One afternoon not too long ago, a truck arrived on Park Avenue, delivering a batch of Impressionist paintings from a family’s home in the Hamptons to their apartment in Manhattan. With some but not all of the art unpacked, the lady and man of the house went out for the evening, leaving instructions for their maid to finish up and get rid of the boxes.

She put the paintings in the bedroom, and took the boxes out to the service entrance of the building.

In the morning, as the owners began to get the art ready for the walls, they realized that they were short four paintings. “They scrambled around the next day, looking everywhere,” said Colin Quinn, director of claims management in the United States for Axa Art Insurance. “At the end of the day, they reported it to us.”

The maid had worked for the family for more than 10 years and was above suspicion, Mr. Quinn said. The conclusion was that the paintings, still in their crates, had ended up in the trash, he said. They were long gone by the time the insurance investigators arrived.

“These are the ‘oops’ claims,” Mr. Quinn said.

On Friday, a woman taking a class at the Metropolitan Museum of Art stumbled into “The Actor,” a work by Picasso dating to 1904 or 1905. The canvas was ripped in the lower right-hand corner.

New York is like many big, crowded cities in having plenty of art to bump into — or drop or toss in the trash or surrender to the cosmic banana peel. A drawing by Lucian Freud valued at more than $100,000 was accidentally put through a shredder by Sotheby’s in London in 2000. A man tripped over his shoelace on a staircase at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, and managed to shatter three Qing dynasty porcelain vases, as The Guardian reported.

There’s more. A painting by Giorgio de Chirico, “Piazza d’Italia,” was hanging on the wall of a townhouse in the Netherlands when demolition began on a bank next door. The wrecking ball came through the wall of the house and shot a perfect hole through the canvas. In Germany, a Ming dynasty lacquer plate — about 600 years old — was hit by a housekeeper’s elbow and ended up in bits on the ground. These two items were soberly displayed by Axa Art at the 2009 Art Basel exhibition in Switzerland under the caption “The Thrill of Protecting,” although it might as well have said, “Let This be a Lesson to You.”

Representatives of New York’s leading museums say collisions between visitors and art are rare, and none of them were inclined to steal the spotlight from the mishap at the Met by talking about them.

“Incidents happen,” said a spokeswoman for Museum of Modern Art. “There are no incidents we can discuss in the press.” The Whitney didn’t “have anything to contribute,” a spokesman said. At the Frick Collection, there has been “no apples-to-apples incident” comparable to the damaged Picasso, said Heidi Rosenau, a spokeswoman.

All of the big institutions have strategies to keep people at a safe distance from the artwork — seeing-eye alarms triggered when someone leans over a rope barrier, or guards who keep their eyes fresh by frequent shifts from one gallery to the next.

Compared with some of the bigger museums, the Frick, housed in a mansion on Fifth Avenue built by Henry Clay Frick, is a remarkably calm setting. That serenity is aggressively protected: Children under age 10 are not admitted.

“It’s a longstanding rule related to the fact that we have a minimal number of stanchions for displays,” Ms. Rosenau said. “Things are not in glass cases to a great extent. This was the house of a private collector, not a big institution.”

Art catastrophes can happen anywhere. One night at Tavern on the Green in 1995, Jean Kennedy Smith, then the American ambassador to Ireland, was being honored by Irish America magazine for her work bringing about a cease-fire in Northern Ireland. To commemorate the event, a piece of Waterford crystal was carved in the shape of an American flag with eagles. It was a big, glittering hunk of glass that would be presented by the master of ceremonies, Donald Keough, an investment banker.

But before Mr. Keough or anyone else could get their hands on the crystal, another speaker heading for the podium brushed past the sculpture. It toppled off the back of the stage.

Mr. Keough looked down at the remains and took a deep breath.

“Madam Ambassador,” he announced, “you’re going to receive more pieces of Irish crystal than anyone in history.”

Via: The New York Times

LONDON | In May last year, the Centre Pompidou consigned to storage nearly all its works by male artists and ­rehung its permanent collection to show only works by women. Camille Morineau, the curator of elles@centrepompidou, said the show was “going to be dramatic in a big way”. It wasn’t. The art press simply ­ignored it. The Guardian was one of few newspapers to ask itself the ­question: “Is the art world finally taking work created by women seriously?”

British galleries are less, not more, interested in women’s work than French ones. The National Gallery owns ­paintings by only 10 women, of whom only four have been deemed worthy of representation in the main galleries, where you will find one Rachel Ruysch, one Berthe Morisot, and two paintings each by Vigée-Le Brun and Catherina van Hemessen. The rest, with the ­exception of Rosa Bonheur, can be found in Room A, the study collection, which is open for three and a half hours on Wednesday afternoons.

The Centre Pompidou, popularly known as Beaubourg and officially as the Musée National d’Art Moderne, houses works dating from 1905. ­Morineau was quoted as saying that until now there were not enough works by women in the collection to have been able to mount anything on the scale of elles@centrepompidou. After five years of a deliberate policy of spending 40% of the acquisitions budget on them, works by women now account for 17% of the permanent collection. This ­compares with the 13% of female artists in the Tate collections.

