Blast from the Past

Che Guevara is at once celebrated and defaced in José Toirac’s Untitled, 2001–7, made with the artist’s son, Mario Jorge Toirac Marrero. COURTESY THE ARTIST

Artists around the globe are turning Socialist Realism on its head, layering the once-potent tool of propaganda with irony and nostalgia
by Pernilla Holmes

At first glance, Shi Xinning’s painting Yalta No. 2 (2006) appears to be a simple, almost photorealistic rendering of a famous photograph taken during the World War II conference, showing Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin seated in front of their retinues. The colors in the painting match the pleasingly faded hues we associate with vintage prints, lending the work an air of authenticity. But Chairman Mao is sitting between Roosevelt and Churchill. He wasn’t there, was he?

He wasn’t. Nor did he ride in the horse-drawn carriage with Britain’s Queen Mother, as he does in another painting. And he certainly didn’t sit on the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era. But Shi’s precisely rendered paintings would have us believe otherwise. Employing the authoritative tone and heroic mood that are at the heart of Mao’s strictly prescribed Socialist Realist style of art, Shi rewrites history, ridding the West of its Eurocentrism and China of its isolationism.

Shi is one of many painters from Communist and formerly Communist countries who are revisiting Socialist Realism. Although the term has been used to describe a range of styles, from finely textured Beaux-Arts-style paintings to pared-down graphic figuration, the original practitioners of the genre consistently sought to glorify the Communist Party—dictators such as Stalin or Mao were always promoted as strong and intrepid leaders, and workers and peasants were portrayed as happy and healthy. Today’s artists are not reviving the style so much as deftly turning it on its head, layering the once-potent tool of propaganda with irony and nostalgia. “It’s provocative to quote a style like Socialist Realism,” says Agnieszka Morawinska, director of the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. “It’s a contradiction, in a way: even if you are being ironic, you are still celebrating it.”

The ambiguities inherent in this reevaluation of official style are reflected in the uneasy approval of such art in China and Cuba, both still ruled by Communist regimes. Shi, for example, has remained in China since graduating from LuXun Academy of Fine Arts in 1990; there his works are embraced in part because they have been so widely celebrated in the Western art market. In Cuba, where avant-garde artists who challenge Fidel Castro have frequently been forced to leave the country, the use of the still-official style provides a veneer of acceptability.

Paralleling this resurgent interest in Socialist Realism, a number of artists from non-Communist countries have been exploring new modes of social realism, a distinct genre that emerged early in the last century to address social inequalities. While social realism often made heroes of the poor and downtrodden, it also sought to depict their plight realistically. By contrast, Socialist Realism is less about describing reality than about being socialist.

Socialist realism was born in the Soviet Union and traveled to Eastern Europe with the establishment of Communism after World War II. The Art Academy in Leipzig, in the former East Germany, became an important center for indoctrinating that country’s young artists in the style. In recent years the city has lent its name to the New Leipzig School, a much-touted group of painters, some of whom were educated there before German reunification. The most acclaimed of these students is Neo Rauch, who was born in Leipzig in 1960 and was trained in Socialist Realism in the early ’80s. Today he melds that style with a highly anxious surrealism, creating oddly static and ambiguous works suggestive of fouled utopias and futility. The cryptic Paranoia (2007), for instance, shows three figures in a distorted studio space; looking tense and facing in the same direction, they appear out of sync with one another and their surroundings.

Many of the group’s younger painters share Rauch’s predilection for disjointedness and nuanced, one-foot-stuck-in-the-past melancholia. Matthias Weischer paints forlorn interiors in moody colors, and David Schnell places fragments of built structures in lush landscapes. All three artists show with Eigen + Art in Berlin and Leipzig, which handles many New Leipzig School artists. Rauch also shows with David Zwirner in New York and last year had a one-man exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Socialist Realism was accorded official status throughout the Eastern Bloc, but many artists rejected it out of hand. “The Polish avant-garde defined itself in opposition to the official art of the state,” writes Zurich Kunsthalle director Beatrix Ruf in an essay on Wilhelm Sasnal, who, she points out, is among “the first generation of artists that is able to free itself from this dispensation.” The 35-year-old Sasnal is at the forefront of a group of Polish artists reengaging with figuration. He has gone so far as to make works in the exact style of Andrzej Wroblewski, one of Poland’s best Socialist Realist painters of the ’50s. Such stylistic experimentation has only furthered Sasnal’s reputation. The artist has a retrospective at the Zacheta in Warsaw through March 2, and last May he broke his own auction record when a painting of aircraft in formation sold for $396,000 at Christie’s in New York.

These days Sasnal favors a less emotional, more restrained brushstroke. Factory (2000), for example, is based on a famous propaganda photograph of women on an assembly line, but the artist omits the Marxist utopianism. Sasnal has eliminated the subjects’ pride and confidence, leaving only a dispiriting vision of unrewarding, machine-led labor.

Similarly stripping away the Socialist Realist pose of heroism, Maria Kiesner paints landscapes featuring Poland’s Socialist-Modernist buildings. Although most are now falling into disrepair, these structures offer outstanding examples of late Modernist architecture. Kiesner’s pristine presentation of these factories, community centers, train stations, and stadiums bereft of people conveys a wan nostalgia.

As far back as the ’70s, Russian artists were engaging with the French Beaux-Arts style of realism favored by Lenin and Stalin to create work critical of the state. The former duo Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, key proponents of the dissident Sots art movement, merged Soviet Socialist Realism with aspects of Pop art and Dada to undermine and parody official Communist art. Despite experiencing numerous arrests and legal difficulties, they achieved international fame for their efforts, moved to the West, and continued to work together until 2003, when they began to pursue separate careers.

More recently, the Moscow-based duo Alexander Vinogradov and Vladimir Dubossarsky (see “Sex, Money, Glamour, Tractors”) have woven these historical legacies together with contemporary pop culture. They have developed a propaganda-like vocabulary drawing on the iconographies and narratives of Socialist Realism and Sots art as well as pulp-fiction cover art and advertising imagery.

A more subtle but equally ambiguous depiction of the entanglements of Soviet Russia and the contemporary West can be seen in Yevgeniy Fiks’s portraits of present-day members of the American Communist Party at their headquarters in New York. The paintings were shown at Moscow’s Marat Guelman Gallery last summer. The 35-year-old artist, who has lived in New York since 1994, is fascinated by the fact that while Communism has been declared dead in his native country, it perseveres among these Americans, who hold business cards and work for the Communist Party USA.

Slightly older than Fiks is Kerim Ragimov. The artist still lives in Saint Petersburg, where he graduated from the Rerikh School of Fine Arts in 1989, just before the fall of Communism. Ragimov, who paints in a photorealist style, says his work is about Russia’s destiny. Alluding to a post-glasnost saying—“The end of the world will come when the whole of Russia is flooded with foreign cars”—the artist’s “Roadoff 2” series (2002–3) carefully reworks classic 19th-century Russian landscape paintings in oversize formats, with the addition of marooned foreign cars and SUVs and rampaging bears. Western liberalism appears to have crashed into Russia’s history.

Ragimov says he wants “to create the image of victory of Russian traditionalism over the consumerist, conquistador-like expansion of Western values in their brutal forms.” Although far from universal, his nationalism explains some artists’ renewed interest in the Socialist Realist mode.

Despite their continuing one-party rule, both China and Cuba are loosening restraints on artists at the same time as they renegotiate relationships with the capitalist West. Censorship is still officially practiced in China, but the country’s leaders have begun to appreciate the commercial and political benefits of promoting avant-garde artists whose works have become popular draws at museums in Europe and the United States.

Many of today’s best-known Chinese artists were trained in a Socialist Realism based largely on the Soviet model. “We used to have to copy Russian academy paintings,” says Zhang Huan, who has a solo exhibition at the Asia Society in New York through the 20th of this month and recently joined PaceWildenstein. “The first time I saw an artwork from the West was in the mid-’80s.” By the ’90s, artists like Fang Lijun, Zeng Fanzhi, and Yue Minjun were turning that training to their own ends, expressing anger and disillusionment after the Tiananmen Square massacre and subsequent crackdowns on artists. Their work came to be characterized as Cynical Realism.

