Category: art

Anyone with an interest in Piet Mondrian’s painting technique probably already has Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings, published by the Harvard Art Museums in 2001. It’s a fascinating, in-depth, and not-at-all boring look at a unique body of Mondrian’s work, based on the scholarship of art historian Harry Cooper and forensic painting scientist Ron Spronk.
They examine a group of 17 paintings which Mondrian took with him to New York when he fled Paris just before the outbreak of WWII. Mondrian had already shown some of the paintings, but he reworked them so significantly after his arrival in the US, that he gave them all two dates. [The Phillips Collection’s Painting No. 9, for example is dated 1939-1942.]
Cooper and Spronk get deep into the layers of paint to reveal how Mondrian constructed and executed his paintings, and then how he altered them. It’s great, geeky stuff, and the book is filled with weird, interesting photos of details–like 40x zooms on brushstrokes, and the messy backs and reshaped stretchers–that people who don’t own Mondrians never get to see. And there’s X-ray photos and spectral analysis that you usually only see used on Old Masters, rarely on modern art. These images, these paintings, are objects, after all, and they were made by someone. It’s a basic reality that is somehow easy to forget.
Buy Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings for like $40, a third off the $60 cover price [amazon]

It happens all the time in the Old Masters market, but I could never understand how a work of art could sell at auction for one price, only to reappear–and to sell–at a fair a few months later with a vastly inflated price tag. I mean, I can imagine how a dealer would do it; and if there were a cleaning, a restoration, a different presentation, or even new research or a new attribution, it can even make sense. What I don’t get is the mindset of the collector who, either through indifference or ignorance, buys a work that just sold very publicly for 40-80% less than what he paid.
Of course, it would explain a lot if these chumps are all North Korean 80’s art speculators. Let’s pick at some of the confusing details from the New York Law Journal’s error-ridden story of an unsuccessful lawsuit by one such “collector,” Najung Seung, who the NYLJ describes as “a resident of North Korea” and “a woman who worked in art galleries in Beijing.”

In May 2006, Seung, and who is actually listed in court filings as Korean, not North Korean, bought a 1986 John Wesley painting for $118,000 from Dinaburg Arts, a NY art advisory. Its principal, Mary Dinaburg, had just curated Wesley into the windows of the Hermes store, and Seung was friends with one of Dinaburg’s assistants.
But despite holding a paid invoice for Bulls and Bed, “the following March [i.e., 2007], Seung learned that Dinaburg had sold the Wesley painting to another buyer,” reportedly for $200,000. Way to stay on top of things, Najung. [Bulls and Bed was at Basel this past summer, btw, offered by Wesley’s London representative, Waddington Galleries, for $300,000. It’s still available.]
To make up for it, Dinaburg apparently offered Seung a $200,000 credit toward the purchase of Chinkzee a giant, truly execrable, 1983 velvet painting of a dog by Julian Schnabel. It was a $500,000 painting, Dinaburg said, though she’d let it go at the “gallery net” price of $380,000. In a May 2008 email, Dinaburg wrote, “I believe we have a good opportunity to place your work within the year and resell it a profit.”

Instead of her main firm, though, Dinaburg offered the Schnabel through Fortune Cookie Projects, [not Ventures, NYLJ. Who’s proofing these things?], the Asia-focused art advisory operation she’d launched in 2006 with Howard Rutkowski, who oversaw Asian, modern, and contemporary art for Bonham’s auction house in London.
Seung agreed and paid Fortune Cookie an additional $90,000 in June 2008. Her lawsuit mentions a final invoice [presumably unpaid] for the last $90,000 installment, dated October 30, 2008, aka The End of The Art World As We Knew It.
At some point–even though it kind of matters, it’s not clear when–Seung realized that Chinkzee had sold in May 2007 at Phillips in New York for $156,000, well above its original estimate of $60-80,000, but well below the $500,000 value she’d been told. [How Seung managed to avoid getting those gigantic catalogues Fedexed to her, I have no idea; Phillips was blanketing the globe with those things.]
Anyway, if Seung’s case is meaningful, it’s only as a reminder to collectors to do their own damn homework; the NY Supreme Court determined that art advisors and even dealers are not “experts,” and their opinions are just sales patter which constitutes, at best, “non-actionable ‘puffery’…on which a sophisticated commercial entity could not reasonably rely.”
When I started writing this post, I thought it was just a savvy dealer using the promise of an easy follow-on flip to flip her own auction purchase to a clueless, foreign speculator. But there’s someone else involved. Dinaburg’s emails to Seung, including the one promising “the gallery net,” make it sound like Chinkzee was coming from the artist himself:

(1) We are working with the very well respected [sic] and important [sic] artist Julian Schnabel. I was thinking that I could offer you what I offer the galleries directly…
(3) I have spoken to the Schnabel studio and have gotten the final lowest possible price on both [?] works
(4) I was over there with Julian before I went to Hong Kong and we were pricing work and you will never see a Schnabel form [from] the studio coming out at the prices they are now, but higher.