The exhibition takes up the fourth floor of the vast building, plus odd rooms on the fifth. The entrance is ­signalled by a purple panel, on which have been mounted large buttons of different colours; 11 bear the feminised name of a well-known male artist, Annie Warhol, Francine Bacon etc. The 12th bears the name Louis Bourgeois. Though this jeu d’esprit, by Agnès Thurnauer, has its admirers, it is after all feeble. Does anyone really think that Martin Kippenberger could have been Martine Kippenberger?

The storm of words that accompanies the exhibition stresses that its intention is to restore women to their rightful place in art history, as if there was a vast mass of wonderful work by women artists just waiting to be brought to light. The exhibition has been treated as a journey of discovery of works that have been forgotten or lost, but many, including the best of them, are stupefyingly familiar. Some major artists have been sampled in a fashion that seems positively flippant. Jenny Holzer’s 26 Inflammatory Essays have been reduced to eight, replicated and mounted on a partition in uniform stripes from ceiling to floor, like cheap wallpaper.

Eva Hesse is represented by Untitled (1970), a seven-part sculpture made of fibreglass and polyester resin over polyethylene sheeting and aluminium wire. When it was made, the 34-year-old artist was dying. She never saw the finished work, which differs significantly from her model. The book published to accompany the exhibition claims that the piece was bought by the Centre Pompidou in 1986, other sources that it was presented to the museum by Mr and Mrs W Ganz. Time and poor conservation have reduced it to a sticky mess.

Some of the younger women ­artists in the show may turn out to be ­discoveries, but too many of them are ­making the kinds of female body art that have been doing the rounds for years. Innocents may be excited by Sigalit Landau’s Barbed Hula of 2001, a video showing her full-frontal naked doing the hula with a hoop made of barbed wire, but only if they were too young to see Marina Abramowic´ slicing into her naked belly in the 1970s, or Orlan on the operating table in the 1990s. Later this year, Abramowic´ will be performing throughout her planned retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The life’s work of Nancy Spero, poorly represented in this exhibition, will be celebrated at the Centre Pompidou. Both shows will be more rewarding experiences than elles@centrepompidou.

The effect of offering a sampler of the work of 200 women is to diminish the achievement of all of them. By lumping the major with the minor, and by showing only minor works of major figures, elles@centrepompidou managed to convince too many visitors to the exhibition that there was such a thing as women’s art and that women artists were going nowhere. Wrong, on both counts.

Featuring Susan Beiner, Rebekah Bogard, Rebecca Hutchinson & Anne Drew Potter; curated by Ovidio Giberga

BOSTON | More than a few eyebrows will likely be raised on Thursday when the Italian architect Renzo Piano unveils his design for the expansion of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here.

The cultural watchdogs of Boston don’t take well to change. And the museum, whose collections haven’t moved since 1924, is one of the most beloved art institutions in this city. Its eclectic array of artworks from the Middle Ages to the early-20th century, displayed in a dazzling faux-Venetian palazzo, stands alongside those in the Frick Collection in Manhattan and the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif., as a rare — and intimate — expression of a single collector’s vision.

Well, the preservationists should put away their torches and pitchforks. Mr. Piano’s design, dominated by a four-story copper-clad volume that encloses a 300-seat music hall and a temporary-exhibitions gallery, keeps a respectful distance from the Venetian dowager. And the new building’s strong geometric forms should make a welcome counterpoint to the old one, which, from the outside at least, has always seemed a bit bland.

If the design has a flaw, it’s not that it tramples all over Gardner’s memory, but that it holds it in too high regard. Mr. Piano has been so careful to protect the sanctity of the existing museum in his design that you may find yourself tiptoeing through the galleries instead of floating joyously through them as visitors do today.

I doubt Isabella Gardner ever walked around on tiptoe; she was more the type to dance barefoot to Gypsy tunes. Born into a newly rich New York family in 1840, she moved north 20 years later and became known in Boston society as something of an eccentric outsider. After her 1 ½-year-old son died of pneumonia, she seemed to find solace in the world of musicians, artists and writers; John Singer Sargent and Henry James became friends.

She had two qualities that are crucial to building a great collection: an all-consuming curiosity and confidence in her own tastes. She was among the first Americans to collect Renaissance painting, and when men wealthier than Gardner — like Pierpont Morgan and Henry Clay Frick — pushed her out of the market, she turned her astute eye to Spanish and Chinese art, amassing formidable collections there too.

The museum she built, which opened in 1903, reflects the same independence of mind. Its galleries are centered around a fabulously faux-Venetian courtyard overflowing with tropical and flowering plants, both a reflection of Gardner’s catholic tastes and an image of feminine power. A Roman mosaic of Medusa’s head dominates the garden. Rows of mismatched Venetian windows — some real, others fake — line its pink walls.

The barely disguised references to the female realm pile up as you climb to the upper floors. A somber marble staircase is decorated with an ornate wrought-iron railing made from the frame of a bed from an Italian convent. In one upstairs gallery a small, pious painting of Jesus’ head, lightly bearing the weight of the cross, is set on a small table just to one side of a wild abduction scene, Titian’s “Europa.” Underneath is a framed fabric swatch from one of Gardner’s ballroom gowns.

As splendid and theatrical as the museum is, however, it has suffered over the years. Immediately after Gardner’s death the main entry was shifted so that it now lines up with a vaulted side gallery, which meant that visitors lost the impact of stepping from the dark, brick entry corridor directly into the light-filled courtyard. A small bookstore and cafe were stuffed into the back of the first floor in the 1970s. Conservation offices and a temporary gallery are in a small 1930s addition plugged into the back of the museum, an area staff members refer to (not, it seems, with affection) as the doghouse. Meanwhile the number of visitors has grown from a few thousand a year to nearly 200,000.