Chang Tsong-Zung, a Hong Kong–based curator who has been a key figure in promoting Chinese art around the world since the ’90s, explains, “Almost all artists in China using the human figure today are dealing in some way with Socialist Realism. It was so dominant for so long that it’s virtually impossible to make this kind of work without its influence.”

An early example of Fang’s now-signature style is Series 2: No 2 (1992), which shows four bald men: one in the foreground, apparently screaming, and three behind him with identically dull expressions, clothes, and poses. The work describes the anxiety of the individual trapped among the masses, yet it is ambiguous enough to have avoided being suppressed. A similar work from the same series set a record for the artist when it sold last fall at Sotheby’s in New York for $4.1 million.

Liu Xiaodong and Yang Shaobin work more in the mode of traditional social realism, documenting the genuine predicaments of the poor and the rapid transitions taking place in China. Since 2003 Liu has been painting scenes relating to the country’s controversial Three Gorges Dam, which will eventually displace some 1.9 million people and 650 factories to create a reservoir 412 miles long. Liu paints the affected individuals and puts real faces to the statistics. Displaced Population (2003), for example, features a panoramic view of the reservoir slowly filling behind six resigned-looking peasant laborers. Works from the ongoing series have been shown at venues including Beijing’s Chinablue Gallery and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

Yang, who has turned away from the irony of Cynical Realism, recently made a series of paintings of miners facing extremely dangerous and difficult conditions. Had these been classic Socialist Realist paintings, Yang’s mines and Liu’s dam would be monumental symbols of the power of the state, and the workers would appear rosy-cheeked and contented. Instead, both artists offer visions of hardship.

Like China, Cuba has also allowed some artists to thrive despite their thinly veiled criticisms of the government, which they often advance in the form of metaphors or allegory. Although many artists in the first wave of the avant-garde were forced to leave the country in the ’80s, many who achieved renown in the ’90s were able to stay in Cuba, encouraged by the favorable terms set by the government for foreign sales. Describing the relationship between artist and government in his essay in Holly Block’s book, Art Cuba: The New Generation, curator Gerardo Mosquera writes, “Some officials even discuss with artists what is allowed in their works—almost as if it were a technical problem. This is what I call the You Know Who syndrome. This phrase is used in Cuba to criticize the Maximum Leader without mentioning his name. . . . In the end both know what the work refers to, but both are protected in an unusual alliance between censor and censored.”

However cynical they appear, such arrangements have allowed the emergence of many important new artists, including José Toirac, Alberto Casado, and Abel Barroso. Toirac plays with the portrait tradition. His Obsession (1996) uses the logo from Calvin Klein perfume ads but features a laughing Castro looking down at a newspaper headline that proclaims, “All police on alert! Plot to kill Castro!” In other works the artist paints graffiti celebrating Che Guevara over an image of the young revolutionary looking rather self-consciously heroic.

Barroso and Casado offer humorous commentaries on Cuban society, but typically focus more on social issues such as poverty and wealth distribution. Both artists use wood-block printing. Casado learned his method while working as a fabricator of the kind of kitsch religious objects found in many Cuban homes and tourist shops. Retroactively depicting Castro’s censure of the art world in the ’80s—showing artists being arrested, for example—Casado chronicles a troubled period while bringing new relevance to an old medium.

If Socialist Realism is inextricably linked with Soviet artistic doctrines, social realism is still most associated with Mexico, where in the ’20s the revolutionary government employed artists such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros to depict the working classes and the poor. Luis Pérez-Oramas, curator of Latin American art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, points out, however, that Rivera created something new by infusing social realism with transcultural modernism and rich symbolism. Many of today’s Mexican artists, Pérez-Oramas says, have reengaged with narrative, but in a far more conceptual way. They are much more likely to focus on the “social” than on the “realism.”

For example, Minerva Cuevas, 32, typically makes social-activist work. She has painted murals—the format favored by Mexico’s early social realists—but her depictions are far more acerbic. In one, she adds the words “pure murder” to the label for a can of Del Monte tomatoes and creates a wall-size critique of the food company’s exploitation of Central America; in Mural (2006), shown at the São Paulo Biennial, she combines a crashed plane with a General Motors logo and a Terena Indian saying, “The white man is afraid of listening.”

Peruvian artist Fernando Bryce and Colombian-born Carlos Motta also target the interference of multinational corporations and foreign governments in Latin American politics. Taking inspiration from archival images, Bryce borrows subjects forgotten by official history to make pointed comments about the present, as in the drawing Guatemala 54 (2002), which refers to the CIA and United Fruit Company coup against Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. Motta, who lives in New York, where he had a show at Winkelman Gallery last fall, addresses the sometimes troubled U.S.–Latin American relationship. For his “SOA: Black and White Paintings” series (2006), he applied black vinyl cutouts directly to the gallery wall, creating silhouettes depicting images of U.S. military incursions into Latin America and other historical events.

In the United States, social realism has its roots in the Great Depression, with many artists employed by the Works Progress Administration who used their work to show support for New Deal programs during the ’30s and ’40s. According to last year’s Venice Biennale curator, Robert Storr, these days the most interesting American social realism “addresses the middle and upper classes—people not normally associated with this term. Artists such as John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, and Eric Fischl make social studies of how we live now.”

Modern middle-class life has been the focus of the work of British-born artist Malcolm Morley, 76, who typically paints from photographs. Recently, however, he has put his brush to touchier subjects. In Wall Jumpers (2002), he depicts Palestinians leaping over a barrier into Israel, while in Military Object #1 (2006), a Sony television shows one of the infamous Abu Ghraib photos. Similarly, South African artist Marlene Dumas, 54, uses images from the media to poignant effect: The Blindfolded (2002) shows Palestinian hostages. The way the media portrays these scenes is also at issue in these works—and is a characteristic feature of contemporary social realism.

Indeed, according to Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery in London, “A lot of the work that looks realistic now is much more about how information is mediated.” Many works seem to warn against trusting what you see. Whereas the original practitioners of Socialist Realism and social realism modified their subject matter while using their art to prescribe a worldview, many contemporary artists take this distortion to another level. As they reengage with these once-rejected styles and combine them with other genres, they cast doubt on the very possibility of describing reality in art. “In a way,” says Rugoff, “the whole idea of realism is called into question.”


Pernilla Holmes is a London-based writer and curator.

Sex, Money, Glamour, Tractors

Andy Warhol in Moscow, 2002, from a series the artists refer to informally as “People Who Never Came to Moscow.”
COURTESY THE ARTISTS

Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov are charting new terrain by using the language of Socialist Realism to comment on contemporary Russia
by Nora FitzGerald

Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov sit and smoke in their penthouse studio, not far from Moscow’s Sheremetev Airport. They are laughing as they tell a story about Night Fitness (2004), their large painting of a woman doing a push-up in the shallow end of a swimming pool beneath a night sky filled with stars. They are laughing because the work sold at the Phillips de Pury & Company auction in London last June for $250,000, a record price for them. A few years ago the painting sold for about $15,000.

Dubossarsky talks vividly and almost incessantly, while Vinogradov looks on with a smile. Why are they so amused? “Because we are not the clever ones,” Dubossarsky says.

Clever or not, the duo have entered the top echelon of the market for Russian contemporary art. At Phillips de Pury’s London auction of the John L. Stewart collection last October, their paintings outperformed all sales estimates, according to chairman Simon de Pury. Their 2005 painting Snow sold for more than $225,000, almost doubling its high estimate. More significant, their canvases were auctioned alongside works by some of Russia’s most prominent living artists.

“We are doing consistently well with Dubossarsky and Vinogradov,” says de Pury. “What was interesting was not only the level of prices they attained but to see international collectors as well as Russian collectors bidding.”

The artists are also garnering recognition at home after showing at the Venice Biennale and Deitch Projects in New York in 2003, Vilma Gold in London in 2004, and Saatchi Gallery in London in 2005, among other venues. Their large picture Russian Troika was included in the Guggenheim Museum’s “Russia!” show in 2005. They will be returning to Vilma Gold in March and to Deitch Projects later this year.

Last year they had a surprise hit in Moscow: their picture installation The Four Seasons of Russian Painting, shown as the grand finale of the Tretyakov Gallery’s exhibition of 20th-century Russian art, was a crowd-pleaser. There is only one way out of the Tretyakov’s 20th-century exhibition, and that is to follow it through 42 rooms. This is not an easy undertaking, but The Four Seasons rewards visitors who reach the end. It’s a massive multipanel work that wraps around the room. The first in a series of special projects commissioned by the Tretyakov, it is part of the permanent collection and will be on view for at least the next year.

