded glass spheres.

Photos: The Making of the New Fountains at Versailles

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Paris-based sculptor Jean-Michel Othoniel's three fountain sculptures will become the first new permanent artworks in the palace's gardens in more than 300 years. Philippe Chancel

The genesis of the work, titled "Beautiful Dances," dates to 2011, when the artist was invited by landscape architect Louis Benech to collaborate on a proposal for a Versailles-sponsored competition to reimagine the Water Theater Grove. It has been closed to the public since suffering severe storm damage in 1990.

The entry from Messrs. Benech and Othoniel—the only one to include contemporary artwork—won in 2012 over 21 other international submissions.

Some preservationists flinch at the idea of contemporary art becoming a permanent feature of a historic landmark. But Versailles President Catherine Pégard says that "Versailles was always a place for creativity and creation." Louis XIV, she added, "surrounded himself with the greatest artists of his time, and we are continuing that tradition today."

No stranger to monumental art projects, Mr. Othoniel is best known for his bauble-decorated entrance to a Paris subway station near the Louvre Museum. In 2000 he gave a garland of glass ornaments to the fountains of the Alhambra complex in Granada, Spain. Since 2003 six of his giant glass necklaces, like permanent strings of Mardi Gras beads, have adorned an oak tree at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

What the final artwork will look like. Othoniel Studio

At Versailles, Mr. Othoniel says, he felt a responsibility to "enter into a dialogue with the past." He extensively researched Louis XIV's interest in dance. The Sun King, it turns out, got his nickname from his balletic interpretation, at age 14, of Apollo. Mr. Othoniel's studies led him to discover a rare book of notations devised to help the king study Baroque dance steps. Originally published in 1701, these diagrams are the basis for the fountains' arabesque forms, which are meant to evoke the king and queen dancing on water.

"Beautiful Dances" is also linked to the past through its materials and manufacture. Louis XIV brought Venetian artisans to Versailles to fabricate the famous hall of mirrors. Similarly, Mr. Othoniel joined with a traditional glassblowing workshop in Murano—Venice's island of glass artisans—to create four blue orbs that will mark the locations of fountains in Le Nôtre's original garden design.

To match the particular form and intensity of the water jets in Versailles' existing fountains, Mr. Othoniel joined with hydraulic engineers to custom fabricate 17th-century-style nozzles. "I am dialoguing with history," he said, "but also creating a contemporary discourse that will become the next chapter in the history of a legendary location."