The addition will clear up some of that mess. The bookstore and cafe will be moved to addition’s ground floor, and the space at the back of the old museum will eventually return to its original function as a meditative space with Buddhas and Chinese screens. The new music hall means that the second-floor Tapestry Room, which is often used for recitals, can now be returned to its original state. The collections will be freer to breathe.

But Mr. Piano has done more, striking an ideal balance between new and old without compromising the identity of either. The addition, whose copper cladding will give it a muscular feel, is set discreetly behind the existing building. A narrow garden, 50 feet wide, separates the two, creating a palpable tension, as between two magnets held slightly apart.

That sense of tension is also apparent in the addition, in a constant play between darkness and light, gravity and weightlessness. The ground-floor lobby and commercial spaces will be wrapped entirely in glass, with the copper-clad gallery, music hall and offices resting above. These three spaces will be divided by vertical bands of glass, so that from certain angles they will seem to be breaking apart. (The gorgeousness of these forms may very well be diminished by the treatment of the copper surface; Mr. Piano plans to treat the copper with acid, which will give it a uniformly green finish, rather than letting it age naturally, which would convey a passing of time.)

The sense of discrete spaces is enhanced by the treatment of the individual interiors, which feel less uniform in character than those in some of Mr. Piano’s earlier museums.

The music hall, surrounded by narrow balconies, may be one of his most radical spaces in years. The extreme vertical organization and compactness of the room bring to mind La Fenice in Venice. Because the rigidly symmetrical hall is a square, 44 feet on each side, audience members will be staring directly at one other as well as down toward the stage, an effect that could be pleasingly voyeuristic or distracting; it’s hard to tell.

For the gallery space Mr. Piano has created a mechanical ceiling that moves up and down so curators can make the room airier or more intimate, depending on the needs of a given show. A high window, facing northeast toward the old building, can be blocked out with a system of computerized shades.

Behind the addition Mr. Piano has also designed a giant greenhouse with a sloping glass wall. Conceived as an Arcadia for visiting artists and scholars, it will include a row of apartments and terraces running along the top like little treehouses.

Some people, no doubt, will complain that this expansion is yet another example of museum bloat. But my only worry about the design has to do with the way it leads you to the old building’s galleries. When the project is complete, sometime in 2011, visitors will no longer be able to approach through the old entry on the Fenway. Instead they will enter the complex through Mr. Piano’s new lobby, and from there turn right and follow a glass-enclosed walkway through the garden and into the back of Gardner’s palazzo.

This significantly lengthens the distance between entry and artworks, which I suspect is intentional. In recent years more and more architects have used an extended architectural narrative to screen out the visual noise of the contemporary city, and in the process prepare visitors mentally for the act of viewing art. But it may also further reduce the impact of Gardner’s original vision. The ability to move, in a few short steps, from the darkness of the brick vaulted lobby to the joyous explosion of light that fills the towering pink courtyard is not just a great architectural effect; it is a powerful metaphor for what art can do — and what it did for her.

Mr. Piano has given us a thoughtful, mature, even beautiful, building. And there is no question in my mind that it is necessary. Still, some of us will mourn the loss of that experience.

Via: The New York Times

SEATTLE | At the Ballard Farmers’ Market in Seattle on a recent weekend, passers-by could be forgiven for thinking John Morefield was running for political office. Smiling, waving and calling out hellos to everyone who walked by his stand, he was the picture of friendliness. All he needed was campaign buttons and fliers.

In fact, Mr. Morefield, 29, is no politician, but an architectural designer looking for work. He was seated at a homemade wooden stand under a sign reading “Architecture 5¢,” with a tin can nearby awaiting spare change. For a nickel, he would answer any architectural question.

In 2008, Mr. Morefield lost his job — twice — and thought he could ride out the recession doing design work for friends and family, but when those jobs dried up, he set up his stand. As someone in his 20s without many contacts or an extensive portfolio, he thought he might have an easier time finding clients on his own.

“I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Mr. Morefield said. “I had no other option. The recession was a real kick in the shorts, and I had to make this work.”

A troubled economy and the implosion of the real estate market have thrown thousands of architects and designers out of work in the last year or so, forcing them to find or create jobs. According to the latest data available from the Department of Labor, employment at American architecture firms, which peaked last July at 224,500, had dropped to 184,600 by November.

“It’s hard to find a place to hide when the economy goes down,” said Kermit Baker, the chief economist at the American Institute of Architects. “There aren’t any strong sectors now.”

And it’s not clear when the industry will recover. Architecture firms are still laying off employees, and Mr. Baker doesn’t expect them to rehire until billings recover, which he thinks won’t be until the second half of this year at the earliest.

In the meantime, many of those who have been laid off are discovering new talents often unrelated to architecture.

When Natasha Case, 26, lost her job as a designer at Walt Disney Imagineering about a year ago, she and her friend Freya Estreller, 27, a real estate developer, started a business selling Ms. Case’s homemade ice cream sandwiches in Los Angeles. Named for architects like Frank Gehry (the strawberry ice cream and sugar cookie Frank Behry) and Mies van der Rohe (the vanilla bean ice cream and chocolate chip cookie Mies Vanilla Rohe), they were an immediate hit.