For the piece, Dubossarsky and Vinogradov took photographs of paintings in the Tretyakov that are recognizable to every Russian—heroic depictions of Lenin and Stalin, sentimental genre scenes, portraits of Pushkin and Gorky, and images of characters from folktales, among many others—then scanned the photos onto canvas and painted them. The result is an exuberant collage of clichés—a Socialist Realist–style pastiche that many gallerygoers find entertaining.

Critics and painters, on the whole, are less enthusiastic about the work. Critic Alexander Panov, for example, said that the entire exhibition appeared to have been put together by designers rather than curators and called Dubossarsky and Vinogradov’s contribution a triumph of decoration over art.

The exhibition’s curator, Irina Lebedeva, acknowledges that The Four Seasons has aroused a certain amount of disdain. After all, it was produced by two artists who have been accused of spawning Socialist Realist porn, or “Capitalist Realism”—art intended to capture the fancy of the new rich. But, she adds, visitors like it. “Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov are classically trained artists creating a new approach to painting,” she says, standing in front of the work, which hangs from wires like a banner. “They have found a new and unusual approach, the way Erik Bulatov did.” (Bulatov was one of the first painters to parody Socialist Realist icons.) “Not everyone understands that this has been done with great love for Russian art,” Lebedeva insists.

Dubossarsky, 43, and Vinogradov, 44, have known each other since they were teenagers. Both were born in Moscow, studied art at the Surikov Academy, and served in the Russian army. Dubossarsky likes to say that he flunked out of art school: “I left the institute, or they kicked me out. Anyway, I stopped going there, but Sasha [Vinogradov] finished. Afterward we had an idea to paint our first picture together.”

Their initial collaboration, painted in 1994, depicts Picasso standing on the Moscow River Embankment. The first in a series they informally call “People Who Never Came to Moscow,” it was followed by images of the Beatles and Jesus. Andy Warhol also showed up, with a tiger, standing in front of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. His portrait can be seen in the new Moscow museum (and Web site) Art4.ru, a private showcase for the contemporary-art collection of window-blind tycoon Igor Markin.

The duo had occasional gallery shows in Moscow in their early days, “but we were seen by only a hundred artists and critics,” Dubossarsky recalls. In 1994, the artists say, they were the first to create bright, beautiful paintings in reaction to Moscow’s oppressive atmosphere of confrontational installations and street performances. “You have to understand, when we started working together, there was an opinion here that painting had died,” says Dubossarsky, a tall, lanky man known to friends as Volodya. “In some way, our first project was alternative at that point in time. We didn’t understand what we were doing, but we understood it was against the trend. Aggressive performance art was very popular here. Art was either depressive or aggressive. We decided to create paradise.” Vinogradov smiles at the floor in agreement.

The pair charted new terrain later in the decade when they started to parody the visual language of Socialist Realism to deal with the new Russian ideology of money, sex, and glamour. Russians who have been bombarded from childhood with paintings of idealized life on Soviet collective farms—Sergei Gerasimov’s 1937 Collective Farm Harvest Festival, for example—can appreciate the humor of Dubossarsky and Vinogradov’s Harvest Celebration (1995), in which the action in the hay field is not a feast but an orgy. The painting comes from a series called “Commissioned Paintings.” In the Soviet era, state entities of all kinds commissioned artists to paint pictures. “We pretended we had orders from different institutions, and this one was from the collective farm,” Dubossarsky says.

Western superheroes were also grist for the parody mill. In an untitled painting, a youthful Arnold Schwarzenegger sitting in a field of flowers flexes a bicep for a group of admiring children. And in Happy Day (1995)—the artists call it “a picture for the Reichstag”—shown at Galerie Kai Hilgemann in Berlin, then German chancellor Helmut Kohl watches a wedding ceremony, intended as an allegory for German reunification, under a sky crowded with angels and flowers. Der Spiegel commissioned a portrait of Kohl for its cover after the show.

Russian Troika (1995), the finale to the Guggenheim’s “Russia!” exhibition, was inspired by a familiar image from 19th-century painting and literature. Gogol ended his novel Dead Souls with a vision of Russia as a speeding troika that would one day force the rest of the world to give way. In Dubossarsky and Vinogradov’s version, the coachman fires a Kalashnikov machine gun at a flying demon while wolves run alongside, howling. Dubossarsky calls the painting a tongue-in-cheek “welcome to Russia.”

More recently, the artists have produced utopian visions in such works as Total Painting (2001), Night Fitness (2004), and the dreamlike Snow (2005). But this utopia is in the style of advertisements and TV commercials. The golden sunbeams, overripe fruit, and lush flora and fauna are frankly artificial. Relaxed bodies seem to be floating out of orbit, whether they are on land, in water, or in space.

The artists are “particularly fascinated by images of earthly paradise in advertising,” critic Ekaterina Dyogot wrote in the catalogue for the Stewart collection auction. “This world of immediately fulfilled desires, with its effective erasure of differences of sexes, ages, and seasons, inflicts universal boredom—this is usually the final ‘truth’ about Dubossarsky and Vinogradov’s ‘models of happiness.’ The more exuberant these images of fulfilled life are, the more skeptical and even sarcastic [the] artists appear to be.”

Snow is a strange picture in which a young man is submerged to the neck in what seems to be warm water, while snow falls around his head. He is walking in the water, his face hidden from us. He has no purpose other than to keep walking, Dyogot said, “to keep being alive, young and happy. This is a particularly poignant portrait of contemporary society.”

In 2001 the artists started Total Painting, a work in progress that now includes more than 150 panels dispersed around the world. Painted in a deliberately slapdash style, parodying the joy offered by advertising images and Socialist Realism, the panels jumble movie stars, fashion models, and pop singers with the artists and their friends, all kinds of commercial products, naked sunbathers on a beach, and Tolstoy and Dostoyev-sky as nude models. When 38 of the panels were shown at Deitch Projects in 2003 under the title “Our Best World,” they prompted New York Times critic Ken Johnson to ask (in imitation of David Letterman), “Is it something or is it nothing?”

“If this painting is anything,” Johnson decided, “it’s a goofy, distinctively Russian satire of consumerist euphoria. There are reasons to think it’s not much of anything—it’s not admirable as painting nor is its iconography surprising. Still, its effect is exhilarating. It may not be something, but it’s not nothing.”

Just as difficult as defining Dubossarsky and Vinogradov’s work is persuading them to explain how they do it. Both eschew questions about who holds the brush, and when. Finally, the generally silent Vinogradov ends the mystery: “First we discuss our project. Then we make a sketch on the computer, and then we think of characters. We simply paint. We have assistants who help us. In the end, we put our signature on it.”


Nora FitzGerald is a Moscow correspondent for ARTnews.

The Mysterious Journey of an Erotic Masterpiece

Courbet’s Femme nue couchée, 1862, was lost for 50 years.
PRIVATE COLLECTION







Femme nue couchée, one of several Courbets owned by the Hungarian Jewish collector Baron Ferenc Hatvany, disappeared after World War II from a Budapest bank vault. The painting resurfaced 50 years later in Slovakia, setting off a cat-and-mouse game that resulted in its restitution to Hatvany’s heirs—who loaned it to the Courbet retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris

by Konstantin Akinsha

The Gustave Courbet show opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on the 27th of this month is the largest retrospective devoted to the artist in 30 years. Organized by the Met with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux in France, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, it will provide an opportunity for a new generation to discover the work of a major figure in the history of 19th-century art.

When the show opened last fall at the Grand Palais in Paris, it included a masterpiece, Femme nue couchée (Reclining Nude), that wasn’t in the 1977 retrospective, because it was lost for 50 years. (At press time, the Met could not confirm that the picture would travel to New York.) Well known to art historians, it is completely unfamiliar to the general public. Femme nue couchée disappeared without a trace at the end of World War II and was recovered by its legal owners only two years ago. The story of its recovery, featuring a Russian commander, a stalled train, lawyers, major auction houses, and police on both sides of the Atlantic, reads like a thriller.

