art – Page 137 – greg.org

Fire Destroys ‘90%’ Of Helio Oiticica’s Work

Unbelievable. The Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica refused to sell his work; his estate, the Projecto Helio Oiticica, held an estimated 95% of his entire output when he died in 1980. The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston had a truly spectacular, history-shaking show of Oiticica’s work in 2007, which traveled to the Tate. Roberta Smith said in the Times,

This show is like a large stone dropped into the calm waters of European-American art history. With its thick, lavishly illustrated catalog, it presents an enormously productive artist, writer and thinker whose work effortlessly spans the gap between Modern and Postmodern, Minimal and Post-Minimal. Reflecting inspirations from Mondrian to the samba music of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (slums), it also bridges first- and third-world cultures in a way that has seldom been equaled.

Now O Globo reports [via artforum] that a fire in Oiticica’s brother’s house has destroyed “an estimated 90%” of the PHO’s holdings. Some installations and conceptual projects designed to be recreated are fine, of course, but his paintings and sculptures, including his incredible bolides [above], minimalist experiments in experiential color from the early 60s that remind me of Anne Truitt’s genre-breaking works, are gone.
Apparently, PHO–which is controlled by the artist’s two younger brothers–was in an ongoing dispute with the municipality of Rio over the government’s inadequate storage conditions and late exhibition payments for the work. As a result, PHO removed the work to the house–where it just burned up. This just tears me up inside to think about it.
A multi-year digitization project for Oiticica’s work and prodigious archives was nearly complete, though, and presumably the 7-volume catalogue raisonne will keep the artist’s seminal ideas in circulation. Without the works themselves, though, Oiticica could end up a digital ghost, haunting artists and art historians of the future.
update: O Globo has photos of the aftermath. The loss may be closer to 75%.
The exhibition catalogue for the MFAH show: Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color [amazon]

Greatest Hits: Highlights From The LAPD Art Theft Detail’s Wanted Gallery

Considering the awesome graphic power of their official publications, you’d think I would have visited the Los Angeles Police Department’s Art Theft Detail website sooner. Well, let me make amends:
THE LAPD ART THEFT DETAIL WEBSITE IS FANTASTIC!
Seriously, there is some great art in LA. Or at least there was, until it got JACKED.
Richard Weisman’s Warhols may be the biggest art heist of the year–and it definitely has the greatest poster–but just take a look at this small, curated showcase of some of LA’s greatest stolen art. If you have seen any of it lately, of course, please contact the LAPD:
The stolen art alerts usually don’t mention any circumstances of the theft or the owner. The only clue is the case number, which is usually keyed to the date. Alexander Calder’s tabletop stabile, Little Roxbury (1956), [above] was stolen in 2005.

This simple, unassming drawing by Nayland Blake (2003), is just 9×12, small enough to stick in a folder or stack of mail. It was stolen in 2006.

Continue reading “Greatest Hits: Highlights From The LAPD Art Theft Detail’s Wanted Gallery”

On Second Thought, Don’t Find The Warhols??

Well that’s complicating. Richard Weisman has withdrawn his $25 million insurance claim for the 11 Andy Warhol paintings he reported stolen last month from his home in Los Angeles. As a result, the insurance company, Chartis, has withdrawn its offer of a $1 million reward for the works’ recovery.
As the Seattle Times reports,

he simply couldn’t stand the thought of insurance investigators poring through his personal records and interrogating his family and friends before he stood any chance of collecting.
“They turn you into a suspect. I just finally told them, ‘I’m not going to go through it for three to five years. Forget it,’ ” Weisman said. “That’s the only reason, and it’s a good enough reason.”
…
“It’s a lot of money he gave up,” [LAPD Art Detective Don] Hrycyk said. “It’s one of those puzzling aspects you have to take into account when you do your investigation.”