“I feel this is a good time to try new things,” said Ms. Case, who did a project on the intersection of food and architecture while studying for her master’s in architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2008. “You do things you always wanted to do, something you’ve always been passionate about.”

Since she and Ms. Estreller rolled out their truck, Coolhaus, at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival near Palm Springs last April, they’ve catered events for Mr. Gehry’s office, Walt Disney Imagineering and the Disney Channel.

Their initial investment was low: they bought a 20-year-old postal van on Craigslist and had it retrofitted and painted silver and bubblegum pink, all for $10,000. With seven full- and part-time employees, they now make enough to support themselves and have plans to expand (a Hamptons truck is in the works and they are trying to get their products into Whole Foods stores).

Leigh Ann Black was working as an architectural designer in Seattle when she lost her job over a year ago. After a long struggle to find work, she finally moved back to her hometown of Water Valley, Miss., in June, to take care of her sick grandmother.

Ms. Black, 30, is now living above her parents’ garage, but she finally has time to indulge her love of pottery. She recently converted an old horse barn on her family’s farm into a studio, plans to apprentice with local potters and has applied to several post-baccalaureate ceramics programs, with the hope of selling her wares at farmers’ markets and someday teaching art.

“This is not where I imagined I’d be when I turned 30, but I feel really inspired being back,” she said. “There’s something about being with family and not feeling upset about meeting rent, car payment and groceries every month. Now I have some breathing room.”

When Debi van Zyl, 33, was laid off by a small residential design firm in Los Angeles in May, she decided to do freelance design work for as long as she could, and she picked up jobs doing exhibition design for the Getty and Huntington museums. In her spare time, to relax, she started knitting what she describes as “kooky” stuffed animals like octopuses and jellyfish. Then, at the urging of the readers of her blog, she began selling them on Etsy. Les Petites Bêtes Sauvages, as she calls them, have helped her pay the rent and other bills for the last few months.

“You think you’re in charge of your profession, and then the recession hits and you realize that your career is market driven,” Ms. van Zyl said. “It’s forced me to push myself and become more individual. My motto is don’t say no to anything.”

Richard Chuk, of Lombard, Ill., said that since he lost his position as a commercial designer a year ago, when two of his firm’s clients — both developers — lost financing for their projects, he has been looking for any job he can find to support his wife and children, ages 6 and 7.

Mr. Chuk, 38, began his job search in a good mood because of the wave of optimism surrounding the presidential election. During the first three months, he sent out nearly 150 résumés, applying for many jobs he was overqualified for. (Sears, Home Depot and Lowe’s all turned him down for jobs as a designer because he was overqualified, he said.) He had only one interview.

After that, he said, he applied for the rare job that popped up but spent most of his time taking care of his children, studying for his architectural licensing exam and renovating his basement.

This month, he began commercial truck driving school.

“You feel this year of your life is gone,” Mr. Chuk said. “It’s lost wages and lost experiences. But you have to keep positive and move forward. I look at this as an education. It opens up more doors and you never know when it’ll help you.”

As for Mr. Morefield, the architect in Seattle, he started his booth (and a Web site, architecture5cents.com) with the hope that it would bring in sufficient income to get by until he could find another job. As it turned out, he received so many commissions — to build a two-story addition, a deck, a master bedroom — that he realized he could make plenty of money working for himself.

Last year, he made more than $50,000 — the highest salary he ever made working for someone else — and he expects to do even better this year.

“It’s developed into what I was supposed to do,” he said. “It’s a lot of work, it’s scary, but I love every minute of it. If someone offered me $80,000 to sit behind a computer, I wouldn’t do it.”

Via: The New York Times

LOS ANGELES | The recession has derailed a Jeff Koons sculpture involving a replica of a 1944 Baldwin locomotive with an estimated cost of $25 million, making it one of the most expensive public art projects ever undertaken.

Scheduled to arrive at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011-2012, the “Train” project got pushed to 2014-2015 when the stock market plunged last year, erasing 23 percent of Lacma’s endowment and forcing it to rethink budget priorities, the museum said. It could be canceled altogether if the museum doesn’t come up with necessary funding.

“We wouldn’t do it unless someone funds it; someone has to write us a check,” said Barbara Pflaumer, Lacma’s associate vice president for communications and marketing. “This is a very tough economy. Everyone has revised timetables.”
The proposed sculpture would consist of a 70-foot locomotive suspended from a 161-foot-tall crane. Three times a day — at noon, 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. — the train will blow its whistle, puff steam and move its wheels, first accelerating and then slowing down.
“It’s very visceral,” Koons said in a 2008 Bloomberg Television interview. “It gives us a sense of this kind of power and energy and the preciousness of this moment of life.”
In addition to fundraising, the museum has to consider numerous engineering and logistical issues, from ensuring that the work can withstand an earthquake to figuring out how to change a wheel or a light bulb.

The project is still in the exploratory stage, assisted by a $2 million grant from the Los Angeles-based Annenberg Foundation. The museum will need to raise many times that amount to commission the sculpture, which would tower outside its BP Pavilion. Lacma will try to have the work endowed in perpetuity to ensure it’s always self-sustaining, Pflaumer said.

