Ted Loos

In the old days, the stories that museums picked to tell weren’t questioned too much. Lately doors have been opened to different kinds of stories, changing our perceptions of the types of material that fit into the citadel of high culture. When done right, it makes the institutions feel roomier than ever, not cramped.

“Soft Power,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through mid-February, epitomizes its era in that it looks self-consciously at the ways in which cultural influence is exerted, with special attention to previously hidden voices.

“The title is a twist on the Reagan-era phrase,” said Eungie Joo, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, who conceived the show.

In the late 1980s, the phrase, coined by Joseph S. Nye Jr., the political scientist, was employed in a foreign policy context. It referred to the ability of the United States to influence countries’ behavior without coercion or force, through cultural institutions, universities, churches, media or other civic means.

For Joo, it helped her organize her thoughts about “a generation of artists who are concerned with their role in society as citizens and social actors.”

The exhibition features 20 artists, some of whom have done special commissions for it, and it has an international flavor — perhaps ironically, given the title’s original all-American slant. Many of the participants were born outside of the United States or work in other countries.

The roster includes some contributors like American photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier, who have had substantial museum exposure, and others like Turkish artist Cevdet Erek who may be new to viewers.

The title and concept were especially appealing to artist Tavares Strachan, who grew up in Nassau in the Bahamas and now lives and works mostly in New York.

“‘Soft power’ is a contradiction in terms,” Strachan said over the summer, on a brief break from creating new work in his large Chelsea studio. “But yin and yang is a fundamental part of making anything compelling.”

Strachan, 39, gained attention when he represented the Bahamas in the 2013 Venice Biennale, and he has three artworks in the San Francisco show: “Henrietta” (2014), “The Encyclopedia of Invisibility” (2018) and “Six Thousand Years” (2018).

He said that “Encyclopedia” was the foundation of much of his art making lately. The project, which took several years to complete, is a lavish tome with gilt-edged pages that mixes entries on previously untold histories, written by Strachan and his collaborators, with standard information from other sources.

One of the new entries, on the Jamaican DJ known as Sister Nancy, reads in part, “Lives in New Jersey and plans to go back into her music career full time after working as an accountant.”

“We’re revealing a layer of something that’s been obscure or invisible,” Strachan said. “It’s not meant to replace Britannica. It’s an alternative document.”

Similarly, “Henrietta” takes as its subject Henrietta Lacks, the African American woman whose cells were used for pioneering medical research, but without her consent. It is a Pyrex sculpture in a vat of clear mineral oil.

“When light passes through it, the form disappears,” Strachan said.

He said that after growing up in the Bahamas, he moved away, and only upon going back to visit much later was he able to see some of the power dynamics at play there.

“A lot of the politics are hidden,” Strachan said. “The Bahamas had a peaceful transition in the post-colonial era, but the attitude of the powerful was to just control things from an economic standpoint.”

He added: “I’ve lived it, but it was hard to see at first. So I’ve developed a fascination with things that aren’t on the surface.”

He said he appreciated that in organizing the show, Joo knew exactly what she wanted.

“The job of the curator and the artist is to push each other, and she has a strong vision,” he added.

For her contribution to the show, the New York-based artist Xaviera Simmons is showing an assemblage of about 150 color-blocked panels with text.

One of the panels reads: “Angry white mobs intentionally destroyed whole Negro towns.”

The work’s palette is inspired by that of the African American artist Jacob Lawrence’s well-known Great Migration series.

“I grew up in New York going to MoMA and seeing that series as a kid,” Simmons said of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “It’s part of my language as an artist.”

New Yorkers had a chance to see her work recently, when her piece “Convene” was installed at Hunters Point South Park in Long Island City over the summer. It was composed of overturned aluminum canoes painted to evoke various national flags.

Simmons said that the San Francisco show’s theme resonated for her: “Our lives are dictated by soft power — traditional media, social media are part of how we build democracy.”

Artist Tanya Lukin Linklater, who grew up in Alaska and now lives and works in North Bay, Ontario, has two works in the exhibition, including a 2017 video called “The Treaty Is in the Body.”

“Treaty” deals with “the transmission of sacred knowledge” among indigenous people, Linklater said. It was filmed in her living room, where an Omaskeko Cree knowledge keeper talks to a group of women, and at a nearby school, where a Maliseet dancer performed.

The video is silent. “They retain a kind of opacity,” she said of the interactions. “The audience may not have a context for the knowledge.”