Before World War II, the painting belonged to a famous Hungarian art collector, Baron Ferenc Hatvany, a descendant of one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Hungary. Sugar refineries had made the Hatvanys very rich in the 19th century, and Emperor Franz Josef had granted them a title of nobility. They played an important role in Hungarian cultural life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Born in 1881, Ferenc Hatvany was a talented painter and a graduate of the Académie Julien in Paris. He enjoyed the art life of both Paris and Budapest and amassed an art collection of more than 700 works. Hatvany collected Old Masters and Hungarian art, but his true passion was 19th-century French painting. Canvases by Ingres, Delacroix, Chassériau, Corot, Manet, Pissarro, and Renoir adorned his sumptuous villa in the Buda hills.

Courbet had a special place in Hatvany’s collection. L’Origine du monde, one of the most notorious paintings in the history of art, belonged to him. This close-up of a woman’s genitalia had been commissioned in 1866 by the Ottoman diplomat Khalil Bey, who lost it two years later when his ruinous passion for gambling compelled him to auction his collection at the Hotel Drouot in Paris. L’Origine du monde, however, was not among the works on sale. It had disappeared, and it remained missing for 44 years, until November 26, 1912, when a certain Madame Viale sold another painting by Courbet to the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris.

That painting is described in the sales contract as a “landscape—seashore (castle-fortress),” and that is what it is. But the landscape was also the cover of a case concealing L’Origine du monde. In June 1913 Hatvany bought both works from the gallery. He sold the landscape-cover to his brother-in-law, Baron Mór Lipót Herzog, another famous Hungarian collector. Today the landscape, known as The Castle of Neufchâtel, is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.

Hatvany bought a second erotic Courbet that year from the Berlin dealer Paul Cassirer. Femme nue couchée had once belonged to the duc de Wagram and later to the legendary Hungarian collector Marcell Nemes. Hatvany also owned Courbet’s large Wrestlers (now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest), Women Bathing in a Wood, Portrait of Jules Bordet, The Wave, and a still life. This was undoubtedly one of the most important private collections of Courbet’s paintings in the world.

The Hatvany treasures survived the Hungarian revolution of 1918. Confiscated by the revolutionary government, the masterpieces were returned to their owner after the fall of the short-lived red republic. During the interwar period, the art-filled Hatvany villa was a gathering place for artists, connoisseurs, and such important visitors to Budapest as Thomas Mann.

Everything changed in the second half of the ’30s, when Hungary fell under the influence of Nazi Germany. Racial laws were introduced, and ultrarightist politicians spewed anti-Semitic rhetoric, but the Jews of Hungary were slow to react. In 1940 Hatvany exhibited some of his treasures, including Femme nue couchée, at the Countess Éva Almássy-Teleki Institute of Art in Budapest. It was the last time the painting was seen in public until last year, when the current retrospective opened in Paris.

After Hungary entered the war, circumstances worsened for the country’s Jews. In 1942, after the first bombing of Budapest by the Allies in September, Hatvany finally understood the danger. He deposited 350 masterpieces from his collection in the vaults of three Budapest banks, in the names of two gentile employees. Femme nue couchée found temporary refuge in the safe of the Hungarian General Credit Bank. The large Wrestlers remained in the villa, because no bank safe was large enough to hold it.

Two years later, Nazi SS officers occupied the Hatvany villa. During the winter of 1944–45, hundreds of thousands of Budapest Jews were deported to Auschwitz or murdered by Hungarian Nazis.

Hatvany survived the Holocaust in hiding, but his collection suffered. The paintings in the bank vaults disappeared, and his villa was looted, first by the SS and then by Hungarian Nazis, before being destroyed by bombs.

The fate of the paintings remained a mystery until the end of the cold war. Not until the period of perestroika, in the late ’80s, was it revealed that some of the Hatvany treasures were hidden in a museum in Nizhny Novgorod. The Red Army had allegedly found the paintings in the village of Reinberg, near Berlin, and taken them to Russia.

After the Soviet army conquered Budapest, the bank vaults were looted. It seems that the artworks weren’t confiscated by official trophy brigades, whose mission was to collect property and ship it to the Soviet Union. The artworks fell into the hands of private looters. According to the Hungarian art historian István Genthon, a Soviet military vehicle with Femme nue couchée cut out of its frame and attached to the tarpaulin was sighted on Castle Hill. Another source reported that Soviet troops drove through the streets of the ruined city in an open car, waving L’Origine du monde. It was a strange ceremony of humiliating the defeated enemy.

Hatvany’s attempts and the efforts of Hungarian officials to persuade the Soviet military administration to recover the looted masterpieces were unsuccessful.

In 1946 Hatvany was approached by a Soviet officer who was apparently a native Hungarian (he spoke the language without an accent). The officer told the baron that he was willing to return his paintings to him for an appropriate reward. Hatvany ransomed ten canvases, which had been “liberated” from the Budapest bank vaults by Soviet troops, including Courbet’s L’Origine du monde and Portrait of Jules Bordet, Ingres’s The Small Bather, and works by Delacroix, Daumier, and Manet.

The following year Hatvany left Hungary, which was on the brink of a Communist takeover. He was granted official permission to export one painting from his collection—a work that lacked artistic value in the opinion of cultural officials. It was, of course, L’Origine du monde. The other paintings Hatvany had ransomed were taken out of the country after he left.

Hatvany spent his last years in his beloved Paris and in Switzerland. To support his family, he parted with his remaining treasures. Courbet’s Portrait of Jules Bordet and Ingres’s The Small Bather went to Knoedler Galleries in New York. The portrait is now in the National Museum of Sweden in Stockholm. Ingres’s masterpiece was bought by Laughlin Phillips and became one of the highlights of his museum in Washington, D.C. In 1955 L’Origine du monde was sold at auction for 1.5 million francs. Its new owner was the famous psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. It is now in the Musée d’Orsay.

Hatvany’s walls were bare. He often visited the Louvre, sketching one pastel after another of galleries filled with paintings. He died in 1958.

Among the artworks the Red Army allegedly found in the village of Reinberg were paintings from a number of Hungarian collections. The Hatvany works included Tintoretto’s Portrait of a Venetian Nobleman, Corot’s Portrait of Madame Gambay, and Édouard Manet’s pastel-and-gouache Méry Laurent with a Pug Dog. The paintings were transported to the USSR not as official trophies but as the private loot of officers of the 49th Army.

The 49th Army was never in Hungary. There is no reason to doubt the information that Soviet troops found the paintings in Reinberg, but it is not clear how artworks from a number of Hungarian collections made their way to this obscure village. It is especially mysterious because some of Hatvany’s paintings found by Soviet troops in Reinberg were deposited in the same bank vaults as those paintings he succeeded in buying back from the Soviet officer in 1946.

More than ten years after the revelation that artworks from Hungarian Jewish collections were hidden in Russia, they remain in Russia, which is in no hurry to return them. Hatvany’s Manet and Corot hang on the walls of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. In 1995 director Irina Antonova borrowed them from Nizhny Novgorod for an exhibition of trophy art, called “Twice Saved,” and never returned them. Last year Antonova stated that restitution “will never take place.”

Antonova has said many times that Russia has the right to keep the art treasures taken from the Axis countries as compensation for the cultural property Russia lost during the war. But many of those treasures, like the Hatvany paintings, belonged to people who were themselves victims of the Nazis.

Femme nue couchée was not among the paintings hidden in Russia. It had vanished without a trace.

In 2002 a man from Slovakia, who claimed to be an antiques dealer, approached Sotheby’s and showed officials a painting he wanted to sell. It was Courbet’s white-stockinged nude. He was told that Sotheby’s couldn’t sell it. The painting had been looted after World War II and was listed at the Art Loss Register by the Commission for Art Recovery (CAR) in New York.

The painting had actually surfaced in Hungary two years earlier. In 2000 an intermediary acting for the antiques dealer offered to sell the work to the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. László Lengyel, head of the museum’s records department, who conducted negotiations with the intermediary, decided not to disclose to him the provenance of the painting for fear that it might be damaged or destroyed. Instead he tried to buy time. Lengyel went to Slovakia and was shown the painting. It was in the possession of men he described as “bodybuilders with shaved heads.” It was obvious that the people he had encountered were not traditional art dealers.

