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.       

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

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."

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Oliver Payne and Nick Relph: ‘Ash’s Stash’" @nytimes by Karen Rosenburg

An installation view of “Ash’s Stash” at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, with shelves of formerly trendy gadgets and accessories. Credit Courtesy the artists and Thomas Müller/Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York

“Today everything is always ‘on’ at once, simultaneously forever — we’ve simply run out of past,” the British duo of Oliver Payne and Nick Relph write in a statement for their latest show at Gavin Brown. There, boutique-style shelves hold small, colorful assemblages of formerly trendy gadgets and accessories, among them, Reebok pump sneakers, Sony Walkman cassette players and one forlorn-looking Macintosh Classic computer with a protruding floppy disk.

The whole installation is itself a “reissue”; it dates from a booth at the 2007 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. And the artists have restaged it because they found it oddly predictive of the current trend for sharing carefully chosen photographs of our bookshelves and closets on social media. As they cleverly put it, “Cupboards become catwalks, and possessions pose for the camera, waiting to be liked.”

The cheeky little displays here do look as if they had been made for that exchange, with their high-low, tasteful-kitschy juxtapositions; witness the gilded cat that seems to be “driving” a black-and-gold sneaker, with a Confederate flag pin serving as a hood ornament, or the bottle of Chateau Latour that sports a chunky white digital wristwatch. (The many wine bottles tucked into sneakers may balance out all the expired tech and fashion with suggestions of increasing value.) The assemblages also make an interesting complement to Jeff Koons’s boxed Hoovers at the Whitney — which implies that to “run out of past” is not exactly a new phenomenon of the Instagram age. In fact, it sounds a lot like postmodernism. 

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "‘Displayed’ at the Anton Kern Gallery" @nytimes by Anton Kern   

When you exhibit a work of art, there are two things going on. There’s the object and there’s the presentational apparatus, which might be a frame, a pedestal, a shelf or a vitrine. Also involved are the gallery architecture, the structure of the exhibiting institution and, in the broadest terms, the art world social system. Usually, viewers are supposed to focus on the object and take for granted the apparatus.

In these postmodern times, however, many artists — from Joseph Beuys to Jeff Koons and Carol Bove — have made the displaying part an object in its own right. Organized by the artist and curator Matthew Higgs, this excellent show at Anton Kern Gallery presents works by 18 artists exemplifying a trend he calls “displayism.”

A ramshackle stage set with the artist’s signature — Josh Smith — scrawled in paint on its canvas backdrop implies that the object is the absent artist himself. An installation by Nancy Shaver resembling part of a flea market consists of materials from an antiques store she operates in Hudson, N.Y., called Henry. It includes old things like balustrade knobs and a chain made of bottle caps, with price tags attached, that viewers can purchase mostly for under $20.

Funky sculptural works by B. Wurtz — cobbled from odd pieces of wood, wire and metal cans — display things like white tube socks and plastic bags. A lovely, Walker Evans-like series of photographs of New York sidewalk newsstands from 1994, by Moyra Davey, turns a familiar type of public display into a kind of vernacular art form.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Rearranging Warhol’s Legacy" @nytimes by BLAKE GOPNIK

The front entrance to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Credit Abby Warhola        

PITTSBURGH — Andy Warhol was, chronologically and by his own description, a nose picker, a pimp and a water guzzler. He was also (or therefore) one of the most various, complex and impressive talents the art world has produced. All those claims, however unlikely, can be confirmed by a visit to the Andy Warhol Museum here in his hometown. In honor of its 20th anniversary, the museum has been rethought from top to bottom, and the results are now being revealed to the public. There may not be another museum that digs as deep into a single artist, and gets as much out of the excavation.

“We want people to know that there’s much more to Andy Warhol than Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyns,” said Eric Shiner, who took over as director in 2011. He started his career as an intern at the museum in 1994, and sitting in his office one day in April — the same space where he once sorted books — he said of Warhol, “He changed just about everything.”

Curators set out to show how life and art were perhaps more closely entwined for Warhol than for any other artist.

The museum used to mix works from various periods in an attractive scattershot, but now all seven of its floors have been reconceived as an orderly survey of just about everything that Warhol got up to, from the 1950s as a leading commercial artist to his work as an impresario with the Velvet Underground in the later ’60s to his landmark films — and the first video art — right through to his place deep within MTV culture in the 1980s. Where other artists of his generation, such as Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, used pop culture to feed their high art, Warhol plunged right in and became part of that culture.

“It really is a new Warhol; it’s much more about him,” Mr. Shiner said, noting especially the trove of archival documents and early art, much of it on loan from local relatives.