The Real Thing

During the summer, Lacma digitally scanned the parts of a real 121-foot Baldwin locomotive to prepare “a construction blueprint for the Koons locomotive,” according to Mary Ballantyne of the artist’s studio. Koons will also build a power plant to go inside and provide energy for the train’s perfomances, Pflaumer said.
The original train is being restored by the New Mexico Steam Locomotive and Railroad Historical Society in Albuquerque. The 65-year-old locomotive used to run on the Santa Fe railroad, which is now part of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp.

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. agreed earlier this month to pay $100 a share, or $26 billion, for the 77.4 percent of Fort Worth, Texas-based Burlington it didn’t already own and assume $10 billion in net debt.

‘Two Years to Go’

The restoration group has raised almost $600,000 during the past 10 years to enable the old train to run again.

“We have about two years to go,” said Albert Leffler, a member of the group and a founder of Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc.

After a year of cutbacks, Lacma is focusing on completing the construction of the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion in the fall of 2010, as scheduled.
“The train is something on our to-do list,” Pflaumer added. “There’s no question we’d like it to happen. It’s a question of whether we can make it happen.”

ROME | I remember looking at Zaha Hadid’s drawings for Rome’s new museum of 21st-century arts a decade ago and wondering how on earth this structural adventure would ever be built. On paper, it looked like a surreal motorway intersection imagined by JG Ballard, or a wiring diagram plotted for the palace of esoteric giants. Her floor plans were some of the most mesmerising and challenging since Frank Lloyd Wright unveiled his seemingly improbable designs for New York’s Guggenheim museum more than 50 years ago.

What was so radical about them? The walls of Hadid’s new museum, unveiled to the public this month, not only curve but change in depth as they do so. There are moments where walls become floors and even threaten to become ceilings, diving and curving like bobsleigh tracks. (When I went there last week, Hadid told me she wanted the building’s concrete curves to “unwind like a ribbon in space”.) All of this means that the gallery has been an enormous challenge to build.

It took Wright 15 years to realise the Guggenheim; it has taken Hadid 10 to complete Maxxi, as the museum is known (a play on the Roman numerals for 21st century). There have been at least six changes of national government in Italy since the project was first announced in 1998, from left to centre to right, and the future of many such public projects has often seemed doubtful. But now here it stands, in the residential and military Flaminio district, almost exactly as Hadid and her team first imagined it.

Open to the public over the past two weekends as an architectural shell, the museum will launch fully next spring. Only then will it be possible to judge whether Maxxi, Hadid’s finest built work to date, is a real success. Just how will the museum’s curators make use of these extraordinary public spaces and gigantic galleries? What will go on show?

The truth is that although the museum, devoted to both architecture and art, has been busy collecting work by Anish Kapoor, Gerhard Richter, Francesco Clemente and many others (along with the archives of architects Carlo Scarpa, Aldo Rossi and Pier Luigi Nervi), this light-filled labyrinth is dedicated to the future. There is no great hurry to fill it, after all: there is the rest of the 21st century to go before the museum can be called complete.

Perhaps this is why Hadid has chosen to make Maxxi an almost modest, if not quite self-effacing, building from the outside. She says she hopes it will be fashion-proof. As you approach, it is only the big flags emblazoned with the name Maxxi that guarantee you have come to the right place. Instead, Hadid has reserved her architectural firepower for the interior.

The huge entrance lobby sets the tone, punching up through the height of the building and offering views into what appear to be ineffable depths. This is a museum of just a few heroic galleries, but with a variety of ways of reaching them. Daylight is ever-present; this can be blacked out if need be for exhibition purposes, though the sun is always held at bay, with light filtered through a two-tier system of roof-mounted louvres and screens. Artificial lighting is concealed wherever possible. If curators wish to divide the galleries, floating walls can be hung from the dark concrete ribs snaking throughout the building; these can also support sculpture weighing up to a tonne. The gallery’s project architect, Gianluca Racana, says: “We didn’t want anything – air-conditioning grilles or light fittings – to take away from the raw power of the spaces we’ve created, or from the art that will be on show.”

This is a building of few colours: black, white, grey and the varied cream of exposed concrete. The walls and balustrades of the gallery’s extraordinary stairs and passageways have been finished in the thick black primer used as an undercoat for new cars. (Highly durable and slightly rough to look at, the paint is surprisingly smooth to the touch.) The stairways rise up through the lobby, with their bare metal treads, disappearing mysteriously into the far recesses of the museum; the effect is cinematic – Piranesian, even – and wholly compelling.

There is a point on the first floor where you can choose to walk in one of three directions, between galleries, stairwells, liftshafts and lobbies. Two of these paths take you into the heart of the exhibition spaces, while a third projects you out of the main body of the museum, along a glazed walkway, allowing you to look in at the gallery as if from the outside – a haunting effect. “For me, it’s like standing in [Rome's] Piazza del Popolo,” Hadid says. “When you look north, you see the tridente [three streets set between two 17th-century baroque churches] offering you this sudden and thrilling choice of direction. Yet, coming south, all three streets lead back to the same single point.”

This is a brave project, and little short of incredible in a city that has proved so deeply conservative over the past decade. In recent years, there has been little imaginative new architecture in Rome, least of all in the public sector. But, remarkably, Maxxi is funded by what is now the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, or, as it describes itself, “a laboratory for artistic experimentation and production that gives voice to the different languages of contemporariness”. Rome’s history is inexhaustible, but it is good to see the city moving forward.

