"12-Year-Old Building at MoMA Is Doomed" @nytimes

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

MoMA expects to have the building demolished by the end of this year.

 

By ROBIN POGREBIN

 

When a new home for the American Folk Art Museum opened on West 53d Street in Manhattan in 2001 it was hailed as a harbinger of hope for the city after the Sept. 11 attacks and praised for its bold architecture.

 

 

The former home of the American Folk Art Museum, acclaimed when it opened 12 years ago, is going to be demolished.

“Its heart is in the right time as well as the right place,” Herbert Muschamp wrote in his architecture review in The New York Times, calling the museum’s sculptural bronze facade “already a Midtown icon.”

Now, a mere 12 years later, the building is going to be demolished.

In its place the adjacent Museum of Modern Art, which bought the building in 2011, will put up an expansion, which will connect to a new tower with floors for the Modern on the other side of the former museum. And the folk museum building, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, will take a dubious place in history as having had one of the shortest lives of an architecturally ambitious project in Manhattan.

“It’s very rare that a building that recent comes down, especially a building that was such a major design and that got so much publicity when it opened for its design — mostly very positive,” said Andrew S. Dolkart, the director of Columbia University’s historic preservation program. “The building is so solid looking on the street, and then it becomes a disposable artifact. It’s unusual and it’s tragic because it’s a notable work of 21st century architecture by noteworthy architects who haven’t done that much work in the city, and it’s a beautiful work with the look of a handcrafted facade.”

MoMA officials said the building’s design did not fit their plans because the opaque facade is not in keeping with the glass aesthetic of the rest of the museum. The former folk museum is also set back farther than MoMA’s other properties, and the floors would not line up.

“It’s not a comment on the quality of the building or Tod and Billie’s architecture,” Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s director said.

Mr. Lowry personally went to the architects’ offices to inform them of the museum’s decision, a gesture that Ms. Tsien said she appreciated.

“We feel really disappointed,” she said in an interview. “There are of course the personal feelings — your buildings are like your children, and this is a particular, for us, beloved small child. But there is also the feeling that it’s a kind of loss for architecture, because it’s a special building, a kind of small building that’s crafted, that’s particular and thoughtful at a time when so many buildings are about bigness.”

The folk art museum, which had once envisioned the building as a stimulus for its growth, ended up selling the property, at 45 West 53d Street, to pay off the $32 million it had borrowed to finance an expansion. It now operates at a smaller site on Lincoln Square, at West 66th Street.

Mr. Lowry said the expansion would complete the MoMA campus, which will ultimately consist of five buildings, four of them on West 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas.

Still to be built is an 82-story tower just west of the folk museum that is being developed by Hines, a Houston company, and was designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel. It will include apartments as well as exhibition space for the museum.

When the projects are finished the museum will gain about 10,000 square feet of gallery space at the former folk art site and about 40,000 in the Nouvel building, officials said. The Modern’s second, fourth and fifth floors will line up with those in both buildings. (The second-floor galleries are double height.)

“We’ll have a completely integrated west end to the museum,” Mr. Lowry said. “Floor plates will extend seamlessly.”

Precisely what will be displayed in the new galleries has yet to be determined, but Mr. Lowry said they would include work from the Modern’s “midcentury collections, early Modern collections and temporary exhibitions.”

The cost for the project has not been announced, he said, and fund-raising has yet to begin.

MoMA’s 2004 renovation, designed by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, increased the museum’s gallery space to 125,000 square feet, from 85,000 (and the overall size to 630,000 square feet, from 378,000). But the museum still needs more room for exhibitions.

“We have a lot of art that we own that we would like to show,” said Jerry I. Speyer, the real estate developer who is the museum’s chairman. “When we built what exists today we didn’t get as much exhibition space as we really need.”

Ms. Tsien said she and Mr. Williams, her husband, wished the Modern had found a way to reuse what they designed and to realize its value.

“It’s a building that kids study in architecture school,” she said. “They study it as a kind of precedent to understand how buildings are made and to understand the kind of space it is because it is a complex and interesting building in a very small site.”

But, she added, “it doesn’t seem to make sense to second-guess how they might have used it.”

The Modern will interview architects to design the new addition, Mr. Lowry said, and hopes to select one by the end of this year. It expects to have the building demolished by then.

Construction of the Nouvel project is expected to start in 2014, with both new buildings being completed simultaneously in 2017 or 2018, Mr. Lowry said.

