2014 Power 100 - A ranked list of the contemporary artworld's most powerful figures

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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.”

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.

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 by George Lindemann "A Palace of Wonders" @ nytimes by Frank Rose

VARESE, Italy — The Lombardy region of northern Italy is known for its many “villas of delight” — the “ville di delizia” that aristocratic Milanese families built in the 17th and 18th centuries as summer escapes and settings for lavish entertainments. Varese, in the foothills of the Alps, was a magnet for these estates, several of which are clustered on the parklike hill of Biumo Superiore. At its crest sits the Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza, the most storied, thanks to its longtime owner, Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, the Milanese businessman whose adventurous tastes and ardent appetites made him one of the most important art collectors of the last century.

“It’s not bad,” admitted his daughter, Maria Giuseppina Panza di Biumo, a smile escaping her lips as our eyes swept across eight acres of topiary and fountains.

In 1996, more than a decade before his death at 87, Count Panza, as he was widely known in the art world, donated the estate and 167 of the 2,500 artworks he’d amassed to the Fondo Ambiente Italiano, Italy’s national trust, which opened it four years later as a museum. Normally on view are sculptures by Martin Puryear and Meg Webster, monochromatic paintings by such artists as Phil Sims and David Simpson, and site-specific works by Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin and James Turrell that Panza commissioned in the ’70s. But through Nov. 2, the villa is also hosting a small but powerful exhibition of works by Mr. Irwin and Mr. Turrell, pioneers of Southern California’s Light and Space movement, artists whose concern with the limits of perception appealed to Panza both aesthetically and intellectually.

Called “Aisthesis: The Origin of Sensations,” the show takes its cue from the ancient Greek word for “feeling.” Esthesia, the ability to perceive, is the opposite of anesthesia, and this is what the exhibition is about: not admiring inanimate objects, but sensing afresh the world around us. Mr. Irwin and Mr. Turrell create a dialogue between illusion and reality that appealed to Panza — a somewhat stiff and cerebral figure — in ways that he himself may only gradually have appreciated.

Organized by Anna Bernardini, director of the Villa e Collezione Panza, and Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the exhibition comprises 19 works created from 1963 to 2013. Among them are two environments the artists returned to the villa to create last year: Mr. Irwin’s “Varese Scrim 2013,” translucent and serene, and Mr. Turrell’s “Sight Unseen,” an unsettlingly immersive installation that provokes a sense of wonder tinged with intimations of danger.

Occupying a former lemon house built in the early 19th century, “Varese Scrim 2013” consists of a mazelike series of white nylon panels that capture sunlight streaming in through tall, south-facing windows. It’s almost the inverse of the “Varese Scrim” he created for the villa 40 years earlier. That work, directly upstairs, transformed a windowless room by dividing it lengthwise with a white nylon panel that is all but indistinguishable from the walls. What appears to be a solid surface is in fact a screen that masks a void, creating a ghost room that exists in parallel with the room you can enter.

This understated questioning of the physical, so characteristic of his work, is present throughout the show. Two other works Mr. Irwin created in 1973, “Varese Window Room” and “Varese Portal Room,” use simple architectural elements to make subtle interventions in empty white rooms, adjusting our perception in a way that makes the real seem hyper-real. A tall acrylic column on the main floor of the villa refracts the sunlight streaming in, scattering rainbows across the room even as the column itself all but disappears.

The Turrells in the show are more assertive, sometimes to the point of aggression. “Shanta (Blue),” a 1967 piece never exhibited outside the artist’s studio, looks to be a glowing, three-dimensional blue box suspended in a corner of a darkened room; in fact, it’s completely immaterial, a projection of blue light. “Skyspace I,” one of the three works Mr. Turrell created for the villa in 1974, is a small room so saturated with natural and fluorescent light as to be blindingly white.