The thrust of the piece, she said, is that “learning continues, despite centuries of colonial violence.”

Her other work in “Soft Power,” a commission, was a collaboration with the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley, California. For “An Amplification Through Many Minds,” she filmed dancers in an off-site storage area of the museum. The action centers on artifacts from Kodiak Island, Alaska, where Linklater was raised.

“My island has a difficult and violent history,” she said, adding that the performance was a “gesture toward repatriation.”

In another era, that may have not been embraced by a museum like the Hearst, but Linklater said the institution had been receptive and welcoming.

She did not shrink from asking the hard questions, or from working for months on the two pieces.

Joo said that in her experience as a curator, that was a reassuring constant: “The surprise is always how far artists are willing to go.”

This article originally appeared in

In San Francisco, Wielding Influence (Gently) Through Art

Museums are culturally influential, but the space inside them is tight. Not everything fits, so choices must be made.

Take, for example, the upcoming Nov. 13 evening sale of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s New York.

Francis Bacon’s “Study for Self Portrait” (1979) will be offered with an estimate of $8 million to $12 million right alongside Andy Warhol’s “Muhammad Ali” (1977), estimated at $4 million to $6 million, and Ed Ruscha’s “Hurting the Word Radio #2” (1964), with an eye-popping estimate of $30 million.

But there is also a new member of the club, an artist who has never been included in that evening sale company before: Charles White’s “Banner for Willie J” (1976) will be offered, too, with an estimate of $1 million to $1.5 million.

Though painted more than 40 years ago, the picture has resonance today on a few levels — social, artistic and otherwise. White, who died in 1979 at 61 and is now recognized widely for his draftsmanship and as an African American artist who did not get his due during his lifetime, painted it as an ode to his cousin, an innocent bystander who was shot and killed during an armed robbery.

“It was a love letter,” said White’s son, C. Ian White, the director and chief executive of the Charles White Archives.

“Banner for Willie J” is a 1970s riff on portraits of old: Willie is clad in sunglasses and squatting casually, but against a more formal decorative background that includes a golden circle, giving him a saintly cast. A rose is depicted at the top of the painting, which may have symbolized innocence, and at the bottom, the word “BANG” in block letters.

The fact that the picture is in the sale in the first place says a lot about how far White’s reputation has come.

It got a serious boost from the largest-ever retrospective of his work, which began at the Art Institute of Chicago last year and then traveled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and finished its run over the summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

White’s previous auction record was just over $500,000 for a charcoal drawing, “O Freedom” (1956), made in 2018 at Swann Auction Galleries in a sale dedicated to African-American art.

“The retrospective really helped put him on the map,” said Alexis Klein, a senior specialist in Christie’s postwar and contemporary department.

“It’s an important moment for him,” Klein said of his inclusion in the evening sale. “This elevates his work in terms of the market. Some of his works on paper have come up over the years, but there hasn’t been a painting of this quality at auction.”

She added, “He deserves to be shown alongside the best artists of the 20th century.”

Of course, White’s work has significance that transcends the marketplace.

Born and raised in Chicago, White was inspired at a young age by illustrators like N.C. Wyeth. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a year on scholarship, and was then hired by the Works Progress Administration during the Depression, as were many artists at the time. He lived in different cities as an adult before landing in Los Angeles later in life, where he taught at the Otis College of Art and Design. One of his students was Kerry James Marshall, now an acclaimed painter who happens to hold an auction record himself, for the most expensive work by a living African-American artist, just over $21 million for “Past Times” (1997).

Though best known for his drawings, White steadily worked on canvasses, too, and kept a separate studio for painting.

“‘Willie J.’ was one of the last paintings that he completed,” said Sarah Kelly Oehler, a curator and co-organizer of “Charles White: A Retrospective” last year at the Art Institute of Chicago.

“It’s a commemorative work, and stylistically it relates to other ’70s paintings like ‘Homage to Sterling Brown,’” Oehler said, referring to White’s 1972 work.

Style aside, the underlying themes resonate, she said.

“It’s very relevant to society today,” Oehler said. “White shows us the challenges we face in terms of social justice and racial equality. His work has a lot to say.”

Given that it honors a victim of gun violence who was related to the artist, she added, “I don’t think anyone can look at this and not be affected.”