In one sense, however, Maxxi is happily old-fashioned. It has been built on-site by local contractors using materials close to hand; Rome led the way when it came to concrete construction 2,000 years ago, and these ambitious new curved walls are made of Roman concrete. “It does sound odd when I say it,” says Racana, “but this has been a little like building a medieval cathedral.” And, like a medieval cathedral, the museum is in fact several structures gathered together. Tough new legislation ensuring the ability of new buildings to withstand seismic shock was put in place after the earthquake of October 2002, which rocked Italy’s Molise and Puglia regions, and was felt in Rome. As a result, the museum consists of five separate buildings leaning against one another, designed to withstand powerful natural shocks.

Last week, the roof of Hadid’s aquatic centre for the 2012 Olympics was unveiled, a wavy promise of things to come. Hadid won’t be pressed on this, and says she will be happy to talk about the building only when it is complete, once the pools are filled and the swimmers are training. “All people want to do is talk about the budget, as if the rise in cost has been something we’ve caused. We haven’t. We’ve done what we’ve been asked to do.” Her hope, and that of the Olympic committee, is that the building will inspire Britain’s sporting stars.

Likewise, I have a feeling that the energy and imagination of this new museum, its sense of intrigue and possibilities, will bring out the best in its curators. Who knows what twists and turns architecture will take in the course of the 21st century; for now, Hadid’s gallery offers an exhilarating set of Roman walls to build upon.

Via: The Guardian

NEW YORK | That the artist Tracey Emin had asked to be interviewed at her hotel swimming pool and showed up in a bathing suit would probably mean more to readers in her native England, where her self-revelatory and at times exhibitionist tendencies are well known. They have helped make her an object of public fascination there — a national celebrity, in fact — for more than a decade.
Ms. Emin first gained notoriety in 1997 for her contribution to the famous “Sensation” show at the Royal Academy of Arts: a tent embroidered with the names of everybody with whom she had ever shared a bed. Soon after came an installation consisting of her bed itself, littered with blood-stained underwear, condoms and lubricant, which was shown at the Tate Gallery in 1999 and got her on the short list for the Turner Prize.

Recent years have brought a strong run of museum exhibitions, with major retrospectives at the Stedlijk in Amsterdam and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, along with regular appearances in British party pages and fashion magazines. In 2007 she was chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. She is quite possibly the most famous living artist in England after Damien Hirst.
“And Damien’s not recognized like I am everywhere I go,” she said. “In London I’m in the papers every time I blow my nose, essentially. I’ll be followed by paparazzi. I’m taught in the school curriculum in Britain. It’s actually kind of nice when I come to New York and I don’t have that recognized thing.”

What brought Ms. Emin, 46, over from London was a new exhibition of her work at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery on Chrystie Street on the Lower East Side, titled “Only God Knows I’m Good.” While it was hardly a dull week — Madonna and Kevin Spacey, both friends who collect Ms. Emin, came by to see her new output, and a crowd she put at around 1,000 came to her opening on Nov. 5 — she couldn’t refrain from comparing it with her openings at the White Cube Gallery in London.

“There, it’s 5,000, 6,000 people spilling into the square outside,” she said. “It’s like a rock concert.”

The difference between her receptions on the two sides of the Atlantic may be due partly to her nationality, as Ms. Emin pointed out — after all, “Jeff Koons isn’t famous” in Britain, she said. Even so, given that the New York art world has become much bigger and more international in scope in recent years, it is notable that an artist who has achieved Ms. Emin’s level of stardom in Europe should struggle to make inroads here.

This is Ms. Emin’s fourth solo show in New York. So far it has not received much attention from reviewers, and Rachel Lehmann, an owner of the gallery, said that 10 of the 53 works there — which include many single-edition prints and embroidered cloths, along with a handful of sculptures and a short animated film — have sold so far.

By contrast, when the White Cube held an exhibition of similar pieces by Ms. Emin six months ago, about three-quarters of them were sold within a week, according to Tim Marlow, a director of that gallery (who cautioned against reading too much into the comparison).

That opening was a major event in the British art world and generated a great deal of press. Rachel Campbell-Johnston, the chief art critic for The Times of London, wrote, “This new show should have been the one she presented at the biennale” in Venice. The Evening Standard’s review raved about the animation piece in particular and declared that “no museum exhibition about feminist art, art about the body or sexual identity in art will be complete without this work.”

Ms. Emin’s new prints and embroideries are rendered in the spare and sketchlike style she has taken to calling “my salty Egon Schiele line.” (“Imagine if you would there’s salt poured on the paper, and you draw right over it,” she said poolside, drawing an imaginary line with her finger on the arm of her chaise longue.) The works explore perennial themes of Ms. Emin’s: sex and loneliness, sex and self-reproach. One print depicts a dog and a woman having sex, with the scrawled text: “No You Were A Dog But Thing Is I Was Less.”

Ms. Emin said that the longer critical and commercial discrepancies exist between her status in Europe and America, the more puzzled she is. For years she attributed it to uneasiness over several autobiographical video pieces and essays in which she discussed being raped as a teenager and having two abortions, though now she doubts it is that simple.

“I’m not mourning it,” she said, adding, “Over here, I’ve never really shown in museums at all.”