The first of more than 70 “skyspaces” Mr. Turrell has created, it prefigured “Aten Reign,” the otherworldly installation that occupied the rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York during last summer’s Turrell retrospective. But where the Guggenheim installation was vast and awe inspiring, “Skyspace I” is intimate and assaultive. It’s also modest compared to Mr. Turrell’s new installation at the villa, “Sight Unseen.” One of his “ganzfeld” (“total field”) pieces, this is an immersive and wildly disorienting environment designed to produce confusion and astonishment in equal measure.

Visitors experience the work in small groups for 10 minutes at a time. After signing a release (lawsuits have been filed over injuries sustained in other ganzfelds) and donning plastic bootees, you are ushered up a set of steps to what looks like an extremely large artwork on the wall. The guide steps through it, inviting you to do the same. Entering a large and seemingly boundless space suffused in white, you feel as if you have floated into a cloud — or you would feel that way if the floor weren’t sloping downward reminding you that gravity has not gone on holiday.

“Stop!” the guide says once you’re 25 or 30 feet in. “No farther.”

There seems to be an edge ahead, barely visible but suggesting a sharp drop. Then the light begins to shift, from an all-encompassing white to intense reds and blues. Now you feel as if you were deep within a Rothko, bathed in nonspecific spirituality. It would be nice to have a wall to lean against, but you can’t make one out. It’s important to remain upright, you tell yourself. You still have five or six minutes to go.

Giuseppe Panza di Biumo was the dutiful son of a Milanese wine merchant and real estate investor who had been granted a title by King Victor Emmanuel III. Young Giuseppe earned a law degree after World War II and went into the family business. But his first love was the villa, which his father had acquired in a run-down state in 1935. He fell in love with America on his initial visit to New York in 1954, and a few years after that, he discovered his greatest passion: art. Here in Varese, at the estate he once described as “a great, green space suspended between heaven and earth,” his three passions converged.

Panza — “He was never a count,” his daughter said, laughing, “but people liked to call him that” — focused his attention on American artists of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. He bought early and in depth, moving on to newer artists once the market caught up with his tastes. He installed many of the best pieces in the villa, to the befuddlement of friends and neighbors.

The white stucco mansion with its decorative plasterwork and 18th-century frescoes was not an obvious home for such work. Panza reveled not only in the juxtaposition but in all the space he had to fill.

“He started collecting because he had this house,” said Ms. Panza, who is a curator there, along with her son and three other family members. “He wanted big things, because he had big spaces.”

Panza first encountered Mr. Irwin’s work in the late ’60s. He was fascinated by Mr. Irwin’s concern with perception and reality: how we think we perceive reality when what we perceive is in fact what we think reality to be. No sooner had he begun to grapple with this conundrum than he discovered Mr. Irwin was not alone in this pursuit. “Irwin told him, ‘You have to go to L.A.,’ ” Ms. Panza said. “There’s a group of artists who are working with light. It’s very important.”

Chief among them was Mr. Turrell. Under the auspices of an early Los Angeles County Museum of Art program, Mr. Irwin and Mr. Turrell had worked with a psychologist on sensory-deprivation environments, a forerunner of Mr. Turrell’s ganzfelds. Before long the two artists found themselves in Varese, transforming rooms above the stable into the site-specific environments you find there today.

As for Panza, he succeeded in transforming the hilltop estate once again into a villa of delight, though one this time conforming to his own definition.

“My father was not very emotional,” Ms. Panza said as we walked back toward the first-floor family quarters, now open to the public as well. “He was more thoughtful.”

But the villa “was a place of recovery for him,” she explained. “It gave him breath and hope.”

Not always, however. In 1999, having concluded a series of deals that sent the bulk of his collection to the Guggenheim and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, he was overseeing a full restoration of the villa as both museums were preparing major Panza exhibitions. For an obsessive and a perfectionist, it was all a bit much. Perception may not be reality, but it’s the closest thing we know, and reality had to be just right. The stress led to a heart attack, and as he was recovering, he became overwhelmed with the realization of how much it all meant to him: the purchases, the intellectual discussions with artists, the art itself.