Forget Elizabeth Taylor and Brillo boxes and even Edie Sedgwick. To understand the true greatness of Andy Warhol (1928-87), we may want to start with two early images by and of him. The rethought galleries now feature a little-known student painting from 1948 in which Warhol uses the latest in expressionist brushwork to portray himself, nude, with a finger stuck up his nose, pushing past the limits of good taste and fine art even while still in college. Near that artwork hangs a rare family snapshot that includes a baby-bonneted Andy, maybe 2 years old, also with his finger in his nose. Could there be any other artist whose art so closely tracks his life?

We can make do knowing little about Giotto or Vermeer; we can manage without the details of Monet’s life. But Warhol, by being who he was, as much as by making what he made, put himself “at the very heart of what we know as art in the 20th century,” Mr. Shiner said. That art had often tried to bridge the gap between art and life; when Warhol came along, he backfilled the chasm. Figures such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons have waltzed across after him.

Last year, a record 120,000 people visited the museum, helping boost its revenue. The budget for the anniversary rehang was $500,000 — less than some museums spend on one show. A new lobby is lined in silver foil to echo Warhol’s 1964 Factory on East 47th Street in Manhattan, and comes complete with a bar meant to get visitors hanging out and to make the important art-historical point that Warhol was as notable as a catalyst for new ways to hang out as he was a maker of precious objects.

The museum is asking a lot, however, if it wants us to imagine that what goes on in its lobby could have much of a link to Warhol’s wild times. The fun that went on in his studio was so serious, it could almost be fatal.

Later, in America’s disco days, Warhol’s mere presence at Studio 54, as much as the portraits he did of his pals there, were what made him matter to our culture, as revealed in a show about Warhol and his designer friend Halston now filling special-exhibition spaces on the new second floor. (Future exhibitions there will dwell on how contemporary artists were influenced by or even reacted against Warhol.)

The idea of a “post-object” Warhol — we might now think of him as the godfather of such “relational” artists as Rirkrit Tiravanija — was a big part of how he came across in his own day. The rehang includes a 1969 issue of “Esquire” in which Warhol explains that his next work will be to rent out his followers to all comers, turning himself into a kind of art-world pimp.

Recent scholarship has also latched onto this idea of Warhol as performer. “There’s this conception of Andy Warhol’s most important artwork as his construction of the self, as it changed over the years,” said Nicholas Chambers, curator of art at the museum. Many of the new galleries where he’s hanging Warhol’s well-known canvases also include photos that show Warhol constructing a forever-new “self” that ranged from tie-wearing upstart to leather-clad undergrounder to preppy social climber and disco king.

The one Warhol persona that is slighted in the new installation is his presence as one of the first notably gay artists to reach mass attention. The museum is open about Warhol’s homosexuality, displaying his “Studies for a Boy Book,” a series of pre-Pop drawings from the 1950s, and mentioning boyfriends in wall text. But it never digs into how important he was for the history of gay culture, and how vital his gayness was for his art.

Yet there’s a risk that too much attention paid to who Warhol was could distract from the art he made, according to Christopher Bedford, the director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, who recently presented a show on Warhol’s use of photography. Warhol’s ideas about art may have expanded to include aspects of his life, but they are still ideas about art; Mr. Bedford said he felt that the museum has to be careful not to present Warhol as just another “fascinating social figure.”

You can sense the museum trying to strike this delicate balance in its rehang. If anything, however, recent stratospheric auction prices have focused public attention away from Warhol the man and onto his handmade, salable “masterpieces”: The catalog for Christie’s latest contemporary art auction in New York featured a “White Marilyn” from 1962 on its cover, as oligarch bait.

Mr. Shiner, the museum’s director, doesn’t deny the instant appeal of the paintings. Touring through the collection, he stopped to admire an immense 1963 silk-screened canvas of Elvis Presley called “Elvis 11 Times,” now given its own wall. Warhol wrote that he liked the silk-screen technique for its “assembly-line” effect, “the way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple — quick and chancey.”

Mr. Shiner emphasized that it’s easier to recognize the radical flair of Warhol’s classic pieces when they are seen near his more challenging work in moving pictures, as they are in the new installation. “Film is equal in his oeuvre to the paintings,” Mr. Shiner said.

Next year will mark five decades since Warhol became the first artist to make video art. (His landmark piece, “Outer and Inner Space,” featured Edie Sedgwick on film, keeping company with a second image of herself on video, and it beat Nam June Paik’s first video work by several weeks.) One of the rehang’s highlights is a fourth-floor media gallery where, for the first time, the public is offered on-demand, uncut access to about 130 of Warhol’s films, videos and TV programs, mostly unfindable until now. “Movies, movies and more movies,” Warhol later recalled. “We were shooting so many, we never even bothered to give titles to a lot of them".