Uhm, ok! Hrycyk’s partner Mark Sommer also said his office had been having a difficult time contacting Weisman about the theft. Mhmm.
Weisman commissioned eight sets of the Athletes paintings in 1977. He has since given away four sets, and has kept a set or two on the market for the last few years. So obviously, he’s not short of Warhol Athletes. Bully for him, but what about the rest of us?
While I worried for a second or two, I realized that even without the reward, the Find The Warhols Project is still desperately needed. With so many Warhols out there, it’s more important than ever for collectors, traders, and brokers to have a handy reference to check the hotness of their wares.
I assume LAPD will issue a new Wanted Poster [update: they did, for the third time, apparently], but for the FTW! Project, I’m inclined to stick with the original. When posters go out, I will personally add the up-to-date reward information to each work by hand. Just like Thomas Kinkade.
And since Chartis, better known until July as the commercial insurance operation of AIG, is owned by the US government at the moment, taxpayers just saved $1 million – $25 million! It’s win-win-win!
Only 10 days left to join the Find The Warhols! Project [kickstarter.com]
See the original Find The Warhols! Project post [greg.org]

Deal

Maybe Jonathan Monk had the same misremembering of Walter de Maria as I did. His series at Lisson Gallery at Frieze comes with various, built-in resale price caps. [via sarah douglas for artinfo]

What I Looked At Today – Phillips Edition

Why, I feel just like Alma Thomas, what with my shopping around for a modernist painting technique to use on my Dutch camo Landscape series…
Anyway, I headed over to the Phillips Collection in search of Arthur Dove paintings. Huge trove, you know; Duncan Phillips was a longtime supporter of the artist and his work. Until yesterday, they had eight Doves up. But they started some work in a gallery, and so today they have just one: Red Sun, 1935, which is hanging in the little half stairway going to the Goh Annex. His line is promising, not nearly as fastidious as the 17th c. Dutch, of course, and thicker paint, which he mixes and blends on the canvas.
A couple of other unexpected pieces made it well worth the trip:

Continue reading “What I Looked At Today – Phillips Edition”

There’s No Telling What You’ll Have To Do

The late, great curator Walter Hopps on his Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles:

Anyway, one of the painters I loved–and I realized that a number of the artists, including [Robert] Irwin, also really loved him–was Giorgio Morandi. No one was showing Morandi in the Westeren United States. I had been traveling, and I came back and discovered that [Irving] Blum had not put an image of Morandi on the invitation. I was really furious. I said, “One in a thousand people who get our invitation will even know who Giorgio Morandi is. We’ve got to have one of his drawings on this invitation.”
Well, he hadn’t had a photographer come in to take a picture. I said: “Clear this desk off. I’m going in the back and choosing a drawing.” I picked out a Morandi drawing that was strong enough–it had glass over it–and I laid it down on the table. I took a piece of paper and laid it over the glass, took a soft pencil–and I’m not an artist; Blum would have been better because he can draw–and I traced out that Morandi drawing, to life size, in my own crude version. Traced that son of a bitch out on a blank piece of paper, and I said, “There’s the artwork.”
Blum said: “You can’t do that. You’ve just made a fake Morandi.”
I said: “You watch me do it. You just watch me do it.” And that went to the printer, so it’s printed in red with its line cut very elegantly on a paper. e waited to see who would identify it as a fake. Never–no one, no one. [Harald] Szeeman is right–there’s no telling what you’ll have to do.

The interview was originally published in Artforum in 1996, and is included in HUO’s interview anthology, A Brief History of Curating.

Echo I

This 1960 LIFE Magazine photo by Grey Villet of Antenna bouncing first message off Echo I satellite is a great, uh, echo of Trevor Paglen’s The Other Night Sky series.

What I Looked At Today

So I decided to make the Dutch landscape paintings I wanted to see made from those incredible security-obscured Dutch Google Maps I found a couple of weeks ago.
I’ll print the images out and paint over them. Since they are Dutch landscapes, I figure they’ll be nice, little domestic-sized paintings I can make on a table.
I’ve been trying to puzzle out how to get the paint on there and what it should look like. My first idea was to keep the process as mechanical as possible, both to produce crisp, sharp polygons, but also to mediate between the image and me–and my utter lack of painting experience or technique. But my brother-in-law, an excellent artist with an extraordinary sensitivity to technique and material, made the case for just painting the damn things with a brush.
So I’m convinced, though I’m still not quite settled on how I’ll do them. But we set out today to look upclose, extremelyclose, at some 17th century Dutch landscape and cityscape paintings, and see how they were done. Of course, we missed the much-hyped Dutch Cityscapes exhibition at the National Gallery last spring.
Here’s what we saw today at the National Gallery:

