Robin Pogrebin

Now, it turns out, Wrightsman decided to continue that largesse after her death. On Wednesday, the museum announced that the arts benefactor and grande dame of New York society has left more than 375 works to the Met in a bequest that includes gifts to the departments of Drawings and Prints, European Paintings, and European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, as well as to the Department of Asian Art, the Department of Islamic Art and the Watson Library.

“The Wrightsman bequest is the culmination of a half century of giving that has transformed the collection of Old Master paintings, taking it in totally new directions,” said Keith Christiansen, the Met’s chairman of European paintings. He added that the bequest includes 22 European paintings “of the absolute finest quality, namely Van Dyck’s portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria and Delacroix’s ‘Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe.’” These shore up the museum’s existing strengths along with six canvases by Canaletto, which give the Met “one of the finest collections of works by the artist to be seen anywhere.”

Still others, like Francois de Troy’s two “tableaux à la mode,” add “a new dimension to the collection by providing quintessential examples of a type of painting we sorely lacked,” Christiansen said.

In addition to the art, Wrightsman provided for $80 million to the Wrightsman Fund, which supports acquisitions of works from Western Europe and Britain created between 1500 and 1850.

The gift brings to more than 1,275 works that Wrightsman and her husband, Charles Wrightsman, who died in 1986, have already given to the museum.

Wrightsman invited the Met to choose from among the works in her apartment; the remainder will go to auction.

This article originally appeared in

A Trustee Leaves Trove of Old Masters Works to the Met

NEW YORK — Johannes Vermeer’s “Study of a Young Woman.” Peter Paul Rubens’ self-portrait with his family. Jacques Louis David’s portrait of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and his wife. These paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection were made possible in part by the generosity of the longtime donor and trustee Jayne Wrightsman, who died in April at age 99.

“He amassed quite a number of them,” she said of the works, which the artist made with scraps of cardboard as his canvas, using poster paint, charcoal and pencil. “He really likened Traylor to the greats — the Giacomettis, the Kandinskys.”

Forty of those Traylors will go on view at David Zwirner’s Upper East Side space Tuesday in an exhibition whose proceeds will mostly go toward the Harlem Children’s Zone, a nonprofit organization that seeks to break the cycle of poverty for youngsters in central Harlem through education.

The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation, started by William Louis-Dreyfus in 2013 with the fortune he made as a commodities trader, has sold Traylors at auction before. In January, “Woman Pointing at Man With Cane” went for a surprising $396,500 at Christie’s, nearly 10 times its low estimate of $40,000 (those proceeds also went mostly to the Harlem charity).

But the foundation wanted to have this sale at Zwirner to reposition the artist, moving Traylor — who died in 1949 — from the somewhat limited categories of outsider, self-taught or folk art into the mainstream.

“We’re hoping for the art market to see this as great contemporary art and not just as outsider art,” said Jeffrey Gilman, president of the foundation. “Given Zwirner’s position in the contemporary art market, we’re hoping he can introduce this to a larger audience.”

That recontextualizing of Traylor is already underway, with museums all over the country aiming for a more inclusive view of America’s visual culture and reviving neglected histories of many African American artists who did not receive formal training.

Traylor was recently given a major retrospective — “Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor” — at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which closed in April. “He’s not an important outsider artist,” said Leslie Umberger, the Smithsonian curator who organized the show. “He’s an important American artist.”

Earlier this year, the Betty Cunningham gallery on the Lower East Side presented its second Traylor show. And at the Museum of Modern Art, which reopened to the public Sunday after a substantial renovation and rehanging, there are now five Traylors on view.

Lucas Zwirner, the Zwirner gallery’s head of content, who selected the pieces in the Traylor show (priced between $60,000 and $500,000), said the renewed attention is long overdue. “When you look at those blues and the graphic qualities, that stuff just pops,” he said. “It has gravitas, power, intensity and vision behind it.”

The show includes prime examples of Traylor’s signature style — elegantly spare, alternately buoyant and elegiac. Despite their stick-figure minimalism, the characters in his paintings and drawings have personality; his rabbits, birds and dogs seem to move through space.

“They’re almost modern in composition,” Julia Louis-Dreyfus said, “and they have a joyfulness that reminds me of my father at his best.”

The artist’s work is deepened by his singular history. After emancipation, Traylor spent much of his life as a sharecropper and started making art only in his 80s, when he was living on the streets of Montgomery, Alabama. His work was discovered in 1939 by another artist, Charles Shannon, who brought Traylor supplies.

Traylor made his art on the backs of candy packaging, discarded boxes and window advertisements. While his paintings and drawings often have a whimsical quality, they were informed by weighty themes like lynching, illiteracy and the Jim Crow South.

“It is the only existing body of work that has survived made by a person born enslaved,” Umberger said. “So it really is a treasure trove of information from this person who was raised to believe he was not a legitimate part of American society, who in the last part of his life decides he’s going to make this body of work that declares his self-worth and what he was witness to.