“I remember this picture being painted as a kid,” recalled C. Ian White, who is an artist himself. “It’s my favorite painting of his. I think it was the aviators,” he said, referring to the sunglasses worn by the figure in the painting. “It was ’70s cool. My father had aviators, too — my dad was a hip guy.”

Asked whether it made him sad as a child, White said, “I sensed seriousness, not sadness.”

In his role running the Charles White Archive, he has assisted and lent to shows like the retrospective as well as “Charles White: Monumental Practice” at David Zwirner Gallery earlier this year.

“The retrospective really reintroduced him to people,” White said, and he made the point that his father was only 61 when he died.

“The problem for all African American artists is longevity,” White said, noting that a long life span allows someone to be fully appreciated. “You have to make it through a certain time frame. He missed the ’80s and multiculturalism.”

He added, “James Baldwin said if you live long enough, they’ll build a sculpture of you.”

A 40-year-old Painting on Gun Violence Takes on New Meaning

NEW YORK — The marquee evening sales at the big auction houses are exclusive clubs of a sort, filled with works by artists who have already proven their market clout.

The Grand Palais in Paris, however, is a building of a different order. Built for the Exposition Universelle in 1900, the structure has a glass roof and the largest nave in Europe, which have helped to make it an architectural and civic icon. It epitomizes beaux-arts style.

It’s one of the premier selling points — other than Paris itself in the fall, that is — for the International Contemporary Art Fair, or FIAC, taking place there Thursday through Sunday for its 46th edition.

“We’re the largest user of the Grand Palais,” said Jennifer Flay, the fair’s director. “We’ve annexed every nook and cranny we could.

“I’d love to have more galleries, and that will be the case,” she added, referring to the extensive renovation the Grand Palais will undergo, starting after next year’s edition of FIAC.

For at least two years, the fair will move to a temporary venue on the Champ-de-Mars, by the Eiffel Tower. It is scheduled to move back to the Grand Palais in 2024, if the venue is ready. But even in its present form, FIAC is finding room for 199 galleries from 29 countries.

“There’s more geographic diversity this year,” Flay said. “We have our first gallery from Iran, and the first one from sub-Saharan Africa, the Ivory Coast.”

She added: “This is significant for FIAC. It says we are open to the world, as one has to be today.”

The engine of the fair is still European and American galleries; about a quarter are from France.

Newcomers include New York’s Lévy Gorvy, which Flay called “an important new arrival.” The gallery will focus on pop art from the 1960s with works by Andy Warhol, Martial Raysse and Gerald Laing.

Trends in the fair’s displays wax and wane, although Flay has noticed one that has held strong.

“Over the years, the presence of modern art has increased,” Flay said, although, she noted, “it’s getting harder for galleries to find important works.”

The booth of Galerie Gmurzynska, for example, will be devoted to Chilean painter Roberto Matta (1911-2002), with works he completed from 1947 to 1958.

“It’s important for us to show these kind of works, given the importance of Paris in the history of modern art,” Flay said.

Dealers showing at fairs often try to capitalize on recent, concurrent or upcoming museum presentations of artists.

The New York gallery Metro Pictures, for example, will show a work by Cindy Sherman, “Untitled #602” (2019). It is part of a new photographic series by Sherman in which she portrays male characters, and it was shown in a National Portrait Gallery retrospective in London that ended in September.

One beloved figure of modern design, architect Charlotte Perriand (1903-99), is having the largest-ever exhibition of her work across town at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

Galerie Patrick Seguin of Paris is devoting its booth in the design sector of the fair — a small one with just five dealers — to Perriand, including the furniture pieces Banquette Tokyo and Etagère Asymetrique.

“I’ve watched the market for her designs rise steadily over time, growing in conjunction with the contemporary art market,” Seguin wrote in an email.

Known as a specialist in the work of architect Jean Prouvé, a significant collaborator of Perriand’s, Seguin is also erecting a Prouvé house, “Maison Démontable (1944),” on the Place de la Concorde as part of FIAC’s outdoor program, Hors les Murs.

The distinctly French cast of FIAC is furthered by the presence of the gallery Ceysson &amp; Bénétière, with two exhibition spaces in France and one each in Luxembourg and New York.

Its booth in the main part of the fair will feature about 20 pieces that emphasize the achievements of conceptual artists of the 1960s and ’70s, including Noël Dolla’s “Croix” (1973).

“It was a revolutionary time,” said Loïc Garrier, director and fair manager of Ceysson &amp; Bénétière. “The artists destroyed the old traditions of painting.”