Lengyel discussed the offer with Miklós Mojzer, then general director of the museum. To buy the painting, the museum needed the support of the ministry of culture and the Hungarian government, which was impossible to get. After some time, the intermediary visited the museum again and warned Lengyel that there were people who wanted to grab the painting from the antiques dealer. He offered to sell it immediately for $800,000. Museum officials rejected the offer and finally called the art squad of the Hungarian police, which took no action.

Surprisingly museum officials didn’t notify the police or the legal owners of the painting when the negotiations started, although they knew where to find the Hatvany heirs. Those heirs were already suing the museum, demanding the return of works from Hatvany’s collection that had been appropriated by the Hungarian Communist government after 1948. Instead of trying to prevent a crime, museum officials were attending meetings with the Slovak Mafia and seriously discussing the possibility of purchasing looted property for their collection.

How did Femme nue couchée make its way to the mountains of Slovakia? In 1945 a Soviet military train from Hungary was snowed in near a Slovak village. A group of Red Army soldiers climbed down, located a local doctor, and at gunpoint escorted him to the train. Their commander was suffering from a severe case of gonorrhea, which he had contracted in liberated Budapest.

Fortunately the treatment was effective and the patient’s pain assuaged. The grateful warrior rewarded the doctor with a painting. It was Femme nue couchée, which adorned the doctor’s modest dwelling until he died, in 1989. Then the work came into the possession of the antiques dealer.

In 2003 a representative of the dealer went to London and again visited Sotheby’s. This time he asked the officials for an introduction to the heirs of Ferenc Hatvany. The Slovaks had realized that they couldn’t sell the painting. Sotheby’s told him that the Commission for Art Recovery (CAR) represented the Hatvany heirs.

The commission was founded by Ronald Lauder to identify and recover looted property. The discovery of the lost Courbet provoked excitement in its New York office. According to attorney Charles Goldstein, council to the commission, no one imagined that the recovery of the painting would turn into a prolonged game of hide-and-seek with the Slovak dealer.

CAR offered the holder of the painting a deal. The canvas would be sold by him in London, and the proceeds split equally. The Slovak dealer turned it down, demanding an up-front payment of €500,000 ($600,000). CAR countered with an offer of €300,000 ($360,000). The dealer refused again, and contact was interrupted. In the meantime, dubious characters were offering the painting to art dealers in London. They all declined to buy it and informed the Art Loss Register.

When he couldn’t sell the painting in Western Europe, the antiques dealer decided to try his luck closer to home. In 2004 a young official of the Bratislava branch of a respected Austrian bank, working in the department of private banking, contacted CAR, demanding $1.5 million for the painting, which he said was sitting in his vault as collateral for a loan. The banker threatened to sell it if CAR refused to pay. Shocked, Goldstein demanded an explanation from the Austrian bank. The official in Bratislava was immediately fired, but the Courbet was lost again.

These maneuvers inevitably attracted the attention of law-enforcement agencies. Interpol, through the FBI, and the Slovak police asked for information about the antiques dealer and the painting. After it was provided, a lawyer working for CAR in Bratislava received threats and resigned from the case.

The Slovak police didn’t take the matter too seriously until the U.S. embassy intervened. The antiques dealer was interviewed, but then, unexpectedly, the case was dropped. The Slovaks told Goldstein that they couldn’t continue their investigation, because the Hungarian police had failed to provide any evidence that the painting was stolen.

CAR protested that Hungary had no official registry of cultural property confiscated from Holocaust victims, and the Slovak prosecutor ordered the investigation reopened, but the police failed to comply. Goldstein decided not to rely on the Slovak police. In 2005 CAR offered a reward of €250,000 ($300,000) for the return of the Courbet. The reward was intended to capture the attention of the Slovak press, and it succeeded; the story of the looted masterpiece was widely publicized. The painting was rendered unsalable in Slovakia as well as London.

The attention of the police and the press, and the near impossibility of selling the painting, convinced the antiques dealer to resume negotiations with CAR.

There was another, completely unexpected problem. At some moment Ferenc Hatvany decided to demonstrate his skills as a painter and play a practical joke at the same time. He was friendly with Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, a well-known collector, who fancied himself an art expert and connoisseur. Hatvany painted a copy of Femme nue couchée and sent it to an exhibition in Belgrade, where it was hailed as the creation of the French master.

So a question arose about the painting in Slovakia. Was this newly resurfaced picture Courbet’s work or Hatvany’s? Fortunately an old glass negative of the original was discovered in a Hungarian collection, enabling a print the size of the painting to be produced. The painting’s craquelure—the fine pattern of cracks that forms in an old paint layer—could be checked against the print.

Inspection proved that the painting the Russian commander had given the Slovak doctor was the one created by Courbet. The reward was paid, the painting was returned, and the police investigation of the Slovak antiques dealer was dropped at CAR’s request. But it was still necessary to obtain an export permit. Unexpectedly it took many months and more U.S. embassy intervention in Bratislava. Permission was finally granted, and the painting left for Vienna under armed escort.

Femme nue couchée was returned to its rightful owners, the heirs of Baron Hatvany, and the story ended happily.

The recovery of Courbet’s masterpiece proves that positive changes have occurred since 2001, when the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets took place. The thwarted efforts of the Slovak dealer show that it is now almost impossible to sell looted art in Europe. But the case also brought to light an unfortunate fact.

“Surprisingly it was easier to secure recovery of art looted during the Holocaust from the Slovakian dealer than from Hungarian and Russian government officials,” Goldstein noted sadly. “Paintings that belonged to Ferenc Hatvany are still hanging on museum walls in Budapest, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod.”

If a piece is “truly, truly to die for” and is still in private hands, it is no doubt on someone else’s wish list. Like that $100 million Cézanne
by Kelly Devine Thomas


The Museum of Modern Art has one. So does Los Angeles collector Eli Broad. They can be predictable or idiosyncratic, practical or fantastical. But most wish lists are very, very private. “That’s really personal stuff,” a top New York collector chuckled when asked to name his most wanted artworks still in private hands.


Steve Wynn is approached on a regular basis about works he owns, such as his Tahitian Gauguin, Bathers, 1902. He reportedly paid close to $35 million for it.
COURTESY THE WYNN COLLECTION, LAS VEGAS

Yearning—the more discreet the better—makes the art world go ’round. Dealers and auction specialists at the top of their game know where the most wanted artworks are at any given moment and what price might wrest a coveted object from its owner. Museum curators keep track of the same information to court loans and gifts. Collectors, meanwhile, no matter how desired the works in their own collections, always have an eye on something else.

“We all have our wish lists but we don’t go around talking about them. It gets in the way of our getting the work,” says Miami art collector Donald Rubell. “We hope that when our friends die, their children won’t like their art. Those are our silent wishes.”

Jackson Pollock’s Lucifer, a prime 1947 drip painting owned by the Anderson Collection in San Francisco, is so coveted it could fetch $50 million or more, sources say, were it ever to come on the market. (Don’t hold your breath: entertainment mogul David Geffen, who owns Pollock’s coveted Number 5, 1948, offered the Andersons $50 million for Lucifer in the mid-1990s, according to sources, and was rejected.)

Shipping magnate George Embiricos owns Cézanne’s The Cardplayers (1892–93), the only work in the series in private hands, which experts say could be worth as much as $100 million. Canadian publisher Kenneth Thomson and his son, David, recently paid $76 million for Rubens’s recently discovered The Massacre of the Innocents (ca. 1609–11) at Sotheby’s, against competition from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Yet Rembrandt’s 1654 portrait Jan Six (owned by the Six family foundation in Amsterdam), says New York dealer Otto Naumann, is possibly the most wanted Old Master painting in private hands. “It is a killer,” says Naumann. “It is worth in excess of $150 million easily.”

The whereabouts of the most expensive painting ever sold at auction—van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890), which sold for $82.5 million at Christie’s in 1990 and $90 million seven years later in a private sale through Sotheby’s—remain a mystery but to a select few. (They’re not talking.)

But hotel-casino mogul Steve Wynn, for one, would rather acquire van Gogh’s Portrait of Patience Escalier (1888) or the artist’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe (1889), both of which are owned by the Niarchos family, heirs of the late Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos. “Those are the two pictures I’d want before Dr. Gachet,” Wynn told ARTnews. “Dr. Gachet is known primarily because of the amount of money that was spent on it.”