Greg Pierce, a curator of film and video at the museum, is presenting one piece barely known even to experts: Warhol’s 1971 video called “Water.” It was made for an exhibition organized by Yoko Ono, and offers a 33-minute close-up on the tank of the water cooler in Warhol’s Union Square studio, as he and his irregulars stand around nattering and drinking from it. (The audio is punctuated with the “glug-glug” of the cooler being used). The video takes off from Warhol’s earlier “durational” films — works that had him pointing a static movie camera at such things as the Empire State Building — and blends them with his budding 1970s “performance” as the world’s cattiest gossip and partygoer.

John W. Smith, now the director of the art museum at the Rhode Island School of Design, was at the Warhol museum from 1994 to 2006 as an archivist and then assistant director. He said one of the most provocative moves for any one-artist museum would be to acknowledge the weak works as a vital part of the story. He added, “I know the storerooms at the Warhol Museum, and there’s a lot of work that the market has tried to tell us is important but frankly, I doubt it.” He cited Warhol’s “Toy” paintings, from the 1980s, as pieces that might be displayed as examples of second-rate work.

The new installation does not show much sign of trumpeting any works as also-rans.

But Mr. Smith also notes the opposite happening, with works once considered minor now being universally recognized as great. He mentions the Warhol archives as such a case. Down on the museum’s third floor, those archives are going on display behind glass walls. Warhol had the habit of filling cardboard boxes with all the mail, mementos and leftovers from his daily life, including such things as wedding cake, a banana-shaped harmonica and naughty pictures. He called the results “Time Capsules,” and all 610 of them are now visible; at any given time, the contents of one will be spread out in vitrines.

The museum has unpacked Capsule No. 109, whose hundreds of artifacts include a poster printed from a bootleg photo of a naked Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (in good humor, she inscribed it “For Andy — with enduring affection — Jackie, Montauk”) and an autographed (but never opened) copy of Lou Reed’s “Coney Island Baby.” (In an obscure interview conducted in the studio in 1985, apparently with Warhol looking on, one assistant talked about the capsules: “He wants to sell them as a unit. I tried to make them really good. Each one has a T-shirt, a good art book, Godiva chocolates — things like that.”)

Matt Wrbican, chief archivist and a walking hard-drive of Warholian facts, said there are over 500,000 items in his care, with many only now being put on display. Even the couple of hours I spent in the archives last year instantly delivered fresh information — the fact, for instance, that after being shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968, Warhol, either down at the heels or simply cheap, had hoped to trade paintings for his doctors’ services. At today’s auction prices, that would have made it the most profitable medicine ever practiced.

“He always kept everything,” recalled the illustrator James Warhola, a nephew who stayed with Warhol for several weeks in the 1970s and witnessed his manic collecting. “His whole life’s work was made to order for a museum.”

George Lindemann Wins Inaugural Better Beach Award

March 26, 2013

Congratulations, George Lindemann!

"George Lindemann Wins Inaugural Better Beach Award" @bassmuseum

George Lindemann Wins Inaugural Better Beach Award

March 26, 2013

Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce has awarded George Lindemann the award of Citizen at Large at the inaugural Better Beach Awards. This award was given to Lindemann based on his for his prolific and impactful role in growing, branding and leading the Bass Museum of Art for the past 5 years. As the President of the Board of Directors of the Bass Museum of Art, George Lindemann has not only been one of the few original members of the Board of Directors, but helped grow the board from 3 members to the current 23 current members of the Board creating a diverse and dynamic group of leaders for the Bass Museum of Art. Lindemann also helped conceptualize the current mission statement of the Bass Museum of Art, “we inspire and educate by exploring the connections between our historical collections and contemporary art”.

Along with the City of Miami Beach, George Lindemann’s generous donations and commitment to education, he created the Lindemann Family Creativity Center at the Bass Museum of Art. The Lindemann Family Creativity Center is the home of the museum’s IDEA@thebass program of art classes and workshops. Developed in conjunction with Stanford University’s acclaimed Institute of Design, IDEA classes employ a method of teaching known as Design Thinking, an open-ended method of problem-solving that allows children to brainstorm, work in teams and engage in creative play. The Creativity Center is also the home of the Art Club for Adults, lectures, film screenings, and teacher training workshops. Additional programming includespre-school art classes, after school and weekend art classes (children ages 6 to 12), and experimental programming designed by the museum’s Stanford Fellow and other experts in the field of arts education.

Congratulations, George Lindemann!