“He did not have a model for what he was doing,” Umberger added. “He picked up a pencil and tried to figure out for himself what he was seeing.”

Several critics have questioned the motivation behind the glamorous, almost heroic status accorded Traylor today by art dealers, curators and critics, which has fueled soaring prices at auction. While noting that Traylor’s “drawn and painted subjects exude a remarkable exuberance,” G. Roger Denson, writing in The Huffington Post in 2013, added, “We might also regard the same good humor as facilitating the conscience of the white liberal collectors in offering no threat of indictment for the social injustices being perpetuated on blacks.”

The works in the Zwirner show were among the total of about 4,000 pieces in William Louis-Dreyfus’ collection, including examples by the likes of Jean Dubuffet and Helen Frankenthaler, much of which is in a museum-quality converted electrical supply warehouse in Mount Kisco, New York, that is open to the public by appointment.

Louis-Dreyfus, who died at 84 in 2016, was the kind of collector who bought what he loved, rather than what the market or the art establishment deemed valuable, his daughter said.

“He did not approach art collecting like an asset,” said Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who in 2015 made a private documentary about her father and his collection. “His motive was looking for good art, period.”

Her father took a particular interest in self-taught artists who also included Thornton Dial, Nellie Mae Rowe and James Castle.

“He thought it was great art that was undiscovered and unappreciated,” Gilman said.

Like many collectors of such work, William Louis-Dreyfus eschewed the term “outsider art” as patronizing, his daughter said.

“It does have a pejorative connotation to it,” said Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who is best known for the television comedies “Veep” and “Seinfeld.” “I’m very happy that this is moving the needle for Traylor.”

In 2015, the foundation announced that proceeds from collection sales would be donated to the Harlem Children’s Zone, an organization that inspired William Louis-Dreyfus. “I’m an American patriot — I love this country — so I hate all its blemishes, and the way it’s treated the black man has been a huge blemish for hundreds of years which continues today,” William Louis-Dreyfus says in the documentary.

“There is something terribly natural, terribly right, about having the Bill Traylor collection turn into money for his progeny,” he added, referring to the Zone’s students. “I think he would have been — or he is — delighted about that. And I am, too.”

Geoffrey Canada, founder and president of the Zone, said the sale of Traylor’s work seemed especially apt to help children in Harlem. “What could be more fitting than this work helping a generation of kids?” he said.

“It’s incredible to try to imagine what this man had gone through, yet he still produced works of art that cry out about humanity and beauty and the promise of life,” Canada added.

Louis-Dreyfus said she was proud of her father’s decision to use his collection “to do good,” describing it as “a full-circle moment.”

“His whole life he was very upset about the social injustice in this country,” she said, “so the fact that he’s able to address it with this gift is a triumph for him.”

“It’s really an amazing move that he made at the end of his life,” Louis-Dreyfus added. “It may be the best thing he ever did.”

For Bill Traylor's Art, 'Outsider' Doesn't Apply

NEW YORK — Actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus remembers her father, William Louis-Dreyfus, swearing on the phone in the 1990s as he almost got outbid on a painting by Bill Traylor, the Alabama artist born into slavery who took up drawing around age 85.

The eight-story building, on West 25th Street and designed by Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture, is heavy with symbolism, not only because of what it says about Glimcher’s taking the reins from his father — who founded the gallery 59 years ago — but also because of what it telegraphs about the art market.

At a time when small and mid-size galleries are struggling, closing or merging because of a decline in foot traffic and the rise of costly art fairs, New York’s four megagalleries are doing the opposite: doubling down on major building projects in Chelsea.

In planning such new homes, these heavy hitters — Gagosian, Hauser &amp; Wirth, David Zwirner and Pace, which is consolidating its spaces on the Upper East Side and West 25th Street — are redefining what it means to be a gallery, shifting their emphasis from selling and showing art to a more full-service visitor experience that offers food, performance spaces, research libraries and open storage.

The future of art galleries, Marc Glimcher said, lies in making spaces where people want to congregate, “like church.” It is why his new building will feature Pace Live, a multidisciplinary program of music, dance, film and conversation with a full-time curatorial director at the helm: Mark Beasley, the former curator of performance and media art at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington.

But some art experts say the building boom boils down to little more than dueling empires with a “mine is bigger than yours” mentality. “It’s a horse race,” said Howard Read of Cheim &amp; Read, which last year closed its 21-year-old Chelsea gallery and now operates a private dealership on the Upper East Side. “They’re all out to see who can represent Jeff Koons for the longest.”

At more than $100 million, the cost of Pace’s project is greater than the New Museum’s $89 million budget for its expansion, though Pace is technically only renting its space. (It has a 20-year lease.)

In addition, Larry Gagosian, the biggest of the behemoths globally, is expanding into two galleries adjacent to his 26,000-square-foot space on West 24th Street (one of which formerly belonged to the Mary Boone Gallery).