One day, he turned to his daughter, she recalled, and with surprise in his voice said, “I didn’t think emotions could influence so much our heart.”

“And I said, ‘Daddy....’ ”

George Lindemann Journal - "Boxed In, With Room for Creativity" @nytimes by Ted Loos

For the first show he conceived as director of the Museum of Arts and Design, Glenn Adamson is thinking inside the box.

The box is a large yellow crate made by the Brooklyn packing and art transport company Boxart, built for a bulbous sculpture by Wendell Castle. The crate is part of “NYC Makers: The MAD Biennial,” opening on Tuesday. While Mr. Castle’s sculpture is tucked inside, it is not officially part of the show.

“I like this idea that a fine artist and a crate maker can all be seen on a level playing field,” Mr. Adamson said. “It’s a powerful idea, and a radical idea, for a museum.” Though biennials are not exactly news, Mr. Adamson’s exhibition features a fleet of objects and installations that may be getting through the door of a major cultural institution for the first time: bottles of whiskey, a jar of handmade candy and scratch-and-sniff wallpaper, for starters.

Mr. Adamson is attempting what he calls an ambitious “relaunch” of the museum’s mission, which has been focused on “making sure craft is an equal part of the art world,” he said. “Now we’re looking at what the skilled maker brings to the larger world around us.”

The new biennial format spotlights work by 100 citywide “makers” — the trendy term for creators of any kind — and it includes a cross-disciplinary group of people within New York City. Some are famous, like Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk and Yoko Ono, while others have yet to gain renown, like the wallpaper company Flavor Paper. One of the sweaty-smelling papers in the show is supposed to evoke “the scent of creativity of 100 makers,” said Jake Yuzna, the biennial’s curator.

Lest anyone doubt the of-the-moment feel to the maker concept, President Obama proclaimed June 18 a National Day of Making.

There are objects in the show that would not be out of place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Whitney Museum of American Art, like two crumpled glass sculptures by Jeff Zimmerman. But the show, which Mr. Adamson said he conceived during his first week on the job last fall, is part of his effort to create a more accessible museum. He added: “A good rule for me is that an 8-year-old should be able to get quite a lot out of everything. It’s not that all the content has to be totally introductory, but there should be something for them to hang on to.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/arts/design/nyc-makers-the-mad-biennial-opens-on-tuesday.html?ref=arts&_r=0, Images for george lindemann, George Lindemann - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, George Lindemann & family - Forbes, Shark Tales - George Lindemann, George Lindemann Net Worth - TheRichest, George Lindemann, George Lindemann Wins Inaugural Better Beach Award, George L. Lindemann - The Wharton School, The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

That approach makes some people in the art world nervous: Could a level playing field devalue the more traditional artworks on view?

“It’s a concern,” said Zesty Meyers, an owner of the design gallery R & Company, which lent the Zimmerman sculptures to the show. “But if it’s done right it could be the best show in the world.”

The biennial organizers are taking pains to create the feel of an open studio where artisans ply their trades in person. Mr. Adamson said it would have the air of a festival. In August, for example, Martinez Hand Rolled Cigars will demonstrate their rolling process; some of their cigars are on view for the duration of the exhibition.

In searching for previously unheralded creativity, the museum — which was founded in 1956 as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts and moved to 2 Columbus Circle in 2008 — has tapped in to a populist strain of the current cultural moment. Candidates were nominated by more than 300 New York City cultural leaders including the artist Dan Graham, the choreographer Bill T. Jones and the fashion designer Reed Krakoff. Then a 10-person jury led by the design entrepreneur Murray Moss, including Mr. Adamson and Mr. Yuzna, made the final selections.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has made frequent comments about the city’s richness beyond Manhattan, which is well in evidence in the museum’s biennial’s representation from Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island and especially the maker-hub of Brooklyn.