Did Schnabel buy his own old painting back from Phillips, and then flip them back through Fortune Cookie? Or was Chinkzee just part of Fortune Cookie’s big, 2007 All-Asia Tour of Schnabel’s “best works”? [A: Yes.] There is a punchline here somewhere about sarong-wearing white devils peddling Chinkzees out of the back of a Fortune Cookie van as they drive across China, but I can’t figure it out.
No Money Back for Gallery Worker Who Relied on Estimate of Schnabel Painting’s Value [law.com]
Sept. 2007: Julian Schnabel Presents Best Works in Beijing [china.org.cn]

Yale just held a panel discussion on conservation and artist intention. This kind of thing drives me a little crazy:

Not all work inevitably degrades, though. Some art improves with careful conservation. [Yale University Art Gallery director Jack] Reynolds showed a video of the installation of the massive Sol LeWitt wall drawing show at MASS MoCA. As the audience watched a team wearing paint masks carefully sand a wall, he recalled conditions in Paula Copper’s SoHo gallery in 1968, where the artist completed his first wall drawing. “That wall was anything but smooth, unpockmarked, and perfectly sanded,” he said. Reynolds also noted that many of LeWitt’s draftsmen have specialized in particular techniques, becoming “samurai warriors” in their crafts. A LeWitt skillfully executed today dwarfs the quality of what the artist himself regularly produced. [emphasis added]

Really? I mean, really? I guess if that’s the way it is, then that’s the way it is. But I have to wonder about the implications of this samurai model for the conceptual essence of LeWitt’s work. Here’s how Holland Cotter described the wall drawings process in his review of Mass MOCA, which was organized with Yale:

It also stays resolutely impersonal, never sticking for long with any single graphic style, never showcasing a distinctive touch, never carrying a signature.
Although LeWitt came up with the initial designs, his relationship to the work was otherwise hands-off. He wrote instructions for how the work should be done — firm but easy-to-follow recipes with occasional sweeten-to-taste allowances — but hired other artists to do it. Some he trained, with the expectation that they would train others, who would in turn train still others, stretching on through generations.

So it’s an impersonal priesthood?
For a long time–since the 2000 rerospective at SFMOMA, actually, I’ve had a secret guerrilla LeWitt show planned in my head, where all the wall drawings are executed by civilians. Just take a catalogue with a bunch of instructions listed in it, and start doing them on the walls. I don’t know what that would look like, but for that reason alone, I’m interested to see it.
update: Andrew Russeth, who wrote the original ArtInfo article, just emailed in to claim the “skillful” and “quality” lingo, though I still think he captured the larger point accurately, which is the professionalization and upgraded production values of LeWitt’s wall drawings. [Which may be apt for some, especially later bodies of work like the fresco-like geometric shape murals of the 80’s and the high-gloss monochromes of the 90’s, which were, of course, created in the professionalized era.]
Andrew also mentioned that Dia:Beacon has had a “civilian” LeWitt drawing activity as part of their education program for visiting school groups:

A particular favorite (and one of the most unwieldy titled) with the younger kids was: “3. Wall Drawing #123: Copied lines. The first drafter draws a not straight vertical line as long as possible. The second drafter draws a line next to the first one, trying to copy it. The third drafter does the same, as do as many drafters as possible. Then the first drafter, followed by the others, copies the last line drawn until both ends of the wall are reached. 1972”

Which is great to hear, though I’d be more impressed to hear that they put the resulting drawing on public view. Here is Holland Cotter again on the Mass MOCA LeWitts:

Many of his drawings were done by supervised groups of art students — those at Mass MoCA included — in a learning-on-the-job tradition very similar to Renaissance workshop practice. A master artist provides the overarching concept; senior artists oversee production; apprentices do the grunt work and in the process discover and develop ideas of their own.

So LeWitt’s Conceptual Art construct is really just a return to guilds and craft.
The Best of Intentions [artinfo via 16miles]