David Zwirner is building a five-story, $50 million space designed by Renzo Piano on West 21st Street, to open in 2021. And Hauser &amp; Wirth is constructing a five-story building designed by Annabelle Selldorf on West 22nd Street — the gallery’s first new ground-up home, scheduled to open next spring.

Hauser &amp; Wirth arguably set the standard for the full-service gallery with its sprawling Los Angeles complex, which opened in 2016 and features a farm-to-table restaurant, public vegetable garden (with egg-laying chickens), sculpture courtyard, gift shop and bookstore.

Some liken this trend in the art market to the kind of consolidation taking place in the retail industry. “The boutiques that were on every main street — you see them closing and the same major luxury chains in every major city,” said the dealer Jeffrey Deitch, who compared the megagalleries to “a Louis Vuitton flagship.”

“People like events,” Deitch added, “so visiting a megagallery emporium is like an event.”

But the art market has yet to have an online revolution, like the retail industry. Marc Glimcher said that the analogy to retail was misplaced, and that there remained a demand for firsthand interactions and a sense of community, which galleries continued to provide.

“Retail is suffering because it’s replaceable in a virtual world,” Glimcher said. “Art galleries are not suffering; they’re growing because we offer an experience.”

In fact, 2016 to 2018 had fewer galleries opening and several closing, according to the latest Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report. And some galleries are clearly suffering, namely those that have been unable to sustain the steep costs of renting prime real estate and participating in multiple art fairs.

In 2017, for example, On Stellar Rays closed on the Lower East Side. Others that have shuttered include the Laurel Gitlen Gallery, Murray Guy and Kansas. The longtime Chelsea dealer Julie Saul announced last month that she had lost her lease and would deal privately. “I’ve seen attendance diminish a lot,” she told Artnet last year.

Marc Glimcher acknowledged that the art market demands survival of the fittest, but said it has been ever thus, and that the moment simply calls for a course adjustment — namely collaboration, so that galleries are not going it alone.

Galleries have banded together to drive street traffic through Art Walks, and Glimcher pointed to Pace’s recent announcement that it would team up with the Los Angeles-based dealer David Kordansky to represent the abstract artist Sam Gilliam. “Big galleries who are trying to fight that are going to suffer,” Glimcher said. “We’re collaborative because it’s the smartest thing to be.”

“The audience for art has grown radically,” he added. “The number of people who care about contemporary art versus 30 years ago is just crazy. It’ll evolve, and there will be many casualties for sure. And I’m not saying the mix of galleries won’t change; it will. But there is an audience.”

Pace — which represents the estates of Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko and Robert Ryman along with living artists like Chuck Close, Adam Pendleton and Adrian Ghenie — saw 38,000 people pour in for its Rothko dark palette show in 2016. “On some Saturdays we had 2,000,” Arne Glimcher said. “That really disseminates your artists’ work in the best way.”

Proffering user-friendly amenities to woo future buyers, Pace’s new building includes a dining room for catered events; an art book library where scholars can do research; and art storage where visitors can pull out racks of Pace’s inventory, modeled after Galería Luisa Strina in São Paulo, Brazil. Pace bought a food truck to park on its expansive terrace; the gallery also plans to present music four times a year.

“A quarter of this building is given over to experience,” Glimcher said. “It has to be a cultural destination. The job of an art gallery is not retail square footage. It hasn’t been for a long time.”

“I didn’t make up these evolutionary pressures — they exist,” he added. “And that pressure is pushing you to create an experience, create a place for people to come together.”

It’s also pushing galleries to become more accessible, Glimcher said, less elitist and intimidating to the general public. “Open it up,” he said. “Get rid of the velvet ropes.”

Glimcher showed the new space off proudly on a recent tour, during which two prominent members of the gallery’s artistic stable had also stopped by for a look: Claes Oldenburg, 90, and Chuck Close, 79. Glimcher pointed to the use of bespoke materials, like aluminum foam and lava rock, for the exterior, and sound-absorbing ceilings to avoid the echoey quality of most galleries.

“This is my Shed,” he quipped while standing in the gallery’s performance space, referring to the new multidiscipline arts center at Hudson Yards.

The “my” points up the sense of liberation Glimcher seems to feel in finally being the guy in charge. His office is bigger than that of his father, who over the past five years has been handing off more responsibility. This building project was Marc’s baby and earned Arne’s grudging blessing.

“He thinks it’s extravagant, but he is totally supportive,” Marc Glimcher said of his father. “It took 35 years for him to get supportive. It took me 35 years to be ready.”

“There were plenty of times when I was like, ‘It’s you or me,’ and he was like, ‘Bye-bye,’ and I’m really lucky that he did that,” he continued. “It’s really hard to take over. Every gallery is a personality cult. It’s hard to be the second-generation person. You didn’t do your rags to riches, but you have advantages too. You saw all the things that worked and all the things that didn’t work.”

Arne Glimcher said their current hierarchy “feels good.”