The museum has been aggressive about expansion. In 1996 it bought the Dorset Hotel, a 1920s building on West 54th Street, and two adjacent brownstones, using much of the sites for its extensive renovation in 2004.

In 2007 the museum sold its last vacant parcel of land for $125 million to Hines, which decided to develop the Nouvel building and include space for the museum.

Mr. Nouvel originally designed the tower, at 53 West 53d Street, with a spire rising 1,250 feet — matching the top floor of the Empire State Building — and Nicolai Ouroussoff predicted in The Times that it would be “the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation.”

But residents protested the height and the Department of City Planning demanded that Mr. Nouvel cut 200 feet from the top. He did so, and in 2009 the City Council approved plans for a tower that is to rise 1,050 feet.

The museum is deciding what to put at ground level at the former folk art building site — perhaps additional retail or another restaurant, Mr. Lowry said. (Its upscale restaurant, the Dining Room at the Modern, received three stars from Pete Wells in The Times last month.)

“We bought the site,” Mr. Lowry said, “and our responsibility is to use the site intelligently.”

Ms. Tsien said she could not recall another example of such a high-profile architectural project being demolished so soon after it was built. “Museums have opened and closed and buildings have shifted,” she said, “but I don’t know about being torn down.”

"A Billion-Dollar Gift Gives the Met a New Perspective (Cubist)" @nytimes

 

In one of the most significant gifts in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the philanthropist and cosmetics tycoon Leonard A. Lauder has promised the institution his collection of 78 Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures.

The trove of signature works, which includes 33 Picassos, 17 Braques, 14 Légers and 14 works by Gris, is valued at more than $1 billion. It puts Mr. Lauder, who for years has been one of the city’s most influential art patrons, in a class with cornerstone contributors to the museum like Michael C. Rockefeller, Walter Annenberg, Henry Osborne Havemeyer and Robert Lehman.

The gift was approved by the Met’s board at a meeting Tuesday afternoon.

Scholars say the collection is among the world’s greatest, as good as, if not better than, the renowned Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures in institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the Pompidou Center in Paris. Together they tell the story of a movement that revolutionized Modern art and fill a glaring gap in the Met’s collection, which has been notably weak in early-20th-century art.

“In one fell swoop this puts the Met at the forefront of early-20th-century art,” Thomas P. Campbell, the Met’s director, said. “It is an unreproducible collection, something museum directors only dream about.”

And many did. Discussions between Mr. Lauder and the Met went on for years, first with Philippe de Montebello, its longtime director who retired in 2008, and more recently with Mr. Campbell. While Mr. Lauder declined to say who else courted his collection, officials in the museum world have said the National Gallery of Art in Washington was among them. But as a New Yorker aware that his art could radically transform one of the city’s most historic institutions, he saw the Met as a perfect fit.

“Whenever I’ve given something to a museum, I’ve wanted it to be transformative,” Mr. Lauder explained. “This wasn’t a bidding war. I went knocking, and the door opened easily.”

In the New York art scene, which is heavily populated with big-time collectors, Mr. Lauder is a singular figure. While many of his peers have made splashy acquisitions, seduced by the latest trends, he has quietly and steadily built a museum-worthy collection with a single focus, on Cubism.

His gift comes without restrictions so it can be displayed as curators see fit. The Met is already beginning to receive the art, according to officials there, for an exhibition scheduled to open in the fall of 2014.

Mr. Lauder, 80, has also spearheaded the creation of a research center for Modern art at the Met, supported by a $22 million endowment that he has helped finance along with museum trustees and supporters.

The collection, which Mr. Lauder began building more than 40 years ago, is a product of taste and timing.

“I liked the aesthetic,” he said on a recent afternoon in his Manhattan apartment. He was in the living room, staring at a still life by Picasso richly punctuated with bits of newspaper and sand. “Back then,” he said, “a lot was still available, because nobody really wanted it.”

It was also relatively inexpensive because the fashion was for Impressionism and post-Impressionism.

Mr. Lauder and his younger brother, Ronald S. Lauder, a founder of the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side, are among the most influential collectors and supporters of art in New York. But while others buy widely, often in multiple periods and styles, Leonard Lauder stands out for his single-minded focus.

“You can’t put together a good collection unless you are focused, disciplined, tenacious and willing to pay more than you can possibly afford,” Mr. Lauder said. “Early on I decided this should be formed as a museum collection,” and “whenever I considered buying anything, I would step back and ask myself, does this make the cut?”