He added that the era is a reference point for today’s contemporary artists.

“Their preoccupations are still alive,” Garrier said. “Works from 50 or 60 years ago feel relevant.”

Dealers need not have headquarters in French-speaking countries to further the Gallic vibe. Lisson Gallery — with two spaces each in London and New York, and one in Shanghai — will focus its booth on French artists Laure Prouvost and Bernard Piffaretti.

It will also have Paris-themed pieces like Carmen Herrera’s 1953 “Links in a Chain.” The artist, based in New York and still working at 104, painted it when she lived in Paris.

“FIAC has its own atmosphere,” said Louise Hayward, a senior director at Lisson. “It’s totally unlike other fairs, and part of it comes from being in that extraordinary building.”

Hayward added: “Parisian culture just leans toward visiting and enjoying. And people have a very specific way of talking about art.”

The Hors les Murs program provides conversation fodder for anyone strolling around Paris, regardless of whether they pay 38 euros (about $42) to enter the Grand Palais for the fair itself.

In the Jardin des Tuileries, pieces by Lois Weinberger, Katinka Bock and Jenny Holzer will be installed among some two dozen others.

Dolla’s installation, “Nymphéas Post Déluge II,” is meant to evoke Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies” in the adjacent Musée de l’Orangerie: hundreds of multicolored umbrellas floating and bobbing in a large pool.

The marquee outdoor installation this year, in the upscale Place Vendôme, is by 90-year-old artist Yayoi Kusama, who has had a surge in popularity over the past decade.

People flock to her “Infinity Rooms” wherever they are installed, including at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington; its 2017 retrospective of Kusama’s work set attendance records.

The new piece, “Life of the Pumpkin Recites, All About the Biggest Love for the People” (2019), is a giant inflatable pumpkin, in her signature polka dots. The installation is partly a collaboration with her galleries — Victoria Miro, David Zwirner and Ota Fine Arts.

“The Place Vendôme is an historic site, and the sculpture there is always the most important outdoor project,” said Glenn Scott Wright, co-director of Victoria Miro.

The gallery will also show Kusama’s “Flowers That Speak All About My Heart Given to the Sky” (2019), a large painted bronze flower sculpture, in its FIAC booth.

Given the way Kusama’s work attracts visitors, the galleries devote significant time to fielding requests from around the world.

“We get approached almost every day to do something with her — a public sculpture, a fashion project,” Wright said. “It’s endless. But she turns down 99 percent of them. It’s a big deal that she said yes to this.”

Art fairs are by nature cacophonous assemblages that can induce sensory overload, so a single Place Vendôme project, especially something as appealing as a giant inflatable pumpkin, can help center a visitor’s experience.

Flay said that “Life of the Pumpkin” was part of a “special moment for Paris.”

“She has worked in the spirit of peace and love, and that’s wonderful,” Flay added. “It’s a big, throbbing heart from Japan.”

A Fair With a French Accent, Inside and Out

The physical environments of art fairs tend to be utilitarian convention halls, although there are some — like the Frieze fairs in London, New York and Los Angeles, with their light-filled, architect-designed tents — that try to boost the appeal of the surroundings.

Now representing more than 60 artists and estates, David Zwirner Gallery has grown significantly since its 1993 debut in New York City, where Zwirner, who attended NYU, has been based ever since.

This month, timed to the yearly FIAC art fair, he opens his first Paris gallery, in a historic Marais district space.

Zwirner has three galleries in New York — a fourth, in Chelsea and designed by architect Renzo Piano, is slated to open in two years — and one each in London and Hong Kong.

But Zwirner, 54, is ambivalent about being described as a mega-dealer, especially when he is lumped in with other large and influential galleries.

Zwirner held forth about the perils of Brexit, the charms of Paris and how to get an artist to sign on to a gallery, in an interview that has been edited and condensed.

Q: So Paris is next for you — but you don’t have as many branches as some.

A: We’re not all over the place. That’s going to be it for a while. We get thrown together with some other galleries, and it bothers me. I feel we’ve been extremely focused, not opportunistic, and very logical. I like to be judged on my own merits. There are smaller galleries we have more affinity with: Galerie Buchholz, Sadie Coles, Eva Presenhuber. I have more in common with them.

Q: So why Paris?