“He used to work for me,” he said. “Now I work for him.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/11/arts/design/pace-gallery-chelsea-expansion.html" id="f5a6c046-a829-3d1a-a928-3df0a7624b61">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Tagging along on a 1970s business trip to Paris with his father, the art dealer Arne Glimcher, Marc Glimcher was struck by the rough-hewed warmth of the woodblock flooring in André Chenue’s art storage warehouse. Now, as the 55-year-old president and chief executive of Pace Gallery, the younger Glimcher has been able to bring that memory to life in Pace’s new home in Chelsea, which opens next month.

Pace Gallery Doubles Down in Chelsea

But more than a year after he left amid allegations of sexual harassment and physical and verbal abuse, he continues to make his presence felt in ways both big and small — including by ordering last-minute cast changes in performances of his ballets and showing up backstage after a show.

Ashley Bouder, a star dancer, said Martins removed her at the eleventh hour from the opening-night cast of “The Sleeping Beauty” — a position she held for nearly a decade — as retribution for publicly calling for a new day at the company.

“It completely blindsided me,” Bouder said.

Contractually, living choreographers are given final approval in artistic decisions, including casting, and the right to go backstage after performances, though they typically yield to the wishes of management.

The abrupt change was jarring to Jonathan Stafford, the company’s interim leader, who said he had thought the casting was “locked in.” He said he was also upset when Martins defied his instructions to wait until the dancers had exited before going backstage after the first performance of “The Sleeping Beauty” last week.

“Unfortunately, he did not respect my wishes, even though I was crystal clear,” said Stafford, a ballet master and former principal dancer. “I was as surprised as anybody,” he added. “One dancer complained to me directly.”

These sensitivities stem from the circumstances surrounding Martins’ departure. He was the subject of multiple accusations of abuse, but an investigation commissioned by City Ballet’s board did not corroborate those allegations, which former dancers and others had made in interviews with The New York Times and The Washington Post. That outcome divided the company, with some dancers sad to see Martins go and others upset that he had not been held to account.

Martins retains artistic say over his ballets, including “The Sleeping Beauty,” now in performances, and “Romeo + Juliet,” which was performed last February. Both had been programmed before Martins retired under pressure in January 2018.

He changed the casting for “The Sleeping Beauty” just before the roles were officially announced — pulling Bouder from her usual position as Princess Aurora in the first cast and switching her with Sterling Hyltin in the third cast. He also swapped out several other dancers at the last minute. This has left some in the company bristling at Martins’ remaining levers of control.

Casting decisions are always fraught in the dance world, given the intense competition for plum roles. And every City Ballet part is technically up for grabs, though certain important roles unofficially belong to particular dancers, who have owned them year after year in the first casts.

Sara Mearns, for example, leads the first cast in “Swan Lake,” Megan Fairchild has “Coppélia,” Hyltin has “Romeo + Juliet,” and Bouder has “The Sleeping Beauty,” which she danced for the first time at age 20 opposite Damian Woetzel.

Bouder said she believed that Martins made the casting change to retaliate for her outspokenness about feminism and gender equality and to reward Hyltin, who had publicly defended him.

“I feel like he is punishing me, even though he is not my boss anymore,” Bouder said. “And by talking about it I can be punished even further. But that’s a risk I have to take.”

Stafford said that he would have been “happy to keep Ashley as first cast going forward” and that the current management team would rethink how casting is handled by living choreographers outside the company in the future. “It may need some adjusting to make sure the dancers’ interests are protected,” he said.

In Dance Magazine in April, Bouder called for the ballet world to embrace equal opportunity. She founded her own company, the Ashley Bouder Project, in 2014 to promote the work of women and other underrepresented voices in classical ballet.

When City Ballet was roiled again by accusations against three male dancers over vulgar texts about women, Bouder wrote last fall on Instagram: “Though this behavior was carried out by a few highly visible men alone, it was allowed to fester in our currently leaderless state. May we find a moral and fair individual to lead us out of this darkness and into future respect, integrity and success.”

Martins declined through his friend Earle Mack, a former City Ballet trustee, to be interviewed for this article. “He’s publicity shy,” Mack said. Hyltin did not respond to requests for comment.

Mack also contested assertions that Martins’ cast changes were punitive. “Balanchine recast his ballets all the time — I don’t think it’s anything unusual,” Mack said. “If Peter wants to do that, he wants to do that for the integrity of the ballet.”

Even as City Ballet wrestles over its future relationship with Martins, the Balanchine Trust — which licenses George Balanchine’s work — has given him a vote of confidence. The Trust recently approved a request by the Mariinsky Ballet (formerly the Kirov) in St. Petersburg, Russia, to have Martins oversee works by Balanchine, City Ballet’s founding choreographer, whom Martins succeeded as ballet master in chief.

“This will open the door to him being the gatekeeper of Balanchine all over the world,” said Mack, whose wife, Carol D. Mack, now serves on the board. “There is nobody better to oversee the Balanchine choreography than a man who’s worked hand in hand with Balanchine and for 35 years has preserved that legacy.”