As a result, much of his art comes from some of the world’s most celebrated collections, including those of Gertrude Stein, the Swiss banker Raoul La Roche and the British art historian Douglas Cooper.

The term Cubism first appeared in a review of a 1908 exhibition at Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s Paris gallery, which featured early Cubist works. What began as a collaboration between Picasso and Braque, Cubism became a pioneering movement that redefined concepts of space and time, high and low. Those artists, along with Fernand Léger and Juan Gris, took shapes that were familiar and turned them upside down, dismantling the traditional perspective.

Challenging the romantic view of painting, Cubist artists also began incorporating things like cardboard, sand, sawdust, rope, wood, wallpaper, stencils and bits of newspaper into their paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures. Their work paved the way for abstraction, which dominated Western art for the next 50 years.

Often, Mr. Lauder said, it took him years to find something he wanted to buy. “I’ve made more trips to Switzerland than I’d like to count,” he said with a chuckle. With the help of Emily Braun, an art historian who has worked as Mr. Lauder’s curator for 26 years, he was able to pick and choose the finest works that came on the market.

As a result, most of the works in Mr. Lauder’s collection have a particular historical significance. Two landscapes are from the groundbreaking 1908 Kahnweiler exhibition: Braque’s “Terrace at the Hotel Mistral,” from 1907, and his “Trees at L’Estaque,” from 1908.

“ ‘The Trees at L’Estaque’ is considered one of the very first Cubist pictures,” Ms. Braun said. “It created a new form of pictorial space that Braque arrived at from his close study of Cézanne’s landscapes.”

Rebecca Rabinow, a curator in the Metropolitan Museum’s department of Modern and contemporary art, noted other milestones included in the gift. “There are so many firsts in this collection,” she said.

Picasso’s “Oil Mill,” from 1909, was the first Cubist painting seen in Italy, which influenced the Italian Futurists. Another of his works, “The Fan (L’Independent),” from 1911, is one of the first works in which Picasso experimented with typography, in this case the gothic type masthead from a local French newspaper. Braque’s “Fruit Dish and Glass,” from 1912, is the first Cubist paper collage ever created.

Some of the paintings and sculptures in Mr. Lauder’s collection were particularly radical for their time, like Picasso’s “Woman in an Armchair (Eva),” the artist’s 1913-14 image of his mistress Eva Gouel, in which he translated the female body into his own Cubist language. Picasso’s sculpture “Head of a Woman,” from 1909, is thought to be the first Cubist sculpture.

That many of the works look both forward and back is of particular value to the Met’s curators. Picasso’s embrace of African tribal art, for instance, was crucial to his depiction of nontraditional forms.

“Cubism inspired not just Western artists, but it had a huge global impact,” Ms. Rabinow said. “We can tell so many different stories that we could never tell before.”

Up to now Cubism has been only sparsely represented at the Met. In fact it only received its first Cubist paintings in 1996. In a 2010 review of an exhibition of the Met’s Picasso collection, Holland Cotter noted in The New York Times, “When the Museum of Modern Art was wolfing down audacious helpings of Cubism, the Met was content with a tasting menu of Blue Period, Rose Period and neo-Classical fare.”

This isn’t the first transformative gift Mr. Lauder has made to a museum. As the longtime chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art (he is now its chairman emeritus), he donated millions in art and money, most recently in 2008 when he gave the museum $131 million to shore up its endowment.

While it is the largest gift in the Whitney’s history, it came with strings. Concerned about the future of its landmark Marcel Breuer building, which Mr. Lauder considers the Whitney’s spiritual home, he placed a stipulation on his gift that the building could not be sold for the foreseeable future. At the same time, he quietly masterminded plans for the Met to take over the Breuer building for at least eight years, after the Whitney decamps to its new home in the meatpacking district of Manhattan in 2015.

When the Met gets Mr. Lauder’s collection, Mr. Campbell said, it will take “pride of place” in the museum’s soon to be renovated Modern and contemporary galleries, in its main building. Before then the collection will be exhibited as a whole for the first time at the Met in 2014 in a show organized by Ms. Rabinow and Ms. Braun.

Realizing how his collection could help tell so many different stories when seen in the context of the Met’s encyclopedic holdings, Mr. Lauder did not put restrictions on his gift.