“It coincides with what the mayor has been talking about: New York City as a five-borough place,” Mr. Adamson said.

A subtheme of the show is the vital role of the artisan in what Mr. Adamson calls New York’s “creative economy,” and some outside groups have tried to quantify at least part of that impact.

Last month, the nonprofit group Center for an Urban Future released its analysis of figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Its report, “New York’s Design Economy,” looked at the topic in the broadest sense, from fashion to landscaping to industrial work.

“We want to highlight parts of the economy that have flown under the radar, and design is a great example of that,” said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of Center for an Urban Future.

The group reported that, according to the bureau, the number of professional designers in New York was 40,340 in 2013 and had bounced back significantly since the recession but had not reached the levels of 2008, when the number was 44,400.

New York is still the country’s undisputed design hub, and more to the point of the museum’s show, Brooklyn and Queens were found to be leading the growth. The number of design firms in Brooklyn doubled between 2003 and 2012, from 265 to 532.

“A show like this sheds light on the suppliers — specialized people who normally don’t fit into an existing category, but they’re artisans making things,” said Rosemary Scanlon, dean of the Schack Institute of Real Estate at New York University. Ms. Scanlon produced three extensive reports on the economic impact of the arts: in 1983 and 1993, as an economist for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and in 2007, as a consultant for the Alliance for the Arts.

In organizing the biennial, which will tackle a new city in two years, Mr. Adamson also has an eye on the museum marketplace and positioning the museum as a distinct brand. He mentioned the more famous biennial across town at the Whitney as a point of reference.

“The kind of spiky, theoretical programming is being done so well at other spaces that I think we can become a point of entry for people,” Mr. Adamson said. “Look where we are: the corner of Central Park. I would like people to experience MAD as a fantastic adjunct to a day in the park.”

Some of the makers who are usually behind the scenes are surprised and delighted to find themselves in the spotlight.

“When I got the first call from Jake I thought it was, well, not exactly a scam, but I was a little skeptical,” said Daniel Hanford, the director of Boxart, which works frequently with the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.

“I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and most of the time no one gets to see our work,” Mr. Hanford said. “It feels great.”

George Lindemann Journal "Enduring the Elements" @wsj by Richard Cork

Exploring mortal drama with religious overtones. St. Paul's Cathedral

London

Nothing can prepare visitors to St. Paul's Cathedral, in the heart of the city, for the impact of Bill Viola's visionary video installation "Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water)." After walking through the spectacular elaboration of Christopher Wren's architecture, I find the work positioned at the far end of the long South Quire Aisle. The carbon-steel stand containing four plasma screens is purged and minimal; designed by Norman Foster at his most austere, it contrasts very severely with the profuse ornamentation enlivening the High Altar nearby. The presentation of "Martyrs" is not allowed to interfere with the visceral power of the images themselves, focusing relentlessly on the plight of four figures who undergo extreme torment.

When Mr. Viola first made his reputation, in the 1980s, as a pioneering video artist from New York, his work seemed more secular than sacred. In the poignant "Nantes Triptych" (1992), three screens record the birth of a baby, a man surrounded by water and an old woman's death in a hospital. The baby was Mr. Viola's second child and the dying woman was his mother. So his fascination with extreme mortal drama was already clear, but his exploration of religious images became overt as he grew older. The overseers of St. Paul's were very impressed by his 2003 exhibition at the National Gallery in London, where he disclosed an intense interest in traditional Christian art. Small wonder, then, that "Martyrs" was commissioned for the cathedral, where Mr. Viola's figures immediately look at home in a building dedicated to suffering and redemption.

No seats are provided, so I stand and watch as three men and one woman, one on each screen, endure their unimaginable agony. This time, unlike in the "Nantes Triptych," the figures are all performers. Above them, an enormous Wren window admits daylight to the cathedral. But absolute darkness surrounds the martyrs as they strive to withstand their alarming pain. My encounter with "Martyrs" is profound enough to make me feel that I have never before experienced the strange, heightened intensity provided by Mr. Viola here.