Continue reading “What I Looked At Today”

On Wingnuts On Alma Thomas

I guess it doesn’t matter anymore that I don’t see why the White House’s art borrowing is news now, when almost the entire list was already published and discussed four months ago [and many weeks before that, too].
Because now some wingnut Know-Nothings have taken it upon themselves to accuse Alma Thomas of plagiarizing Henri Matisse, an act which reinforces their hard-held disdain for the Obamas and anyone and anything associated with them.

It’s a false and defamatory claim, and the real story of Thomas and Matisse is deeply fascinating and diametrically opposed to the spiteful, divisive worldview in which it originated. But it didn’t seem that useful to just say so.
So I went ahead and read all 200 or so comments on the Free Republic thread where the controversy was born to see if they figured out on their own that Thomas’s 1963 painting, Watusi (Hard Edge) [top] was originally created as a deliberate reworking of Matisse’s large 1953 cutout collage, l’Escargot [above], and that it had always been recognized and discussed as such by the people who followed Thomas’s work.
By around comment #120, they’d at least decided that it was “a study,” and that Thomas wasn’t a fraud, just a hack. So a small victory for fact buried under an inflammatory and inaccurate headline.
As a hopeless art elitist and documented Obama campaign donor, there’s obviously nothing I could ever say that would persuade a hater that the Obamas’ choices of art do not, in fact, catch them out as uppity, ignorant, race-hating, affirmative actionist, communist, stalinist, Nazi frauds or whatever.
Look under the hood, though, and the substance of the angry right’s criticism of Thomas–and, often enough, frankly, of Matisse–sounds very familiar: specifically, the perceived lack of skill involved in making “modern” art; and Thomas’s lack of originality, or more precisely, the rejection of appropriation as a valid artistic strategy.

Continue reading “On Wingnuts On Alma Thomas”

On Knuckleheads On Anne Truitt

I’ll have more to say about the incredible work of Anne Truitt in the Hirshhorn’s retrospective, thoughtfully curated by Kristen Hileman.

Whether on canvas, paper or sculpture-like wooden armatures, Truitt’s exhaustively spare paintings induce, by design, a lot of processing by the viewer. Those interpretations can range from the biographic–reading the works as minimalistic evocations of places, people, and memories from the artist’s life; to the flighty-poetic–riffs on whatever sublimity the colors have been up to lately in nature; to the maddening and/or inapt–pronouncements by critics and curators in positions of authority in the art world who you’d expect would know better. I’m starting with the latter.

Truitt was one of critic Clement Greenberg’s favorite Minimalists. Unfortunately for her career, that was a bit like being one of George Bush’s favorite Democrats. And also? There was this, from Greenberg’s 1968 profile of Truitt in Vogue, which Hileman quotes in her catalogue essay:

She certainly does not ‘belong.’ But then how could a housewife, with three small children, living in Washington belong? How could such a person fit the role of pioneer of far-out art?

Besides/because of Truitt’s DC isolation, her work was difficult to place in the art world’s discourse, which at the time was organized around where you drank: Cedar Bar or Max’s Kansas City. Since then, of course, a critical context has developed that can accommodate minimalist abstraction and color and emotion and metaphor and extraordinary process. Which made Hirshhorn chief curator Kerry Brougher’s demonstrably wrong characterization of Truitt’s art historical significance in his opening remarks at the museum’s panel discussion Thursday night all the more baffling.

Brougher described Truitt’s work as hugely influential at the time “for Minimalism, Color Field School, whatever you want to call it.” I guess it’ll all make sense when his definitive catalogue on the Whatever School is published.