When Yuri Fateev, the acting director of the Mariinsky, told the Balanchine Trust he wanted to engage Martins, “we all said, of course, go with it,” said Barbara Horgan, 86, the Trust’s longtime director. “Peter came to Balanchine in 1967, he is very familiar with the Balanchine repertory — you can’t take that away from him. He’s a wonderful ballet master, and I think it’s a wonderful idea. Why not? Let him spread the magic around a little bit.”

“I’m devoted to Peter,” she added. “What’s he supposed to be, in purgatory for the rest of his life? Give me a break.”

Not long after Martins’ departure, City Ballet was convulsed yet again by allegations that three principal men, including Amar Ramasar, one of the company’s biggest stars, had shared vulgar text messages. All three are gone from the company. (Ramasar is working again: This month he starred in Teatro dell’Opera di Roma’s production of “Carmen.” He also danced this week with Ballet Next at New York Live Arts.)

In the wake of the upheaval at City Ballet, Stafford said last fall that he was working to create “a more nurturing environment.” The company’s dancers spoke up, too, taking the stage at the fall gala to deliver a statement that said, in part: “We strongly believe that a culture of equal respect for all can exist in our industry. We will not put art before common decency, or allow talent to sway our moral compass.”

In an interview, Bouder emphasized that she continues to support City Ballet and remains “very much a part of” the company. “Dealing with somebody like Peter — who could be mean and could be a tyrant,” she said, “how do you change that reality when it’s been that way for so long?”

“I wish every woman could stand up and say, ‘That isn’t right,'” Bouder added. “Women, in particular, have been silenced for too long.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/arts/dance/peter-martins-city-ballet.html" id="21677577-804e-348c-a31e-455376567ed0">The New York Times</a>.

Peter Martins' Clout Lingers at City Ballet

NEW YORK — Peter Martins was supposed to have bowed out of New York City Ballet, the company he ran for 35 years.

“You used to be able to go 80, 90, 100 miles per hour — it was a straightaway,” Leibovitz recalled in a recent interview at her Manhattan studio, wearing black and her signature glasses. “You would just get on it and drive like a bat out of hell.”

When a national maximum limit of 55 mph was introduced in 1974, Leibovitz started racking up speeding tickets. And each time a police officer approached her car, she would photograph him with her Polaroid SX-70. “I took two,” she said, “one for them and one for me.”

Those Polaroids are among the more than 4,000 images from her early years that fill an exhibition of Leibovitz’s work opening in Los Angeles on Thursday at Hauser &amp; Wirth, the first show with that gallery for the photographer, who turns 70 in October.

“There is rarely somebody who has captured America like her in terms of her perception of the 20th century,” said Marc Payot, the gallery’s partner and vice president. “This show is really her beginning as a photographer and developing her language.”

The exhibition — “Annie Leibovitz. The Early Years, 1970-1983: Archive Project No. 1” — comes as photographers are increasingly promoted as artists by galleries.

David Zwirner, for example, in 2016 took on William Eggleston, and in 2018 began sharing representation of the Diane Arbus estate with Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco.

“Photography has historically been seen by many as the poor, little cousin of the art world,” said Joshua Holdeman, a New York-based adviser who specializes in 20th-century art and photography. “Most top galleries are now realizing that photography is a cultural product just like painting and sculpture, and their programs are reflecting this.”

Having seen the 2017 exhibition of Leibovitz’s early body of work at the LUMA Foundation in Arles, France, Payot said he felt strongly that he wanted to bring that show to the United States, where Leibovitz deserved to be contextualized “with the greats of the century — painters, sculptors.”

“She is perceived as a photographer, but not really in the context of art,” he added.

Leibovitz was actually formally trained at the San Francisco Art Institute where, she said, she studied “classic Robert Frank and Cartier-Bresson,” a style she applied to her photojournalism for Rolling Stone magazine and then Vanity Fair.

“I have always thought of my work as art,” she said. “I really thought I could take pictures in this landscape of magazines. Is it easy? No. Are there compromises? Absolutely. Are there five to 10 great photographs a year that I get out of it? Absolutely.”

Leibovitz said she was well aware that magazine photographers had historically not been respected as artists. “I look at what Avedon had to go through — he was made to feel somewhat ashamed of his magazine work,” she said, referring to Richard Avedon, who was often dismissed by art critics because he began his career as a fashion photographer. “You just have to wait till you’re dead — it’ll be fine,” Leibovitz said, adding, “I know who I am.”

The exhibition takes up 24 walls of the gallery’s sprawling space in a former flour mill in downtown Los Angeles that opened in 2016. The images encompass the first 14 years of Leibovitz’s career, when she was shooting performers like Rod Stewart, Loretta Lynn, Elton John and Aretha Franklin, and public officials like Hubert H. Humphrey, Henry Kissinger and Edward Kennedy. To move through the show is to be immersed in the pivotal era between 1970 and 1983.

“The idea was to be overwhelmed,” Leibovitz said, “not to sit there and look at each photograph, but to get this idea that it doesn’t stop. It goes on.”

