The George Lindemann Journal By George Lindemann

"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.

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

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.

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.

                                 

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

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

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.

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 - "  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."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lindemann, christopherfountain www.forbes.com/profile/george-lindemann, https://twitter.com/BassMuseumPres, http://www.nova.edu/alumni/profiles/george_lindemann.html, http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/investors/george-lindemann-net-worth, george-lindemann-jr.com, George Lindemann & family, george lindemann journal, shark tales, aclu, savedade, http://www.bassmuseum.org/blog/george-lindemann-wins-inaugural-better-beach-awards, horse, art, art education, forbes, http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/125anniversaryissue/lindemann.html

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.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lindemann, christopherfountain www.forbes.com/profile/george-lindemann, https://twitter.com/BassMuseumPres, http://www.nova.edu/alumni/profiles/george_lindemann.html, http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/investors/george-lindemann-net-worth, george-lindemann-jr.com, George Lindemann & family, george lindemann journal, shark tales, aclu, savedade, http://www.bassmuseum.org/blog/george-lindemann-wins-inaugural-better-beach-awards, horse, art, art education, forbes, http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/125anniversaryissue/lindemann.html