And it’s shooting fish in a barrel, I know, but I’ll end with Washington Post critic Blake Gopnik’s flight of sexist goofiness. In one of her books, Truitt skewered Roberta Smith for a condescending, gender-based review of her work. I’d love to hear what the artist would have said about Gopnik, who framed his entire review around the idea that Truitt’s human-scaled sculptures are actually mannequins and that her project is somehow transgressive fashion:

This one here could be a matronly Martha Cunningham, clad in forest green but with a stripe of scarlet at her hem to show she’s still got spunk. There are the Updike girls, modish in tight-fitting lime and pumpkin and pink. And there’s that absurd Mrs. Snyder: She’s paired a perfectly nice linen suit with shoes in red and black patent leather.
…
Truitt’s best sculptures, even at their most soberly geometrical, tend to “girlish” pastels or fashion brights — or worse, she mixes the two.
The analogy to fashion seems right. It feels as though Truitt has realized that the so-called “rules” of art are more like fashion etiquette than laws of nature. You imagine that it’s simply not possible, dahhling, to wear blue with green — until the year that some new designer has everybody doing it. If you have the courage to get there first, you’ll either make a fool of yourself or be recognized as fashion forward. The truly bold don’t care which happens. That’s Truitt.

Hahahaha, NO. It is not.

While using show-offy obversion to argue Truitt’s significance, Gopnik manages to get Minimalism, Judd, Morris and Truitt wrong, all in one paragraph:

And yet, by the terms of the minimalist movement, Truitt once again turns out to have gotten things wrong. “Real” minimalism was supposed to be absolutely legible and “whole,” so you could know a sculpture’s essence almost at one glance. At the very least, you were supposed to get a clear “gestalt” of any minimalist sculpture just by walking all around it. Truitt’s sculptures often mess that up, by striping each side of an upright in very different colors.

Judd was interested in the integrity of the object’s shape itself, it had nothing to do with the viewer; he could not have cared less. Gestalt, meanwhile, was Robert Morris’s concept for shape, whose “wholeness” could only [not “just”] be understood by the viewer experiencing it from all sides.

For Morris, the issue with color wasn’t just uniformity; color was “optical” and “unstable,” “inconsistent with the physical nature of sculpture.” It thwarted Gestalt [*cough, Judd’s anodized metal and tinted plexi *cough*]. But for Truitt, color was the Gestalt. She didn’t get Minimalism wrong; she proved it wrong.

My own admiration for Truitt’s work arose from her prescient infusion of content into abstracted, minimalist form; I thrilled to discover in her an antecedent to the contemporary artists I came up liking: Gober, Gonzalez-Torres, Horn, Hodges. But the longer I stay with it, and the more I see, the more it feels like a subtle deployment of memory to explore perception and experience. It makes me want to see Truitts alongside works by Ad Reinhardt, James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, or–moving off the color reservation–even something like Cardiff/Bures-Miller’s Forty-Part Motet. Hmm. That’s more than I thought I’d have to say.

I Am So Banacek, Ch. 2: So Now They’re Prints

I’m really busy Finding The Warhols!, but when the Palm Beach Pollock heist went down, and no one in the crime beat media seemed to know enough about art to spot the inconsistencies and implausibilities in collector/dealer/boytoy Angelo Amadio’s claims, I couldn’t remain silent.
[The biggest red flag, of course, is the couple’s claim to have bought or been given an authenticated but secret painting by Jackson Pollock in 2001. But let’s set that aside for a moment.]
In all his early statements, Amadio described the stolen works as “paintings.” I was the first and only one to point out that the works in the photos were not paintings, but were actually prints: the Miros were lithographs, and the Rembrandt was an etching. As recently as Wednesday, they were being reported as “paintings and drawings.”
Now it seems Amadio has agreed with me.
In advance of a press conference scheduled for today, Amadio & co. gave the Monterey County Herald a list of the stolen works, “which include prints by Rembrandt, Renoir and Miro.”
Just to be clear: no serious collector, no one who actually owns and handles art, and certainly no one who has been in the “wholesale art business” and authenticating Pollocks for years as Amadio claims would call a print a painting. And they certainly wouldn’t do it for Rembrandt, whose paintings and etchings are such completely different physical objects. It’d be like calling a piece of paper a book, or a purse a suitcase. It just makes no sense.
Meanwhile, in other Telling Different Things To Different People news, the LA Times describes Amadio as A law student who clerks for attorney Vicki St. John. Which may be true! Life’s complicated, and we all have many different hats and usernames.
Here’s what he told the SF Chronicle earlier this week:

Amadio said he is chief executive of Alternative Asset Investments Inc., which he described as a company that deals with artwork. He also said he is a law student, but would not say where.