San Francisco collector John A. Pritzker owns the most expensive photograph known to have been sold: Man Ray’s Glass Tears (1932–33), for which he paid a reported $1.3 million four years ago. Today Peter MacGill, president of New York’s Pace/MacGill Gallery, who sold the vintage print to Pritzker, says the photograph’s value has increased substantially. “There are some Man Rays that are worth a couple million dollars,” says MacGill. When asked which images would command such a sum, he replied, “Now you’re putting me in a tough spot. I’m trying to get one.”

Fans of Damien Hirst would love to get their hands on the artist’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991)—a 14-foot tiger shark floating in formaldehyde that is owned by Charles Saatchi and could be worth several million today, sources say. Saatchi reportedly paid around $75,000 for it.

And the popularity of Thomas Cole’s iconic The Falls of Kaaterskill (1826) continues to astound its owner, paper manufacturing tycoon Jack Warner of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who says, “You know, it’s been to the Vatican.” (It was shown in “A Mirror of Creation: 150 Years of American Nature Painting” at the Vatican Museums in 1980.)

Specific works land on wish lists because of what collectors do, or more often don’t, already own. Some collectors are haunted by not having acted quickly enough in the past and fear they will be priced out of the market for an artist or body of work. Others are moved by a new or renewed appreciation of a particular period in an artist’s career. Or by a desire to reunite works in a series that was not kept together. Sometimes the pursuit simply comes down to ego.

“It is a matter of being persistent and finding these works and going for them,” says Simon de Pury, chairman of Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg, who adds, “People who go after these things do not want to point them out and do not want them pointed out.”

When major works in private collections become available, astounding sums are paid. “Iconic paintings by key artists are what this market seems to want,” says New York dealer Michael Findlay. “There are certain artworks that are hot eternally—a Tahitian Gauguin, Monet’s “Water Lilies”—iconic things that collectors talk about generically rather than specifically.”

Wynn says he is approached on a regular basis about works he owns, such as his Tahitian Gauguin, Bathers (1902), for which he reportedly paid close to $35 million, and van Gogh’s Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat (1890), for which he paid $47.5 million.

“We all know what the other guy’s got,” says Wynn of major collectors willing to spend tens of millions of dollars on a work of art. “Approaches at this level are very serious. It is usually direct and done very casually. We talk back and forth: ‘If you are ever going to sell that picture, don’t call anyone. Call me.’”

It took Wynn several years to acquire Picasso’s Le Rêve (1932), a portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, the artist’s mistress, after losing it to collector Wolfgang Flöttl, who paid $48.4 million for it at Christie’s in 1997. Three years ago, Wynn paid close to $60 million to acquire it from Flöttl, according to sources, and bring it to Las Vegas, where he plans to install it in his $2 billion Wynn Las Vegas hotel slated to open in 2005. (Wynn declined to comment on the price he paid for the work or the identity of the seller.)

Seattle collectors Mary and Jon Shirley own the most expensive sculpture known to have been sold. The couple paid more than $30 million several years ago to acquire Constantin Brancusi’s bronze Bird in Space (1926) from collector Hester Diamond in a private sale arranged through New York dealer Vivian Horan. Last year Brancusi’s Danaïde (ca. 1913) doubled expectations to sell for $18.2 million—a record for any sculpture sold at auction—to an anonymous buyer at Christie’s.

“If you have a stellar A-plus museum work, the feeling in the market is that these works keep making more than anyone would have thought,” says David Norman, cochairman of Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern department worldwide. “Whenever someone goes out on a limb and pays an unprecedented price for an outstanding work, the market always seems to catch up and exceed it.”

For example, Ronald Lauder, chairman of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, paid close to $50 million in 1997 for Cézanne’s Still Life, Flowered Curtain, and Fruit (1904–6), in a private deal arranged through Paris dealer Daniel Malingue, who was representing an unidentified seller. Two years later, Sotheby’s sold Cézanne’s Still Life with Curtain, Pitcher, and Bowl of Fruit (1893–94) for a record $60.5 million. Wynn, who bid on the painting at auction, privately acquired the work several months later for an undisclosed price.


In recent years, demand has increased dramatically for postwar American artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning, and Roy Lichtenstein. Leonard Lauder, chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art, paid $26 million three years ago for Johns’s 0-9 (1961) through New York dealer Arne Glimcher, acting on behalf of an anonymous seller. He then donated the painting, along with a trove of other works, to the museum.


“Art of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s has passed the test of time,” says Los Angeles collector Eli Broad. “Collectors are more comfortable buying those artists now than when they first emerged because people didn’t know then how the work would be viewed historically.”

Broad is looking to add a 1961 Twombly (he already owns six works by the artist) and an early Johns, from the 1950s (he has ten from other periods), to his collection. Broad, who says he would also like to acquire a Ron Mueck and a great Hirst, recently approached Saatchi, through a dealer, about the possibility of acquiring some works from Saatchi’s collection. “We are not close to doing it,” Broad told ARTnews in September. “Some works he is willing to part with. Some he is not. It always comes down to price.”

Geffen has the largest private holdings of works by Pollock, Johns, and de Kooning, including de Kooning’s Woman III (1952–53) and Interchange (1955). He owns one of the best Johns works in private hands: Target with Plaster Cast (1955), a collage with plaster casts of body parts in compartments, worth tens of millions today, says San Francisco dealer Richard Polsky. Alfred H. Barr Jr., founding director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, famously passed on acquiring the work for $1,500 because it includes a compartment containing a green cast of a penis.

Geffen also owns Johns’s False Start (1959), which he bought from publisher S.I. Newhouse Jr., along with a group of other works, in the early 1990s. Newhouse had paid a breathtaking $17 million for the work in 1988. “Ninety-eight percent of Geffen’s collection should be in a museum,” says David Ross, former director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney. “Museums salivate over the collection.”

Another most wanted Johns work, Diver (1962), is owned by Miami collector Norman Braman, who paid $4.18 million for it in 1988. “Today it’s worth vastly more,” says Amy Cappellazzo, codirector of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s.

New York collector Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Modern, who owns Twombly’s 1961 Untitled (Rome), regrets not acquiring one of Twombly’s “blackboard” paintings from the late 1960s when she had a chance ten years ago. “Now they are much too much,” says Gund of the works that can command nearly eight-figure sums. Arshile Gorky is another favorite. “I’ve always coveted Gorky,” says Gund, who owns his painting Housatonic Falls (1943–44).

Other important Gorkys in private hands include To Project, to Conjure (1944), owned by New York collector Stephen Swid, and Scent of Apricots on the Fields (1944), which Newhouse acquired in recent years, according to sources, from collector Thomas Lee, who paid $3.9 million for it at Sotheby’s in 1995. Geffen, who owns Gorky’s Charred Beloved I (1946), has tried to lure the artist’s The Plow and the Song (1947) and Mark Rothko’s White Band, No. 27 (1954) away from collector Anne Marion, according to sources, but she won’t sell them. “They are two of the most beautiful paintings I have,” says Marion.

Early 1990s works by Brice Marden, such as his “Cold Mountain” series (1988–91), are also sought after and hard to come by. Several people, according to sources, have recently tried to pry Marden’s The Muses (1991–93), an $8 to $10 million picture, away from the Daros Foundation in Zurich. A great black-and-white Gerhard Richter from the 1960s could bring a similar sum, says Gerard Goodrow, director of Art Cologne and former head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s in London.

Los Angeles collector Beth Swofford longs to own John Currin’s painting Pat (1996), which is owned by a friend, and Maurizio Cattelan’s Bidibidobidiboo (1996), an installation of a stuffed squirrel bent over a yellow kitchen table after having apparently committed suicide, a work she first saw at the 1999 Tate exhibition “Abracadabra.” “Both pieces were the first I had seen by these artists,” notes Swofford. “They made me fall in love with their work in general.”

Swofford has since acquired Currin’s painting The Producer (2002) as well as Cattelan’s Charlie (2003), a freewheeling mechanical boy on a tricycle that debuted at this year’s Venice Biennale, and a small version of the artist’s 1999 La Nona Ora (Ninth Hour), which depicts the Pope struck by a meteor.

Miami real-estate developer Craig Robins is looking to fill gaps in his collection with works from the 1980s and ’90s forward by John Baldessari, a 1960s wood piece by Richard Tuttle, and a basketball hoop by David Hammons. Robins says he also covets Marlene Dumas’s painting Group Show II (1993): “A friend of mine just bought it.”