A: The motor of what a gallery does is to enable artists. Giving the artists a space to work and show in Paris, no one will argue with me or question that. Paris is one of the most beautiful cities in the world and it’s a cultural hub. I believe in galleries being in cities that are densely populated, have a rich cultural fabric and have a big audience for the visual arts.

Q: And the space used to be the dealer Yvon Lambert’s?

A: Yes, I love the space, it has a history of great artists. In the ’90s, I was going to Paris on a regular basis, and it was one of the galleries you went to see. I remember a Barbara Kruger show, and an On Kawara show. The light is great, coming from a central skylight.

Q: And why this timing?

A: People have been asking me, “Are you closing the London gallery?” Of course not. I love the London gallery. But with Brexit, opening a second gallery in Europe felt like a much more logical move. I’m European, and I love Europe. Brexit has been weighing on me.

Q: So you’re not a fan, it sounds like.

A: What it will do to the business, we don’t know. But Brexit is madness. The fact that as of October, London will not be in Europe, that bothers me. It’s turning the clock backward, not forward. I like to think we’re moving to better times, not worse times.

Q: Does your being German impact that feeling?

A: Yes. The EU is one of the most important peace projects the world has ever known. It’s especially bad for a German of my generation, given our complicated history. I was born in ’64. Our generation has been coming to terms with what previous ones did. It felt like we were moving in the right direction.

Q: Brexit is but one global disruption these days.

A: We have a gallery in Hong Kong, and there are problems there, too. Though it’s too early to tell how it will play out. There are things that are problematic all over, but the art world has been somewhat shielded from them.

Q: You’re doing FIAC again. Do you feel there are too many fairs?

A: I suppose it’s a love-to-hate topic, but fairs are important. It’s impossible to imagine the London art scene without Frieze, or Paris without FIAC. And FIAC is a great example, because it’s actually exciting to show at the Grand Palais — it’s one of the world’s great spaces. But I think there will be consolidation of art fairs in the next few years.

Q: Do you strategize about how you use fairs?

A: The key is to really think about what you’re showing there. For Frieze New York, it’s always two-person shows. We’re trying a similar focus in Paris for FIAC this year, but with three artists: Sherrie Levine, Wolfgang Tillmans and Lucas Arruda. And in the new gallery space in Paris, we have Raymond Pettibon. Raymond has a long history in Paris, and some of his most dedicated collectors are there.

Q: What do artists really want from their dealer?

A: Nobody wants a big, big gallery. Artists want the reach and strength and power that a gallery can bring, but on a day-to-day basis they want intimacy, and they don’t want change all the time. They want kinship, and contact. So that’s a juggle: How do you keep a gallery small at heart, but with reach?

Q: Does it take a lot of convincing to sign someone new?

A: You always have to make yourself available to great talent; it’s part of being a gallery. They want to know you’re there not just to be opportunistic. They are used to talking to people whose hearts aren’t in it — all artists know right away when someone is like that. I guarantee it. Certainly great artists know. They pay much more attention than we think.

A good art dealer finds a way to combine earnestness with polished savvy, and the success of German-born gallerist David Zwirner demonstrates the potency of such a mixture.

David Zwirner Expands His Reach to Paris

If you ask decorators, architects and other aesthetes to name their favorite modernist, French designer Charlotte Perriand comes up more often than not.

Perriand lived from 1903 to 1999, nearly spanning the 20th century, and she made the most of her decades, designing buildings, furniture, rooms and objects at an impressive clip. She found a way to match the strict modernist demand for utility and practicality with the elusive quality known as good taste.

Many of her works remain influential reference points today: her colorful Nuage cabinet (imagine a 3D version of a Mondrian painting); the sleek chaise longue she designed with the cousins Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (better known as Le Corbusier) and Pierre Jeanneret, which was covered in a chic pony skin; her later collaborations with architect Jean Prouvé; and the lodgings she created in the 1960s and ’70s for the Les Arcs ski resort in Savoie, France.

Hers was a big career, and now she is getting an exhibition to match her stature, with 400 works by Perriand and her circle on view at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris from Oct. 2 to Feb. 24.

“Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World,” the largest exhibition of her work to date, required four years and five curators to organize. It features not only 200 of her own pieces (some of them collaborations) but also works by Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso and other artists, in recognition of her many forays across the art-design divide. Léger, a friend and frequent breakfast companion, is represented by more than 50 contributions alone.