Also this, “St. John’s ex-wife is Vicki St. John, who is listed as the attorney for Alternative Asset Investments, Amadio’s company, on the firm’s Web site.”
And from the Herald: “Vicki St. John, an attorney representing Angelo Benjamin Amadio and Dr. Ralph Kennaugh…”
So St. John is Amadio’s “boss,” his employee, and/or his lawyer. And she’s also an ex-wife? Yes, of David St. John, the couple’s insurance broker, who is the only other person named so far who claims to have seen the art. In describing the coming “rebuttal press conference” [Amadio & co’s term], the LA Times said the collectors’ proof would include “a statement from an insurance agent who specializes in art.”
So I guess that means the statement will not come from David R. St. John, then, because he apparently specializes in auto, health and life insurance. One of Tulsa’s most upstanding independent insurance brokers, I’m sure.

UPDATE: I didn’t notice that Wednesday, the Herald put a date on the Pollock: 1944. That should narrow it down.
One work that hasn’t gotten any real attention is the Van Gogh. I know, right? Was it the drawing of an old woman [signed “Vincent”] that Amadio showed to KSBW last week? [above, right] Because according to the Internet Archive version of Art Etoile [above, left], Amadio & Kennaugh’s defunct “wholesale art” business website, that drawing was “SOLD” for $1.5 million by April 2004. It was described as a “Van Gogh [that] has never before been seen outside the actual artist’s family!” What incredible art historical detective skills these guys must have, finding unknown Van Goghs and Pollocks everywhere! Maybe they can help–you guessed it–Find The Warhols!

The Modern’s Image Of Freedom Competition

News that the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth acquired a painting by Charles Sheeler of the Boulder Dam sent me looking for more, and guess what I found? Sheeler’s painting is one of six commissioned in 1938 by Fortune Magazine for a series on “American industrial power.” He also made at least 20 photos of the dam, including the print above, which was sold by The Museum of Modern Art in a large sale of photography held at Sotheby’s in 2001.
But why stop at pushing the deaccession button, when there’s the accession, curatorial stunt, war, and government involvement in the arts buttons to be pushed, too? From the lot description:

This photograph was one of the prize-winning images in the Museum’s Image of Freedom contest and exhibition, in which photographers were asked to ‘interpret a facet of the American spirit.’ Of the 799 photographs entered, 95 were selected as prize- winners and bought by the Museum for $25 each. The photographer’s identities were concealed while their entries were reviewed by a judging panel consisting of Ansel Adams, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Monroe Wheeler, James Thrall Soby, David McAlpin, Alfred Barr, Jr., and A. Hyatt Mayor.

Now truth be told, that’s a pretty unimpeachable panel, as far as the history of photography goes. Adams and Barr, you know. Beaumont Newhall helped form MoMA’s photography department under trustee/collector McAlpin’s watch; Nancy Newhall was an influential critic and close collaborator with Adams and Brett Weston; Wheeler and Soby were both senior officials and/or curators at the Modern as well as trustees; and Mayor was a pioneering print curator at the Met. Still, an anonymous contest where the prize is $25 and entry of your work into the Modern’s collection? Would any museum try such a thing today?

And what about this whole Image of Freedom competition itself? The contest, organized in conjunction with the US Office of Civilian Defense, took place in 1941, before the country actually entered WWII. [The exhibition opened in October, hot on the heels of the National Defense Poster Competition show, part of a double bill with the debut of Picasso’s Guernica (above). The goal of this contest was to “urge artists to create posters that would encourage citizens to support the war effort through personal and economic commitment.” The posters later appeared in Army recruiting offices and on billboards around the country.]
In the invitation, photographers were asked, “What, to you, most deeply signifies America? Can you compress it into a few photographic images?” and charged to capture “the spirit of our thoughts, our ways, our homes, our jobs.” Which doesn’t exactly sound the same as our awesome dams, our giant parades, and our suspension bridges [that’s one of Brett Weston’s award-winners above, which was also sold at Sotheby’s].