In preparing for the show in Arles with Maja Hoffmann, LUMA Foundation’s founder, Leibovitz said she had spent more than two years looking at every single contact sheet from that period and doing a very liberal edit.

“I had no idea what I was opening up, this Pandora’s box,” Leibovitz said. “I wish I were Cartier-Bresson — the decisive moment. But it’s not like individual photographs stand out at you. It’s really like a small film. If you start to look for the picture, you get bogged down. So I started to just pull things out — anything I was interested in.”

The archive she created adds up to a chapter of her life, a moment in time when she was capturing major cultural moments like Apollo 17, NASA’s last manned mission to the moon; Rolling Stones tours; the 1972 presidential campaign with journalists Hunter Thompson and Timothy Crouse — which resulted in Crouse’s seminal book, “The Boys on The Bus”; and the liftoff of Richard Nixon’s helicopter from the White House lawn after he resigned.

Rolling Stone was holding about 10 pages for Thompson’s Nixon story, but Thompson had writer’s block, “so they took my pictures and they blew them up,” Leibovitz said. “It was the first time the magazine used photographs to tell a story.”

The exhibition, most of which is in black and white, offers a window into the development of a young photographer — hungry, driven and consumed.

“It is the story of a young girl photographer going out and learning how to become a photographer,” Leibovitz said. “I really did see it as a way to instruct young photographers. You’re meant to walk through it; you’re not meant to sit there and try to understand it.”

“When I was younger, I was afraid of being so obsessed and so crazed,” she continued. “I just want all these younger photographers to know: Eventually you do come out of it.”

She had not spent time with these images since her first book, “Photographs Annie Leibovitz 1970-1990,” whose cover features the now-famous shot of John Lennon curled naked into a clothed Yoko Ono. Revisiting that chapter of her life was, Leibovitz said, “very emotional.”

“I did not know what I was doing,” she said. “But I just let it roll. I still don’t know if it makes any sense.”

The images at Hauser &amp; Wirth were produced on an Epson printer and then push-pinned to the wall. None are for sale.

“They are cheap copies, so it’s not something you can keep,” Payot said. “It has a very raw feeling, and it is pinned on a board through the paper, so it has this studio feeling. It’s not the prestigious gelatin silver print, classical frame photography. It’s really very close to her creation at that time.”

Asked whether this collaboration might result in the gallery’s representation of Leibovitz, Payot said: “It is a first project. I hope there will be others.”

Leibovitz said presenting the show in Los Angeles seemed especially appropriate, given her beginnings — kind of like coming home. “It’s a California story, so it feels so good to have it in California,” she said. “This work was born there.”

'Annie Leibovitz. The Early Years, 1970-1983: Archive Project No. 1'

Hauser &amp; Wirth in Los Angeles; hauserwirth.com.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/arts/design/annie-leibovitz-exhibition-los-angeles.html" id="0281efe5-580c-390b-a179-ca2efab0cfd0">The New York Times</a>.

When Annie Leibovitz was starting out as a photographer in San Francisco, she would toss her camera equipment into the back of her 1963 Porsche Cabriolet convertible and tear off to Los Angeles on Highway 5.

Annie Leibovitz Revisits Her Early Years

The installation, “ParaPivot,” will be on view from April 16 through Oct. 27, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in New York.

“It’s a big honor for an artist,” Kwade said in a telephone interview. “New York still stands for one of the highest levels human beings can reach.”

Born in Poland in 1979, Kwade explores concepts of space, time, science and philosophy through sculpture, video and photography.

Max Hollein, the Met’s director, said in a statement that the rooftop setting “presents a compelling site for Kwade, whose works offer an expansive view of the history of art and science.”

Her sculpture for the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, “WeltenLinie (One in a Time),” featured rocks, a tree trunk and chairs surrounded by mirrors. (The New York Times described it as cinematic.) In Central Park in 2015, she created “Against the Run,” a 16-foot-tall version of the classic New York City street clock that simultaneously ran backward and forward, while still keeping time, a commission by the Public Art Fund.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/arts/design/met-roof-installation-alicja-kwade.html" id="9a470231-4d95-36fd-a2c7-05a9327fd510">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — The Met’s Roof Garden Commission is a rite of summer for New Yorkers and a world stage for artists lucky enough to be chosen. This year’s fortunate selection is Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade, who will be presenting two abstract sculptures dominated by large metal frames that she described as “a kind of planetary system.”

Kwade Selected for the Met's Roof Garden Installation

In a statement, Gouzer said that he would spend “the next few months concentrating on conservation and climate issues before coming back to the art world with a new project.”

The announcement marks the second major departure from the auction house; Francis Outred, Christie’s head of postwar and contemporary art in Europe, resigned last month. Gouzer’s exit leaves in charge his co-chairman, Alex Rotter, who came to Christie’s from Sotheby’s last year.

Guillaume Cerutti, Christie’s chief executive, said in the statement: “I wish Loic the very best with his future ventures.”