The curatorial committee was made up of the designer’s daughter, Pernette Perriand, an architect herself; Perriand’s husband, Jacques Barsac, a writer who is the author of his mother-in-law’s catalog raisonné; Sébastien Cherruet, the head of institutional relations at the luxury conglomerate LVMH; and art historians Gladys Fabre and Sébastien Gokalp.

The offerings include not only Charlotte Perriand’s greatest hits — seating and cabinetry from the 1920s to the 1950s — but also black-and-white photographs and an odd surrealist sculpture in stone and wood from 1969 that was a nonfunctional departure for her.

The exhibition will also recreate nine of her most renowned rooms, including the one that really launched her career in 1929, the Salon d’Automne, named for the annual exhibition where it appeared. It featured chrome-tube furniture in an open plan that was strikingly futuristic at the time.

This room hammers home the theme that Perriand’s reputation shouldn’t rest solely on her furniture, the most visible part of her legacy.

“She designed spaces, not just the objects in them,” Cherruet said.

Perriand has legions of fans, but for the Vuitton Foundation, one of them matters above all: Bernard Arnault, the chairman, chief executive and founder of the museum, and among the richest people in the world.

It is no surprise that in the five years since the Vuitton Foundation opened in a Frank Gehry-designed building in the Bois de Boulogne, there has been much overlap between exhibitions there and Arnault’s personal collection, as with last year’s blockbuster show on Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“The museum reflects his taste,” said Jean-Paul Claverie, a senior adviser to Arnault on the museum and cultural matters. “He was an early collector of Perriand, as he was of Basquiat.”

In an email interview, Arnault said that he began collecting Perriand’s furniture in the 1980s, beginning with a mahogany buffet from 1960. “I was immediately struck by its precision, authenticity and simplicity, as well as its sheer elegance,” he said.

That was just a gateway drug of sorts, leading him next to bookshelves and ultimately to a favorite work.

“The piece I use most often is a free-form table that I use as a desk,” Arnault said. “There’s a radical symmetry in its silhouette, a softness to the wood that has a natural and sophisticated look.” The patina, he added, gets “more beautiful each day.”

The foundation shows the work of many living artists, but Perriand is relevant to its mission, Claverie said.

“We’re devoted to the contemporary, but we don’t want to forget the past, which for us is the modern art roots of what’s being made now,” he said.

Perriand was a Parisian native but she traveled outside France often, sometimes for years at a time. “I was impressed by how she had a dialogue with other cultures in Vietnam, Brazil, Mexico and Japan,” Claverie said.

The exhibition is divided into 11 main sections, one of which details Perriand’s long association with architects in Japan.

According to Barsac’s “Charlotte Perriand: Complete Works,” the fourth volume of which will be published in English this fall, she first traveled to Japan in 1940 at the invitation of the government to advise its leaders on industrial art. She stayed until 1942.

Perriand returned several times in the 1950s, at one point redesigning the Air France offices in Tokyo and Osaka. She was particularly inspired by the use of bamboo in Japanese crafts. Junzo Sakakura, an architect with whom she collaborated on the interior of the Japanese ambassador’s home in Paris, said that of all the Western architects who worked in Japan, she probably had the most influence on design there.

Also included in the Vuitton show is a late-career project, the Maison de Thé, created in 1993 for the garden of the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and highlighting Japanese designers.

That topic is but one of the side roads the exhibition travels. Putting together such a large show had its challenges, said Cherruet, especially the nine room recreations. One of them, Perriand’s Maison du Jeune Homme of 1935 incorporated a 12-foot-long Léger work, “La salle de culture physique — Le sport,” which was painted the same year.

The curators wanted it for the show, so they hunted for it.

“We spent hours trying to find the Léger,” Cherruet said. “No one knew where it was.”

The work was in the hands of an American collector who hadn’t advertised his possession of it “because he didn’t want museums asking him to lend it,” Cherruet said. The collector changed his mind upon learning that the Léger was not for a normal show but “for a recreation of a Perriand space,” he added.

The designer has no greater champion than Pernette Perriand, who worked with her mother for years. Maintaining an archive and supporting shows like the Vuitton exhibition, Perriand said in an email interview, is “an enormous undertaking.” She added that her mother’s pervasive influence remains forceful, in good ways and bad.

“She continues to inspire everyone in the design world,” Perriand said. “It’s funny, because some time ago nobody used tapered feet. Charlotte created them back in the day, and you see that this is inspiring contemporary designers.”