In his review for Photo Notes, Walter Rosenblum found the Images of Freedom didn’t show enough of The People:

Isn’t the Image of Freedom something bigger, something more vital [than the natural beauty of the country]? Isn’t it that very human quality that differentiates a Nazi Storm trooper from a real American. Isn’t it that which is reflected in the workers of Lewis Hine, the people who built the Empire State building, the oppressed who come to this country for refuge?
Isn’t it the farmer of Dorothea Lange, the sharecropper’s brave wife? Isn’t it the complete body of work of the F. S. A.? Isn’t it the worker in the mill, in the shop, in the factory? The teacher who can teach as he pleases, without following a regimented text book drawn up by the Nazis? Isn’t it reflected in these people who have a stake in our democracy that they are proud of and are willing to fight for to defend?
Isn’t it the people who organized Ford at the cost of their lives, the American boys who went to Spain to stop the fascist invader before he was able to spread his power. Isn’t it the air raid warden in the city streets, who stands with his head so high, because he is doing his bit for his country? Isn’t it that American, who after a hard day’s work, visits a Red Cross Station in order to donate his blood to the cause of democracy, to that cause which will give us a better chance of retaining our own freedom.

Rosenblum namechecks a few of his favorite Working Man images from the show. Which is all fine, I suppose, though all that union talk sounds like a lot of Ruskie happytalk to me.
But that discussion still ignores the show’s remarkably problematic [or not?] core assumption, namely that a museum–not just a museum, The Museum–should be organizing exhibits for the government and rallying artists to support preparations for war. Or maybe it just baffles me, living as I do in a moment of history where jingoist wingnuts see an NEA conference call as evidence that an army of brainwashing artists is about to enslave America under Obama’s tryannical thumb–and where self-important critics make naive, grand pronouncements on the sanctity of Art.
How does MoMA account for its own deep, involved history of colloboration with the government to produce exhibitions and to promote The American Way or whatever? The short answer is with careful ambivalence that tries to distinguish, at least in retrospect, the independently artistic from the overtly propagandistic. Here’s the introduction to an exhibition in the Museum Archive called, “The Museum and The War Effort: Artistic Freedom and Reporting for ‘The Cause,'” organized last year by two folks in the Archive, Miriam Gianni and MacKenzie Bennett:

In the United States in the 1930s and the early 1940s, many people believed that modern art could pave a pathway to democracy. Numerous exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art were produced in collaboration with the United States government. The Museum also continued to organize shows that were aligned with its mission to exhibit the best of recent works of art.
Artists in the United States, Europe, and Asia used art as a medium through which they could voice their opinions about political regimes, war, and social turmoil. From 1938 onward, a variety of compelling exhibitions featuring works produced by artists motivated by wartime experiences were organized at the Museum. In Luis Quintanilla: An Exhibition of Drawings of the War in Spain, Art from Fighting China, and Yank Illustrates the War, MoMA provided its public with a glimpse into war-torn Europe and Asia and an inside look at the difficulties of military life.
In addition to exhibiting war-focused artworks, the Museum played an active role in seeking out artists to assist in government campaigns for the war effort. Staff from the Museum acted as liaisons between government agencies and artists. In 1942 James Thrall Soby became director of the Museum’s Armed Services Program, which functioned as an intermediary between government agencies and the Museum. Under its auspices, exhibition and film programs designed to rally support for the war and solidify America’s image as a society interested in spreading democracy and freedom were added to MoMA’s roster.

Weston’s images were included in a collection survey in 1944, but Sheeler’s photo was apparently never exhibited again by the Museum. It makes me wonder how other Image of Freedom winners fared after the war, artistically speaking, I mean. Maybe despite its long history as an official partner of government propaganda, the Modern has managed to keep its independent artistic and curatorial efforts clear of interference from The Man. Just like how a fine art photographer keeps her commercial work separate from her art.
Or maybe that’s exactly what they want you to think.