Over the last four years Gouzer championed separate curated sales at Christie’s, creating a series of stand-alone auctions whose art he often hand-picked to appeal to a younger generation of collectors. They included “If I Live…,” “Bound to Fail,” and “Looking Forward to the Past,” which achieved price highs for Pablo Picasso’s “Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’)” and Alberto Giacometti’s “Pointing Man.”

In 2017, he conceived and shepherded the sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” for $450.3 million in partnership with Christie’s Old Masters department. This fall, he oversaw the sale of David Hockney’s “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” which brought $90.3 million, an auction high for a living artist.

A vocal environmentalist, Gouzer in 2013 collaborated with the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation to present “The 11th Hour,” a charity auction that raised $38.8 million for wildlife conservation.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/arts/design/loic-gouzer-leaving-christies-auction-house.html" id="126234b6-363a-3962-a734-0b7a4aec393a">The New York Times</a>.

Rule-Breaking Rainmaker Leaving Christie's Auction House

Loic Gouzer, an irreverent maverick who led history-making sales of Leonardo da Vinci, Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Hockney, is stepping down as co-chairman of Christie’s Americas postwar and contemporary art at the end of this year, the auction house announced Monday.

But that is about to change. Phillips and Macklowe Properties are announcing that next fall, the auction house will move its New York headquarters practically next door — into 432 Park Ave., the gridded luxury building by Rafael Viñoly Architects, one of the tallest residential towers in the Western Hemisphere.

“We’re looking at increasing our capabilities to present state-of-the-art exhibition space for auctions,” said Edward Dolman, who became Phillips’ chief executive four years ago. “It’s a serious upgrade.”

At the new address — for which an architect has yet to be selected — Phillips will have 55,000 square feet of space, including the so-called Park Avenue Cube, a white-glass modernist structure on the northwest corner of 56th Street and Park Avenue. The auction house will also occupy a double-height, column-free underground concourse of more than 30,000 square feet with direct access from Park Avenue, and executive office space with an entrance on East 57th Street.

The announcement comes as Phillips — which is owned by the Russian luxury-goods company Mercury Group — has upped its game. The auction house’s watch business has captured 45 percent of the market since it was established less than three years ago. And Phillips recently opened an office in Hong Kong.

“I kind of built this space for Phillips, because I always thought their space was inadequate for an auction gallery,” said Harry Macklowe, the chairman of Macklowe Properties, who designed the building with Viñoly.

“I feel like this is a validation of their business plan,” Macklowe added, “and we can now have a third voice in a $70 billion industry which will have an impact in the market in New York.”

Asked if the auction house will include a more comfortable area for the press corps (currently squashed in off to the side), Dolman joked, “It’ll have Champagne on tap.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/arts/design/phillips-auction-house-moving.html" id="04f845d6-e2ca-3547-a3f0-83e37b3464af">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Yes, you often have to peer around a column to glimpse the art that is up for sale at Phillips, given the poor sight lines in the auction house salesroom at 450 Park Ave.

Phillips Auction House Is Moving to a New Space

In March, Feldman, director and president of the Minneapolis museum, will succeed Earl A. Powell III, who has been the National Gallery’s director since 1992. He announced in November 2017 that he would step down in 2019.

“The National Gallery of Art is the nation’s art museum,” Feldman said in a telephone interview, adding she was “excited to get started.”

In January the National Gallery canceled an exhibition of work by Chuck Close because of accusations of sexual misconduct against the artist. Feldman said, “I wasn’t privy to the conversations, but I trust their decision was in the best interest of the National Gallery and the artist.”

At the helm of the Minneapolis Institute since 2008, Feldman expanded the museum’s collection and is said to have doubled attendance there. She has also served as president of the Association of Art Museum Directors and as chairwoman of the American Alliance of Museums.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/arts/design/national-gallery-of-art-chooses-first-female-director.html" id="417b1ffb-5895-3886-a213-fa2bf778766f">The New York Times</a>.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington has selected Kaywin Feldman of the Minneapolis Institute of Art as its new director, the first woman to hold the job in the museum’s 77-year history.

National Gallery of Art Chooses First Female Director

Now Fowle will be planted here full-time as the new director of MoMA PS1, the museum in Long Island City, Queens, known for its inventive contemporary arts programming. The British-born Fowle will be only the third leader in the institution’s 43-year history. The museum announced her appointment Wednesday.

“It’s an institution that I’ve known for years and years and years,” Fowle said in a telephone interview. The curator, who was born in Kent, England, added that she first visited the museum’s former studio program when she was living in London in the ’90s.

“I love the second skin,” she added, saying that she was referring to the museum’s lingering aura of past exhibitions, “the legacy artists that have left.”

Fowle, who starts Sept. 3, succeeds Klaus Biesenbach, who departed in October to lead the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Biesenbach in 2010 took over from Alanna Heiss, who in 1976 founded the PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, which in 2000 merged with the Museum of Modern Art.

Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s director, said Fowle was a natural choice. “She’s an accomplished scholar, a deft curator and an outstanding leader,” he said, noting that she will be arriving from outside the organization, where Biesenbach had been nurtured by Heiss.