She noted: “The Guggenheim hasn’t bought my work, but I think they received a donated piece. The Tate last year bought and displayed a whole room of my work.”
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis exhibited her tent, which was not yet famous, in a group show in 1995 — but she did not want it sharing a room “with all these little pieces by everybody else,” she said, and tried to pull it from the exhibition. “They stopped me when I was dragging it down the escalator. Richard Flood, the curator, said, ‘With your attitude, you’ll never show in this country.’ I told him with that attitude I didn’t want to, although actually for the time being he was right.”

Ms. Emin’s art is so closely bound up in her persona that detractors are wont to say that the artist herself, or at least her endless capacity for self-reference, is the turnoff. She has produced works and shows titled “The Tracey Files,” “The Tracey Emin Museum” and “CV,” which stands for two words — the second of them is “vernacular” and the first is unprintable. She has made hundreds of nude self-portraits, including “I’ve Got It All,” a photograph in which her loins are obscured only by piles of money, which she is either giving birth to or forcing inside her vagina.

Mr. Marlow said her approach has been viewed as “perhaps a bit confrontational” for the American market. Ms. Lehmann suggested that sexism was a cause: “The male museum directors and curators were extremely hostile, which didn’t help Tracey get the right attention,” she said.

Nancy Spector, the chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum, pointed out the degree to which Ms. Emin’s appeal as both an artist and a personality had its roots in contemporary British culture. “So much of her public persona is about the appearances, the tabloids following her, the confessional nature of her work,” Ms. Spector said. “I think of Tracey’s work as having a lot in common with the sort of reality television that came out of Great Britain.”

But even Ms. Emin appears to have reached a point of saturation — and, finally, the capacity to be embarrassed — with her own oversharing. Last Saturday, at a public reading at the University Settlement on Eldridge Street from her collection of personal essays, “Strangeland,” that was part of the performance art festival Performa, Ms. Emin prefaced one of several passages about her promiscuous youth with the declaration, “I’m afraid this one’s going to be quite stupid,” and then refused to read the last few paragraphs.

Ms. Emin acknowledged that there is a downside to making such an open book of herself. “People see me in the street and cuddle me,” she said, scrunching her face into the asymmetrical squint that has long been a trademark, at least in Britain. “It’s difficult, because I don’t like being touched.”

Via: The New York Times

Napoleon

It’s hard to believe that this face once made Europe quake. I’m standing in front of Napoleon – or at least his death mask, in the British Museum in London. His steely determination and spark of dynamism have dissolved. His eyes are sunken, his cheek hollow, his lips hang slightly ajar. It’s a fallen face, and the story it tells is of defeat and exile.

Death doesn’t lie, so death masks – a cast of the face in wax or plaster, taken just hours after breath has gone – promise truthful representations of the departed. In an era before photography, these masks give us each beauty and blemish, a living presence in unchanging material. But how were they made? And what is their uncanny allure?

The most extensive American collection was donated to Princeton in 1897. Laurence Hutton, literary editor of Harper’s Magazine, had become enthralled by these remnants of the great when stumbling across a cast of Benjamin Franklin’s ruminative potato face. “While rummaging among the relics of an old curiosity shop,” (reported the New York Times), he caught the desk-mask bug, and travelled across Europe to cull casts from junk shops and major museums. Princeton’s (all-male) worthies include Washington and a whittled Lincoln, not to mention Tom Paine’s startlingly pugnacious conk.

It’s an exciting thought: We’re just a thin layer of plaster away from greatness. Wax, with its sheen of skin, brings us even closer, so it is hardly surprising that the great caster was also the waxwork entrepreneur, Mme. Tussaud. She was schooled in the waxen arts by her uncle, Philippe Curtius, a Swiss physician who turned his hobby into a lucrative trade.

Curtius moved to Paris with Marie, his niece and apprentice. They had a fashionable practice and opened a popular waxworks (the tableaux included the royal family at dinner in Versailles), but come the revolution they were commissioned to cast aristocratic heads fresh from the guillotine. When Marat was stabbed in his hip-bath, Marie was immediately summoned to immortalise this hero of the republic. Although she later claimed that only armed guards kept her casting “the demon’s features,” the resultant waxwork was displayed to the Parisian crowds. The painter David used Marat’s corpse for his own stark canvas, until the July heat necessitated its burial and he then painted from Tussaud’s waxwork.

One person’s bereavement is another’s opportunity. The sculptor Joseph Nollekens was known for mixing his plaster as soon as he noticed a notable death in the newspaper. Such masks made ghoulish souvenirs: Napoleon’s proved so popular that it could be bought with a collectible carrying-case. Even today, Keats House in London’s Hampstead sells a replica of the young poet’s life mask: My friend Tracy will tell you it remains the best gift I ever bought. Serene, full-lipped, the poet had a strong nose that leads like a prow into eternity (even though artist Benjamin Haydon despaired of setting the cast, as Keats would keep giggling).

Want to try this at home? To make a death-mask, the head is oiled (take care with the hair). Threads are often embedded in the wax or plaster, to help remove the mold in neat sections. Life-masks use the same process (Renaissance sculptor Cennino Cennini prescribed rosewater to add a pleasant perfume). Samuel Pepys, dedicated follower of fashion, described how it felt to be cast in 1669: “I was vexed to be forced to daub all my face over with Pomatum [scented ointment],” he told his diary, “but it was pretty to feel how soft and easy it is done on the face, and by and by, by degrees, how hard it becomes, that you cannot break it, and sets so close that you cannot pull it off, and yet so easy that is as soft as a pillow.”