So The Pollock Isn’t Unknown, It’s Secret? Or How I Am So Banacek

So first the big news about the Pebble Beach Pollock Caper: did I call it or what? The Monterey Herald reports from the Sheriff’s Dept. press conference today that Angelo Amadio and Ralph Kennaugh are now being considered suspects in, well, if it’s not an actual $80 million art theft, it’s some kind of “criminal enterprise.” They’ve hired a defense attorney, but they have not, as yet, provided the police with any actual documentation that proves the supposedly stolen works even exist.
David St. John says it exists, though. He’s supposedly the collectors’ insurance broker [and his ex-wife is listed as counsel for Amadio’s newly incorporated investment company, so a really arm’s length guy. From the SF Chronicle:

David St. John said he had seen his clients’ most valuable painting, an untitled Pollock that police were told was worth $20 million.
“There have been very few owners – three or four as I can trace,” Amadio said. “It’s known amongst Pollock collectors, I think.”

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. A 4×7-foot Pollock which has traded hands three or four times in 50+ years, yet has never been sold or exhibited publicly. A painting which is not in the four-volume, 1978 catalogue raisonne or the supplement, yet is “known amongst Pollock collectors,” Amadio “thinks.”
I guess I’ve just been spending too much time trying to rally all the Warhol collectors to Find The Warhols! to do much Pollock collector outreach. Could someone who’s on Facebook contact the Pollock Collectors Group for me and tell them to spill the beans?
UPDATE: Watch the raw feed of the Sheriff’s bemused press conference! [kcra.com]
Also, the Google Map and the real estate listing for the scene of the as-yet-unspecified crime: $4.3m, not $5m, and flooded with western light. Good thing the prints were all rolled up!

Oh, You Mean From The Dead Coke Fiend Pollock Hoard

Now that the Monterey Herald’s on the case, I think the Pebble Beach Pollock heist will be wrapped up pretty soon. Then we can get back to Finding The Warhols! Out of Angelo/Benjamin Amadio’s shifty, grifty interview with reporters Larry Parsons and Julia Reynolds, emerge details about the stolen Pollock and the “wholesale” art business Amadio ran for ten years:

A few minutes later, Amadio confessed that he knows “nothing about art.” But his role in the partnership with Kennaugh was “find it, buy it and sell it.” And he said he has good connections in the art world.
In 2001, Amadio said, research he did for a big-time art broker involved in the pending sale of a lot of Pollock paintings revealed that some of them weren’t authentic.
In gratitude, he said, a would-be buyer gave the men one of the real Pollocks — the same one they now say was taken from an upstairs office nook, where it was rolled up for storage. The broker, he said, wound up dying, an art world casualty of “cocaine overdose out West,” he said [from his rental house perched on the West coast].”

Ah, so in 2001, when he was 23, the guy who knows “nothing about art” authenticated an unknown hoard of purported Pollocks, and got “one of the real Pollocks” he identified as a thank you gift.
Who was this coke-snorting, big-time Pollock broker out West? I’m sure he must be very well-known to the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Just think of the firestorm of attention and debate that erupted in 2005 when sexploitation filmmaker Alex Matter, whose parents were friends of the Pollock-Krasners, pulled a stack of small purported Pollocks from his late father’s East Hampton storage unit. [below: a NYT photo of Matter with some of his find.]

In fact, much of the story of the Matter Pollocks unfolds in Boston, where Amadio lived with his partner, Harvard physician Dr. Ralph Kennaugh. The NY Times reported in 2007 that pigments from Matter’s paintings were analyzed at the Harvard Art Museums and the MFA. When the pigments were found to have been manufactured long after the artist’s death in 1956–some as recently as 1996, after even Matter’s father’s death–Matter disputed the findings, and then commissioned a do-over in Williamstown, and then threatened to sue that guy over the results. And the whole trove was exhibited later that year at Boston’s College’s McMullen Museum.
Oh, look, as coverage of the local angle on the Matter paintings controversy picked up in 2007, the Boston Globe’s Geoff Edgers got Matter to admit that he had given “partial ownership” of his Pollock stash to dealer Ronald Feldman in exchange for help covering the “expenses associated with restoring, insuring and researching the works.”
So it could totally happen! Matter actually said he found the works in 2002. There are 22 canvases and 10 boards. Maybe he gave one of the largest canvases to Amadio for helping him clean out the storage unit, and kept the tiny, notebook-sized ones himself? [Q: Did Alex Matter OD in the desert recently?]
Of course, right in the middle of this Matter matter, David Geffen reportedly sold his Pollock painting, No. 5, 1948, for $140 million. That painting measures 4×8 feet, very close in size to Amadio’s Pollock. No. 5 is on fiberboard, though, not so easy to roll up and store behind your printer. To a collector-dealer of Amadio’s savvy and renown, I’m sure such a confluence of Pollock stories unfolding in his own backyard was a purely matter of deep, scholarly interest–and not a blueprint for concocting a giant Pollock scam of his own.
Pebble Beach art heist puts collectors in spotlight [montereyherald.com]