“She is the first director that comes at it with fresh eyes,” he said.

As to Fowle’s mandate at the museum, Lowry said it would be “to build on the substantial platform we have created together over the last 20 years, but to stay very much true to PS1’s artist-centric roots.”

For her part, Fowle said that she had “lots of ideas” but that she would first aim to get to know the staff and the neighborhood. “I don’t want to rush into it,” she said. “What’s most important and the way that I’ve always worked is through collaboration.”

“It’s an institution that isn’t broken, it doesn’t need fixing,” she continued, adding that given the museum’s experimental environment there is “so much that can be pushed and developed.”

The museum, housed in a 100-year-old Romanesque Revival school building, has over the years established an international reputation for mounting adventuresome exhibitions and championing local artists through its every-five-years roundup, “Greater New York.”

PS1 has also been acclaimed for shows like its landmark 2013 survey of Mike Kelley — at the time the largest exhibition of the artist’s work — and the recent Bruce Nauman retrospective, which Holland Cotter, The New York Times’ co-chief critic, called “a transfixing trip.”

The museum has also had its bumps along the way. Last year, Nikki Columbus, a curator, accused MoMA PS 1 of gender, pregnancy and caregiver discrimination, a claim she brought against the museum saying it had rescinded a job offer upon learning she had recently given birth. The lawsuit was settled in March.

Asked whether that case had given her pause, Fowle said, “I think it was important to listen to what was being said and try to understand things, but it has been settled now.”

“It’s really important to nurture women and especially young women in the workplace and to encourage them to believe they can have it all,” she added. “I’m somebody who really stands up for that.”

Fowle said she also believes strongly in the current trend among museums to make room on their walls — and on their staffs and boards of trustees — for people of color.

“Understanding the world from that perspective is long overdue,” she said. “It’s not the West and the rest. Those days are over.”

Although her responsibilities will mainly be administrative, Fowle said she is glad they also include curatorial possibilities. “In the job description, it still says that you can curate,” she said. “It’s something I’ve done from the very beginning.”

“I love working directly with artists,” she continued.

In an interview with ARTnews in 2015, Rashid Johnson, who was commissioned by Fowle to create a living, green sculpture for the Garage Museum, said she was “an artist’s curator. She’s open to dialogue and really wants to participate in the vision, rather than try to mold that vision.”

Fowle said she initially wanted to be an artist, but quickly realized she was better at organizing exhibitions, which led to a traineeship in curating and exhibitions through the Arts Council of England. “I decided the world was not going to be that sad if I stopped being an artist,” she said.

Fowle went on to serve as the inaugural international curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing from 2007 to 2008 and as chairwoman of the Master’s Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, which she co-founded in 2002.

As the executive director of ICI from 2009 to 2013, Fowle transformed the organization from a deficit-ridden operation into a global network for curators with a professional training program.

Having joined the Garage in 2013 as its first chief curator, Fowle played a key role in the institution’s transformation from art center to internationally recognized museum. She worked closely with Rem Koolhaas and OMA to oversee its first building in 2015, the same year she became an American citizen. In 2017, Fowle established the Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art.

She has written three books — “Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo” (2016); “Exhibit Russia: The New International Decade 1986-1996” (2016); and “Rashid Johnson: Within Our Gates” (2016), which she co-authored.

On Wednesday, when Fowle’s appointment is announced, she will also turn 48. “It’s going,” she said, “to be quite a birthday.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/arts/design/kate-fowle-moma-ps1-director.html" id="199830fd-c25d-30b2-a7ba-f882a5630961">The New York Times</a>.

MoMA PS1 looks to Moscow to hire new director

NEW YORK — For the last six years, Kate Fowle has divided her time between Moscow, where she was until recently the chief curator at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, and New York City, where she has been director-at-large at Independent Curators International (ICI).

<h1>NEW YORK — Rem Koolhaas’ architecture firm OMA has become known for repurposing buildings and championing preservation combined with innovation, from the Fondazione Prada in Milan to the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. And on setting out to design the New Museum’s expansion in an adjacent property — a former restaurant supply company on the Bowery — the firm initially planned to work within the existing structure.</h1>

But the architects and the museum soon came to realize that this route would cost more and compromise the galleries. Even if the new building’s floors were removed to gain more height, its facade was all that could be saved. So OMA instead started from scratch: On Thursday it will reveal its proposal for a geometric new structure that aims to seamlessly integrate the current New Museum, designed by the Japanese firm Sanaa, yet have its own distinct identity.

“We wanted it to be complementary but not competitive,” Koolhaas said in a telephone interview, “to be independently appealing but also make sure the coexistence of these two buildings gives something fresh.”

The new structure, which will add 60,000 square feet of space, reflects how much New York’s small, scrappy New Museum has changed since it opened on the Bowery in 2007, increasing its annual attendance to more than 400,000 from 60,000 and staff to 150 from 30.

Robin Pogrebin

Articles written by the author