At the beginning, the man on the far left is virtually invisible. Almost covered by a stifling heap of earth, he seems to be buried alive. Only after moving in very close to the screen do I realize that his head is still protruding, although he clamps both hands protectively against his skull. Next to him, a fair-haired woman dangles from thick ropes tied round her wrists. Her clothed body is seen full-length, and ropes entwine her ankles as well. There she hangs, twisting in the wind and contrasting with a seated elderly man on the next screen. He appears to be asleep, yet small flames have already started descending from above and settling ominously on the floor near his bare feet. Meanwhile, on the far-right screen, a bearded young man lies motionless on the ground. Although his naked torso looks healthy and well-built, he might be close to death already. Soon enough, the rope tied round his ankles begins pulling him up into the air.

Mr. Viola wastes no time in putting all the martyrs through hell. The duration of his entire video is only seven minutes, and all the way through I find my gaze darting from one screen to the next in an attempt to discover what exactly is happening to each of these doomed figures. It is a highly dramatic spectacle, especially when the man on the far left is uncovered. The earth rushes upward, like smoke rising from an inferno or even an inverted waterfall ascending to the sky. The man emerges from his hunched humiliation, gradually becoming upright. His stance is very different from the position of the hapless woman, who is now tossed brutally from side to side by furious air.

Yet the most alarming development of all affects the elderly man in the chair. The flames flare upward with terrifying force, threatening to burn him. He wakes up, placing hands on knees while raising his head and staring out directly at us. As for the athletic young man on the right, he dangles upside-down and stretches out his arms at either side. For a moment, I am reminded of the Crucifixion. But Mr. Viola rightly ensures that "Martyrs" cannot be pinned down to a single religion. Water starts pouring down from the top, drenching the young man and making his dark hair hang in long, dripping tresses.

In the final phase of this mesmeric work, turmoil gives way to stillness. Yet there is no loss of intensity. If anything, the figures become even more compelling as they arrive at stasis. The man on the far left stands erect, head up and eyes closed as if lost in prayer. By a miracle, none of the earth that once smothered his body can now be seen on his flesh or clothes. He has been purged, and the woman's gyrations have likewise ceased. She has even managed to free her hands from the thick ropes, but her feet are still bound together and so her fingers cling to the ropes for support. Suspended in space, but not inverted, she throws her head backward as if searching for the light-source above.

Her deathly pallor is echoed by that of the man in the chair. Although the flames have subsided and his entire body is unaccountably intact, he looks blanched enough to be dead. The theme of extinction is pursued at the far right, where the inverted young man is pulled up until he disappears at the top, leaving only a thin, melancholy trickle of water in his place. An overall sense of tragedy dominates the work, but at least the young man might have ascended to another realm. Even the man on the far left, who is still standing, tilts his head back and shuts his eyes, while a strong white light shines down and almost makes his face dissolve in the brightness. At this point, all four screens grow dark and the work terminates.

After a few seconds, though, it starts again and the martyrdom is re-enacted on a continuous loop, replayed over and over. Wandering away from Mr. Viola's elegiac installation, I walk behind the High Altar and, in the Jesus Chapel, discover a large open book with names carefully written inside. The chapel especially commemorates U.S. soldiers who died in World War II, and their names lend a poignant historical dimension to Mr. Viola's work. But his overall intentions cannot be limited to the idea of a military memorial. "Martyrs" may invite us to witness what Mr. Viola describes as "the human capacity to bear pain, hardship, and even death," yet its deepest power resides in his ability to convey the fundamental mystery of sacrifice.

Mr Cork's latest book, "The Healing Presence of Art," was published by Yale in 2012.

George Lindemann Journal "Christie's 'Bumpy' Sale Anchored by $23.8 Million Schwitters" @wsj by Kelly Crow

Christie's in London sold a 1920 jewel-toned painting by German artist Kurt Schwitters created from debris he found scattered around Berlin—including cardboard strips and street-poster fragments—for $23.8 million Tuesday.