Photography collector Michael Mattis recently acquired Edward Weston’s Pear-Shaped Nude (1925), which was owned by the model’s descendants. “It was a picture we had been negotiating to acquire since we first learned about its existence three years ago,” says Mattis. Another most wanted photograph: The Reading Establishment (1846), by William Henry Fox Talbot, an “astonishing document from the dawn of photography,” says Mattis.

Works by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami are also in great demand, according to Cappellazzo. Chicago collector Stefan Edlis paid a record $567,500 for Murakami’s 1996 Miss ko2 (squared), a life-size fiberglass cartoon figure, at Christie’s last May. Christie’s owner François Pinault reportedly paid around $1.5 million in June to acquire Tongarikun (2003), a 30-foot-tall fiberglass sculpture, and four accompanying fiberglass mushroom figures, that were part of an installation by Murakami at Rockefeller Center this fall.

Collector Kent Logan has the largest holding of Murakami’s works in the United States, including the artist’s monumental painting Super Nova (1999). He is the only collector to own both Hiropon (1997) and My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), larger-than-life, oversexed brother and sister superhero sculptures that were made in an edition of three.

“I’ve always been interested in societies undergoing dramatic change,” says Logan. “Murakami’s work is about Japanese identity, which is consistent with the postwar period in Japan.” As for what remains on Logan’s wish list—a Jeff Koons painting from the artist’s “Celebration” series.

Rubell says that the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago wants his Charles Ray Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley... (1992), life-size figures of the artist sexually cavorting with himself. “But they want me to give it to them,” says Rubell. Says a museum spokesperson: “We would love to have it.”

Rubell would like to own Jeff Koons’s Rabbit (1986), he says, if it weren’t for the $5 million it would likely cost him. What he would “truly, truly die for,” says Rubell, would be to acquire all of the paintings in Luc Tuymans’s “Diagnostic View” series (1992), which are now in separate collections. “What we most want in life, we often can’t have. My mother taught me that when I was young,” says Rubell. “But we should all dream. It’s very healthy.”

Such aspirations can lead to tantalizing offers. “A collector who has no intention of selling can be quite flattered by the kind of prices he can get for a work,” says de Pury. “The magnitude of an offer can be quite tempting.” Or as Old Master dealer Otto Naumann says, “You cannot make a painting for sale unless you want to grossly overpay for it.”

A collector with his heart set on obtaining an early de Kooning recently offered Seattle collector Jane Lang Davis $8 million for her Town Square (1948), a small black-and-white painting. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Davis, who paid $90,000 for the work in 1976. “It shows you how hard it is to get these works at this point.” Asked if she accepted the offer, Davis laughs, “No. Where would I get another one?”

For many years, Davis says, New York dealer Larry Gagosian tried to persuade her to sell her large 1963 Rothko, for which she paid $75,000 in 1972. Gagosian’s last offer was $5 million, Davis says, and that was a few years ago, before the artist’s 1958 No. 9 (White and Black on Wine) brought a record $16.4 million last spring at Christie’s. (Gagosian declined to comment for this article.)

According to New York dealer and Marcel Duchamp scholar Francis Naumann, the most-wanted Duchamp work in private hands is the artist’s original L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), a postcard-size reproduction of the Mona Lisa defaced by Duchamp with a mustache and goatee. Some years ago, Naumann says, he approached the owner, who was living in Paris at the time and whom Naumann declined to identify, to ask if he might consider selling it. “He asked if I knew the highest price ever paid for a work of art,” Naumann recalls. “I said I thought it was around $65 million, having forgotten about the van Gogh. He said, ‘Okay. Bring me a collector willing to pay $66 million dollars, and we’ll talk.’”

Gund was recently offered $30 million for her 1956 de Kooning, The Time of the Fire, one in a series of abstract paintings of urban subjects the artist created from 1955 to 1956. Another work in the series, Police Gazette (1955), has been acquired by Geffen from Wynn, who paid $11.9 million for it in 1998. Gund declined to sell her de Kooning, explaining, “It’s a museum picture. I think the Modern will probably get it in honor of Kirk Varnedoe,” the Modern’s late chief curator of painting and sculpture.

A trustee of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association recently tried to persuade Warner to sell his 1785 Robert Edge Pine life portrait of George Washington to the association. When Warner declined, he says, he suspected she was “looking forward to my imminent demise.” As for Cole’s The Falls of Kaaterskill, for which he paid $175,000 in 1970, Warner says, people “slyly bring up Bill Gates’s name to me all the time.”

Gates, a driving force in the American art market, has paid record prices for paintings in recent years, including $20 million for Childe Hassam’s The Room of Flowers (1894); $10 million for William Merritt Chase’s The Nursery (ca. 1890); $27.5 million for George Bellows’s Polo Crowd (1910); and $36 million for Winslow Homer’s Lost on the Grand Banks (1885).

Warner says he’s been told the Cole is worth $15 million; he thinks it’s worth $30 million. Regardless, Warner says, it’s not for sale.

Making wishes come true doesn’t come cheap or easy. The Modern recently sold Francis Bacon’s painting Dog (1952) in order to acquire a triptych by the artist. (Dog went to London dealer Gerard Faggionato for more than $8 million, according to sources.)

The Modern also sold a 1909 Picasso Cubist landscape, Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro, left to the museum by Nelson Rockefeller, in order to acquire a superior example of the same subject. (It went to Berlin collector Heinz Berggruen, sources say, who paid around $12 million for it. Berggruen did not return phone calls seeking comment.)

Likewise the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston recently sold two Degas pastels and a Renoir portrait at Sotheby’s for $16 million in order to acquire Degas’s masterpiece Duchessa di Montejasi with Her Daughters, Elena and Camilla (1876), one of the last great family portraits by the artist.

Other factors, aside from finances, can also come into play.

It took Michigan collector Gilbert Silverman more than a decade to track down a work that he first saw hanging from the ceiling at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York a dozen or so years ago.

“I thought, ‘Boy, that would be a neat thing to get,’” recalls Silverman. When a dealer recently called Silverman to tell him she had found the unique work he’d been looking for, Silverman replied, “Well, that’s half the battle.”

Silverman still had to convince his wife to allow him to acquire the work: a bronze double dildo by Lynda Benglis. (He won’t say what he paid for it.) “Initially she said ‘Forget it.’ She didn’t want it hanging in the office,” says Silverman. “But we have separate bathrooms. And she said I could hang it in mine.”

Why Small Is BIG

A detail of Air Stream, 2005, by Rob de Mar, who uses a variety of materials, including model-making supplies, to create his miniature landscapes.
COURTESY CLEMENTINE GALLERY, NEW YORK.









From Tom Friedman’s eraser shavings to Rob de Mar’s minuscule waterfall to Adia Millett’s tabletop dollhouses, intimately scaled sculptures are making a large impact
by Linda Yablonsky
There isn’t much in contemporary life to encourage anyone to think small. This is the era of the Hummer, the McMansion, and the 10,000-square-foot apartment. Even the bagel has been affected, swelling from a hard, palm-sized ring to a puffed-out, chewy blob. What can artists do but reflect and respond in kind?

In recent years, photography has distinguished itself partly by gigantism, and drawings have consumed entire walls. By assuming the scale of museums, commercial galleries effectively equate the intimate with the insignificant, motivating artists to grow their work to suit and compelling institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty, and Tate Modern to build ever larger, whatever the cost.

Sculpture has not merely kept pace with this growth but has led the way—at least since the 1960s, which brought us such macro-minded Minimalists as Donald Judd and Tony Smith; massive Earthworks like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Utah (1970) and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) in the Nevada desert; and Christo’s 1976 California project, Running Fence. Mary Ceruti, director of the SculptureCenter in New York’s Long Island City, puts it most succinctly: “In sculpture,” she says, “the whole idea of small is anti-modern.” All the same, a variety of sculptors are devoting some portion of their creative lives to working in the land of the wee.

Take the process-oriented Tom Friedman. His materials are not just small—they’re trifling. He has coaxed beautiful sculpture out of such things as eraser shavings, pillow stuffing, and plastic cups; once he carved his portrait into an aspirin tablet. Recently he made a Styrofoam figure that is 12 feet tall, but he paired it with another that topped out at only four inches.