For Pepys, curiosity overcame claustrophobia: Other living subjects disliked the oil, close-setting darkness, and breathing through straws stuck up the nostrils. The dead, of course, rarely complain. Curtius and Tussaud worked at unsentimental speed through the French revolution. Although Mme. du Barry, Louis XVI’s mistress, met the guillotine with an unsightly grimace, in the cemetery Curtius pinched her lips into a charming smile. Then he poured warm wax onto the graveside turf, and rolled the head into it. Grisly job done.

Before they were used for art and sensational shivers, death masks had a funereal function. In patrician Rome, for example, a wax mask was worn by someone who closely resembled the deceased, while others wore masks of his forbears. According to Pliny, these masks were kept in a special cupboard, an ancestral congregation awaiting the next funeral. Effigies of British monarchs were also displayed at their funerals: As a child I was fascinated by the proximity to these foreboding models in the vaults of Westminster Abbey.

To look closely at these masks is to see the mighty fall. Napoleon’s great adversary, the Duke of Wellington, looks equally diminished in death, a quavery old man (though with an undeniably smug grin). In the library of London’s National Portrait Gallery, staff puckishly directed me towards their “box of death”: a file box full of matters morbid. Underneath a fat folder of widows, I found the death mask photos. Some are truly startling – the painter J.M.W. Turner looks less a prophet than an old loon, his mouth dwindling in its last exhalation, the eyes that apprehended sea and sunset sunken.

Other collections are more particular: The Midland County Historical Museum offers up outlaws like Jesse James and Butch Cassidy, caught in abrupt death. As with so many relics, doubts remain about their authenticity, as they do with a supposed Shakespeare unearthed in Darmstadt, Germany. American artist William Page, commissioned to paint heads of Christ and Shakespeare in the 1870s, convinced himself that this was the Bard’s true visage, but few scholars concur.

Death masks fix the short period between last breath and visible decay. The body molders, but the face remains forever, though lacking life’s vital spark. Some artists disdained the use of face casts when preparing a portrait: David d’Anger said loftily that “molding from nature never renders the man. It has to be molded through the brain of the artist.”

For the Victorians, the masks were less about art than a pseudo-scientific cousin to phrenology – the study of physiognomy and the skull’s lumps and bumps that were thought to unlock the essential personality. Andrew Combe (later Queen Victoria’s physician) and his brother assembled a collection in Edinburgh that pursued a bifurcated notoriety: split between revered artists and scientists, and lurid felons like the body-snatchers Burke and Hare. You could gaze at Newton’s noble brow, then a murderer’s thuggish frown, and imagine the genius or malignancy clustered within. The so-called “Black Museum” in Scotland Yard, closed to the general public, similarly gathers heads of the wicked among its grim artifacts designed to inform and intimidate new police recruits.

Few celebrities, whether admired or infamous, are cast nowadays – a rare late example was George Bernard Shaw in 1950. His friend Lady Nancy Astor arranged his mask while he was lying in the chapel of rest, dressed in mauve pajamas. She had already invited reporters to view the body, declaring, “I think you ought to see him, he looks so lovely.” In his death mask, Shaw’s whirring mind will look beatific for eternity.

By David Jays

Via: Obit Magazine

Security line outside the American Embassy, London. Credit: Flickr User Gruntzooki.

LOS ANGELES The most recent generation of U.S. embassies hasn’t exactly provided a sterling symbol of American values. In Baghdad, the new American Embassy sits behind a phalanx of blast walls, security barriers and checkpoints. Even some embassies built outside of war zones these days are self-contained and buffered to the point of paranoia. Others that try for openness and engagement with their host cities — such as the new Berlin Embassy by the Santa Monica firm Moore Ruble Yudell — wind up deeply compromised by heavy-handed setback requirements and other safety regulations.

The reason for that architectural attitude is straightforward: After the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa, the State Department produced design guidelines that made security the top architectural priority. The result was a batch of new embassies that were both impenetrable and designed to be built efficiently nearly anywhere on Earth: one-size-fits-all bunkers.

Perhaps a glimmer of hope for embassy architecture, however, can be seen in a detailed new report released this morning by the American Institute of Architects. Commissioned last summer by the State Department’s Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, OBO for short, the report was produced by a task force of more than 50 architects, diplomats, engineers, historians and others. Its chief recommendation is to adopt a version of General Services Administration’s Design Excellence program — which has produced federal buildings by Richard Meier, Moshe Safdie, Thom Mayne and other leading architects — for use in embassy architecture and to integrate that design program from the earliest stages with security requirements. Other heartening recommendations: “Encourage Innovation” and “Publicize and Celebrate New Embassies.” The report also challenges the one-size-fits-all mentality, calling for new embassies “that reflect the unique needs of a site at a foreign post.”

What matters, of course, is not the report itself but what the OBO chooses to do with it. There is a focus on secrecy in the department that sometimes seems to exceed legitimate concerns about terrorism and safety. The whole culture of the place needs an overhaul. Maybe the AIA document will be a significant first step.

By: Christopher Hawthorne

Via: The Los Angeles Times