One successful sale was a Kurt Schwitters collage for $23.8 million. UPPA/Zuma Press

The price for "Yes—What?—Picture" reset Schwitters's auction record, but it also represented one of the few successes in an otherwise disappointing Christie's $146 million sale in which a third of the house's 60 offerings went unsold.

The sale also fell short of the house's $164 million low bar.

Christie's sale was pockmarked by plenty of artworks that fell flat and went unsold, creating an eerie saleroom atmosphere that has been rare since the recession.

Schwitters's abstract performed well in part because it is so rare: His collage relief paintings, which he made during the turbulent, impoverished years following World War I, helped establish his international reputation—and yet only three works from this period remain in private hands. This version was also three-feet high, large for an artist better known for painting on placemat-size canvases. After a dogged, three-way bidding war, a telephone bidder won it for more than double its high estimate.

A couple other pieces sold well, but with strings attached. Before the auction, Christie's had enlisted outside investors to pledge to bid on a pair of paintings by Henri Matisse and Joan Miró—unless other collectors during the sale offered even more.

Christie's risk-offsetting strategy paid off for the house because these paintings garnered no other bids in the moment and so were claimed by their guarantors for $11.6 million and $7.7 million, respectively.

Matisse's Nice-period "The Artist and His Nude Model" from 1921 was expected to sell for at least $11.9 million, and Miro's "Woman's Voice in the Night, Roissignol" from 1971 was estimated to sell for at least $6.8 million.

Works by Surrealist artists such as Max Ernst and Rene Magritte fared reasonably well. A red-and-black Ernst sold to an Asian telephone bidder for $616,975.

A $1.5 million sculpture of black curtains by Magritte sold to London-based art adviser Bart van Son, who said his collector client "has the perfect spot for it at home."

"You don't see much sculpture by Magritte, and it's a marvelous piece," Mr. Van Son added afterward.

Sculptures by Alberto Giacometti largely fell like dead weights at Christie's sale, though. Giacometti has had a mixed performance at auctions lately, and he didn't weather his market test well Tuesday. Of his eight examples up for bid, only four found takers—including a 1956 mustard-colored "Woman of Venice II," that sold for $15.4 million, over its $13.6 million low estimate.

Giacometti's gray portraits and his bronze sculpture of a spindly waving "The Hand" went unsold. The piece was expected to sell for at least $17 million.

Among the other unsold offerings was a Piet Mondrian that was expected to sell for at least $8.5 million—collectors said it had condition problems—and a Chaim Soutine was expected to sell for $2 million or more. The Chaim Soutine stalled at $950,000.

After the sale, Amsterdam collector Matthÿs Erdman said Christie's set estimates that appeared too high, particularly for some material that looked mediocre compared to Sotheby's BID -1.02% Sotheby's U.S.: NYSE ^$39.79 -0.41 -1.02% June 26, 2014 12:37 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 432,844 P/E Ratio 18.69 Market Cap $2.77 Billion Dividend Yield 1.00% Rev. per Employee $576,249 40.2540.0039.7539.5010a11a12p1p2p3p 06/24/14 Christie's 'Bumpy' Sale Anchor... 06/23/14 Dueling Bidders Push Up Trophy... 06/20/14 Checker Cabs Come to Brooklyn More quote details and news » BID in Your Value Your Change Short position offerings the night before.

"People go for trophies, and I think Christie's had trouble getting their prices right," Mr. Erdman said. "Even in this market, you can't get away with everything."

Christie's Chief Executive Steven Murphy said the house had a "bumpy night" and that his staff would look harder at their estimates moving forward. But Mr. Murphy said he didn't think the sale portended a downturn in the market overall.

"The masterpieces still flew," he said.

Next week, both houses are slated to conduct sales of contemporary art in London.

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com