And he stressed that his donation doesn’t mean the end of his collecting. As recently as last month he bought a collage by Gris, which is part of the gift.

“I’ll continue to buy and add to the Met’s collection,” he said, then paused, smiled and added, “But only if the right things come along.”

 

"Family Seeks Return of a Matisse Seized by the Nazis" @NYtimes

The heirs of a French art dealer are demanding that a Norwegian museum return one of its featured paintings, a Matisse that was confiscated by the Nazis in 1941 in Paris.

The family of Paul Rosenberg, a prominent Parisian gallery owner, has documents showing that the painting, known as “Woman in Blue in Front of Fireplace,” or “Blue Dress in a Yellow Armchair,” was among those in the possession of the Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering in 1942. The documents include a long list, stamped with Goering’s initials, itemizing artworks taken from Mr. Rosenberg’s vault

But the museum, the Henie Onstad Arts Center, founded in 1968 by the Olympic skating champion Sonja Henie and her husband, the shipping magnate Niels Onstad, says Mr. Onstad bought the painting in good faith more than 60 years ago, giving the center ownership rights to the work under Norwegian law. The law requires a minimum of 10 years’ possession.

The museum, outside Oslo, said it did not know the painting had once been Nazi plunder, but it does not contest that, in light of the evidence. It says that it is continuing to negotiate with the heirs and to study the work’s provenance, and that it will discuss the family’s request at a board meeting next month.

“We need to investigate this matter properly,” said the museum’s director, Tone Hansen. “It is too early to draw any conclusions. We are in dialogue with the family and will continue to be so.”

She added, “This case has other aspects than pure legal aspects that have to be taken into consideration.”

The Rosenberg family became aware of the Matisse’s location last summer, when the Art Loss Register, an art-recovery company that had put the painting on its list of missing artworks, noticed that it was on loan to the Pompidou Center in Paris. The museum and the Rosenbergs have been negotiating quietly since.

Museum officials met twice with family representatives, first in Norway and then in New York. Marianne Rosenberg, a New York lawyer who is a granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg and took part in the second meeting, said a museum official offered to help resolve the matter by placing a plaque next to the Matisse, acknowledging that Paul Rosenberg had owned it. The family rejected the offer, she said.

A museum spokeswoman said she could not comment on the talks.

The Matisse was painted in 1937, the year Mr. Rosenberg bought it. According to documents gathered from Nazi files, as well as records kept by Mr. Rosenberg and his heirs, it was one of about 160 works that German soldiers were sent to seize from the Rosenberg Gallery’s vaults as part of a widespread confiscation of art owned by Jews.

“This is the most well-documented claim I have ever seen,” said Christopher A. Marinello, a lawyer and the director of the Art Loss Register.

By 1942, the painting was in the hands of a Paris collector, Paul Pétridès. In 1949, museum records show, it was in the possession of Galerie Bénézit of Paris, from which, museum officials said, Mr. Onstad bought it in either 1949 or 1950. Mr. Marinello said that a lawyer for the museum, Kyrre Eggen, informed the Rosenbergs that the museum was researching whether it was possible that Mr. Rosenberg, who returned to Europe after the war in an effort to recover his property, took part in a transaction involving the painting before its purchase by Mr. Onstad.

Marianne Rosenberg called the museum’s theory “complete and utter fiction.”

“Our family was deeply affected by the war,” she said, “and we do not make frivolous claims, and that assertion is frankly insulting.”

The museum said it had never tried to hide its ownership of the painting, which it has lent to several European museums.

Ms. Rosenberg said it was not surprising that her family had not discovered the Matisse earlier, given that it has been busy for decades trying to recover more than 400 items looted by the Nazis and scattered around the world.

“The onus is not on the claimant to have to go scooting around looking in every catalog and small museums hunting for their stolen art,” she said.

The Matisse is among the prized possessions of the arts center, which has two Picassos, two Matisses and works by Miró, Klee and several dozen other prominent Modernists that it refers to as its “core collection.”

The museum’s initial collection was largely the artwork given it by Henie and Mr. Onstad. Henie, who won gold medals in Olympics figure skating in 1928, 1932 and 1936 before becoming a Hollywood star, died in 1969. Mr. Onstad died in 1978.

http://http//www.nytimes.com/2013/04/06/arts/design/rosenberg-family-asks-norwegian-museum-to-return-a-matisse.html?ref=arts&_r=0