Cherchez La Femme [Qui Pisse]

Stolen art aficionados, please don’t let the reports of a giant $60 million art theft in Pebble Beach distract us from Our Important Task of Finding The Warhols, because it is a big gay hoax. I’ll bet you a Warhol wanted poster.

Every thing about the Pebble Beach heist is fishy or inconsistent or hilariously a lie. Let’s start out with the collectors themselves, A. Benjamin Amadio, 31 and Dr. Ralph Kennaugh, 62, who present themselves as business partners. Business partners who lived together, retired from Boston together, and were renting the $5 million house with no alarm system while either finishing construction on their new place or shopping around for a place to build. They first went into business together 10 years ago, when Amadio, then 21, was either an art gallerist or a venture capitalist in Ohio.

A. Benjamin is better known to Google as Angelo Amadio, and as 40 commenters at the Boston Herald–but no reporter anywhere so far–were able to figure out, he is the subject of numerous ripoff complaints for selling undocumented puppies as AKC-registered, but then never delivering the paperwork.

But what about the art? From the Boston Globe:

Amadio said that only three or four people in the world knew the two owned some of the pieces and that the thieves took only authenticated paintings, though the collection included some impeccable reproductions that only a skilled eye would be able to distinguish from the original.
“When they hit us, they knew exactly what they were looking for,” he said.
“They knew exactly where they were and the difference between some of the authentic pieces and some of the reproductions.”

Among those “authenticated paintings” were irreplaceable works by Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Miro, Matisse, Renoir, Jackson Pollock, and G.H. Rothe.
Ignore for a moment that G.H. Rothe is a gigantic print mill, cranking out tens of thousands of pastel posters of taut ballet dancers and running horses–both of which were prominent subjects in the Amadio-Kennaugh “theft” and any of which could be easily replaced for a couple hundred impulsively spent bucks on your next Carnival Cruise.
As for the “real” artists’ paintings, the Rembrandts are clearly etchings. One, Femme qui pisse, or Woman making water, is either the version offered for sale in this 2005 CG Boerner catalogue [PDF, image above] or the shabbier one they mention which was sold at auction. It’s hard to tell from Amadio’s blurry color copy documentation of this extremely rare and priceless treasure. And the Miros are clearly prints, too. [The one on the left is reproduced pointing down the Herald, and up in KSBW’s story.]

The biggest tell, though, is the Pollock, the only painting mentioned which could justify the $27 million, $60 million, or $80 million values Amadio has claimed. It is 4×7 feet. There is no published image of it. They supposedly bought it in 2001. It has supposedly never been exhibited or on the market publicly. The only thing that can be said with certainty about this purported Pollock is that it is not the #$&% Jackson Pollock bought by trucker Teri Horton in 1992 for $5, which was the subject of the 2006 joke documentary, Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? As you can see from the movie poster, that #(*$% Pollock is more than four feet tall:

Also, the insurance talk doesn’t make sense [it costs $30 million to insure a collection supposedly appraised by the insurance company for $27 million?]; the local law enforcement discrepancies; the lack of FBI Art Theft Division involvement; the sudden appearance of a ransom note/death threat? It’s all too much to believe with a straight [sic] face. And yet it gets reported far and wide by newspaper and TV sources as unquestioned fact.
I give it less than a week before the whole Pebble Beach caper implodes in a cloud of boytoy blackmail gone awry. [c-monster]