What is “more annoying,” she added, was seeing outright copies of her work.

Then again, anything that demonstrates the lasting influence of her mother could be taken as a positive.

“When you stop talking about people,” Perriand said, “they disappear.”

Charlotte Perriand's Work Transformed Rooms. Now It Fills a Museum

(Space Innovator)

But everything that goes on view is vetted to ensure that it is authentic, and that process has always been a point of pride for the fair.

Now, measures are being taken to make the vetting even stronger and more independent as about 275 dealers show their wares from Saturday to March 24 at the Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Center. The policy also applies to TEFAF’s other fairs, which take place in New York twice a year.

In an increasingly litigious world, fair organizers thought that more safeguards were needed, even though the decision didn’t exactly thrill the galleries at first.

Going forward, vetting committees will no longer have dealers and auction house employees as voting members. Independent experts only, with an emphasis on museum curators and academics, will vote.

Wim Pijbes, former general director at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, was recently appointed global chairman of vetting, a new role created as part of the policy changes.

“We changed the vetting committees this year, and it created a bit of an uproar,” said Nanne Dekking, the chairman of TEFAF’s board of trustees since last year, who pushed for the policy change.

“We have done everything we could to avoid conflicts,” he said.

A former Sotheby’s executive, Dekking, who is Dutch but is based in New York, founded Artory, an art price database that tracks the provenance of objects. He described himself as “pro-transparency” and noted that his own experience in the marketplace influenced his views on vetting.

“I’m thinking about the consumer’s perspective,” Dekking said of the art world’s often-opaque practices. “The market gives a lot of information to people who are already buying, but not to new clients. A lot of people don’t trust it because they think it’s for insiders.”

To illustrate the point, he employed an analogy from his own life: the recent sale of a 2004 Hyundai Santa Fe that he kept at his house in Tuscany.

“I sold it for 900 euros, and the guy who bought it got a booklet with everything about it, including all the service reports,” Dekking said of the documentation required by Italy’s used-car laws.

He added, “Someday, I hope that the art market has a standardized condition report.”

In the meantime, TEFAF has vetters. About 180 experts from around the world will serve in that capacity this year on several committees, and the process takes place four or five days before the fair.

It usually lasts a day and a half, and the fair provides food and lodging for the visiting experts while they poke and prod everything that goes on view.

One of the sculpture committee members is Robert van Langh, the head of conservation and restoration at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

He knows how to use highly technical equipment: X-radiography, portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, ultraviolet photography and high-resolution microscopy, and all of it is available to vetters.

He noted that aesthetic and stylistic issues were also taken into consideration, not just science.

If the gathering of experts brings to mind a group of Sherlock Holmes-like sleuths, van Langh confirmed that “some of us do wear the tweed vest you imagine.”

But he said that although it was highly enjoyable to be among the fair’s treasures — like walking through a “candy shop,” in his words — he took the responsibility seriously.

“I work at a museum, and I have absolutely no interest in being in doubt about a work of art,” said van Langh, who also advocated for the recent rule change. “I’m not going to put my name on something I don’t believe in.”

He added: “Doubt? Take it out.”

And things do get rejected. As an example, van Langh cited a painting purported to be from the 17th century, offered at a previous fair. Upon examination, its white pigment was found to have zinc in it, rather than the lead that was standard at the time. It got bounced.

“And the dealer thanked us,” van Langh said. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, what did you do to me?’ They don’t want to sell something that later proves to be wrong.”

Dekking confirmed that dealers were won over by the concept. “It’s counterintuitive at first, but they get it once you explain,” he said. “And it’s not personal.”

The change is an attempt to bolster a longtime strength of the fair, which began in 1988.

“They’ve always had a robust vetting process,” said Kaywin Feldman, the new director of the National Gallery of Art and a former director of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

“We acquired works there every year,” Feldman added, noting than some of her Minneapolis curators had served as vetters. “I know from their work how vigorous it is.”

Institutional buyers like Feldman are important to art fairs like Tefaf, but so are private collectors like Marina Kellen French, a trustee of TEFAF as well a trustee emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; she also endowed a decorative arts curatorship at the Met.

The European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht, the Netherlands, is a cornucopia like those sometimes depicted in the old master paintings on view, spilling over with riches. A sparkling display of jewelry here, a pale ancient Greek statue over there, not far from a contemporary work in glowing neon.

Ted Loos

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