Friedman describes his largest work as “a wall piece covered with tiny white Styrofoam balls that you don’t really see. You only see the dots, but you look for the edges and it broadens your sense of space.” That quality is not peculiar to Friedman’s art. It is the nature of much small-scale sculpture to disorient the viewer, inducing a Gulliver-like self-consciousness and a sense of having lost one’s way. In other words, by focusing the viewer’s attention on the space around it, an artwork’s diminution of scale can actually give the piece greater resonance.

George Stoll, a Los Angeles artist, works small partly because it gives him more control over the process. In the past, he has made uncanny replicas of floral-printed toilet paper in hand-embossed silk, richly colored Tupperware vessels in beeswax, and trompe l’oeil painted balsa-wood kitchen sponges. “I’m attracted to the sensuality of the handmade object,” he says. “I’m not interested so much in the craft as the presence.” Nevertheless, Stoll also wants the evidence of his hand to show. “When something is really refined in its manufacture,” he says, “it kind of loses its spirit.”

Stoll works solidly in the camp of Pop conceptualism, best exemplified by his “Holiday” series, on view in a show opening on the 27th of this month at Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, Colorado. It includes embroidered organza “porch flags,” streamers made of plaster, pearls, and nail polish, and encaustic versions of dime-store Halloween masks. Taken together they serve as both a commentary on, and amused appreciation of, the way Americans celebrate holidays. “If any of my works were bigger, they would look the same from far away,” Stoll admits. “But they wouldn’t be the same.”

Stoll’s sculpture may be small next to most artists’, but it’s actually life-size. Richard Pettibone, on the other hand, has spent decades making minuscule reproductions of works by Andy Warhol, Piet Mondrian, and Marcel Duchamp, among others. If made to scale, his sculptures would be no more than clones.

Several recent group exhibitions have helped to focus attention on work of human scale or smaller. A magnifying glass certainly would have come in handy for a 1999 show at the Laguna Art Museum titled “At the Threshold of the Visible: Minuscule and Small-Scale Art, 1964–1996.” A historical survey organized by Ralph Rugoff, it included an image of Mount Ararat carved on a grain of rice by Hagop Sandaldjian (creator of microminiatures for the Jurassic Museum of Technology in Los Angeles), chewing-gum sculptures by Hannah Wilke, and Michael Ross’s thimbleful of dust. Rugoff says, “It intrigued me that you could walk in a room and think there was nothing there, unless you got more involved. It’s art that exists only in relation to everything else around it.”

Curator Jessica Hough’s “Model World,” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2002, focused on miniature environments, such as Rob de Mar’s minuscule alpine waterfall and Charles Simonds’s interlacing towers constructed out of impossibly tiny “smears” of handmade bricks. Viewers definitely needed a guide at “None of the Above,” curated by the artist John Armleder at Manhattan’s Swiss Institute last year. The gallery appeared to be empty; hidden in plain sight were nearly 50 artworks, from a blip of rubberized horsehair to a few lone polyurethane peanuts.

Historically, sculpture has tended to be heroic: think of Michelangelo and Rodin, of Maillol and Moore, or even of Jeff Koons and his flowering Puppy. Richard Serra, Nancy Rubins, Claes Oldenburg, and Mark di Suvero are among this country’s best-known contemporary sculptors, and all of them are known for work of outsize proportions. Other artists, however, have built big careers on very small art, with distinct consequences for sculpture today.

In the early 1970s, when sculpture was ruled by modernist monuments and Minimalist hulks, Joel Shapiro caused a sensation when he placed three-inch-high bronze or cast-iron domestic objects—a chair, a dollhouse, a coffin, a bird—on the floor of Paula Cooper’s SoHo gallery. “Shapiro is the patron saint of small,” says Tom Finkelpearl, director of the Queens Museum of Art, home to a 1:1200 scale model of the entire city of New York. “He was the anti-Oldenburg, taking big things and making them little.”

Better known today for tall, blocky, figural bronzes, Shapiro was only doing what most sculptors do: exploring the effect of form on space. And, he says, “I didn’t think it had to be big to do that.” His child-size chairs and houses were recognizable archetypes that projected both vulnerability and authority. They were at once seductive and impregnable. While they could almost disappear within a space, they could dominate it as well.

Shapiro explains, “If I made a table large, it would just be a table. If I put it on a base, that would remove it from the actual world, so it wouldn’t have to function in the space around it. It would be another precious object. But by putting it on the floor or extending it from the wall in an architectural setting, it became a discourse on space or scale. If a sculpture isn’t doing anything to alter the space around it,” he concludes, “it isn’t interesting.”

In his extremely modest, nearly invisible art, Richard Tuttle tackles the same issue head-on. By cutting what he calls “crummy materials” such as wire, plywood, and cloth into small, sad, irregular shapes and insinuating them into walls or attaching them just above the floor or below the ceiling, he creates works of great deliberation but negligible craft, impossible to apprehend apart from their surrounding environments.

“I was interested in the image as a reference to another world,” says Shapiro. “Richard’s work never had any such reference. It was more about discovery.” Tuttle’s 3rd Rope Piece (1974), for example, is a three-inch bit of cord nailed to a wall three feet above the floor, in the manner of an insect specimen. The work involves not just the rope, the nail, and the shadow it casts, but also the volume of space around it, thus immersing a willing viewer in the very act of seeing. As Madeline Grynsztejn, curator of the retrospective “Richard Tuttle: The Presence of Simple Things,” currently at the Whitney Museum (through February 5), has said, “He really does flirt with nothingness.”

Finkelpearl, a former director of New York City’s Percent for Art program, points to a similar trend toward unobtrusiveness in public art. For that, he credits the debacle over Serra’s Tilted Arc, which was removed from Manhattan’s Federal Plaza in 1989 after a ten-year lawsuit. “There was a reaction against the monumentalism of the Serra,” which led to “a more integrated approach,” says Finkelpearl. He mentions the goofy, money-grubbing bronze dwarves by Tom Otterness installed in a park near the World Financial Center in New York. “They’re whimsical,” Finkelpearl admits, “but they’re also a fairly readable critique of capitalist enterprise.”

Simonds, master of the unfired clay miniature, may have made the most invisible public art in the most visible locations, placing the architectural “remains” of an invented civilization of “little people” on the windowsills of buildings all over the world. His three-part Dwelling has been on view at the Whitney Museum since 1981, permanently installed in the museum’s stairwell, and on the second-story windowsill and the chimney of a building across the street.

Some of Simonds’s tableaux are situated on pedestals or in holes that the artist has cut into walls. In 1983, one of his pieces grew large enough for the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. For the most part, however, his sculptures have stayed within the scale of his own body. Yet the size of his work is more a byproduct of his creative process than its starting point. “When I’m making these dwellings,” he says, “I don’t actually think in terms of scale. I’m more in its space than the one around it, so in a way, to me it seems full scale: it’s a fantasy place and I’m walking around in it.”

In fact, there are many reasons for a sculptor today to favor the domestic scale over the monumental. One is real estate: artists who cannot afford studios outside their apartments, or who simply prefer to work at home, only have room to do so much. Cynics may also point to the influence of a market that prizes the collectible over the colossal—few collectors can accommodate a Serra-size work—though bigger sculpture generally commands bigger prices. Technology can also exert an influence; the digital revolution and the invention of new materials have made not just small but infinitesimal sculpture possible.

Karin Sander, a contemporary German conceptualist, has produced eerily realistic, Thumbelina-size versions of actual people with the help of a laser scanner, a machine used for making industrial prototypes, and an airbrush. Chris Caccamise makes painted-cardboard models of used consumer products (a squeezed tube of toothpaste is one) as well as happy rainbows, clouds, and other items more usually associated with nursery decor. He also seeks out subject matter in the history of art. For an exhibition last month at Brooklyn’s Sixtyseven Gallery, Caccamise made a tiny replica of a Tony Smith L-shape work, adding bright color. “It’s an exact-scale copy,” he says, “but it looks more like a house.” Caccamise, who works for Matthew Marks Gallery, is not the least bit interested in graduating to large-scale sculpture. “I like the idea that I’m making something perfectly collectible that is small and precious,” he says. “It’s kind of an ideal commodity.”

Of course, many artists create or assemble small objects as components of large sculptural installations, another kind of endeavor. Evan Holloway, based in Los Angeles, works somewhere in between, skewering sickly pink or yellow synthetic-plaster heads the size of lollipops on steel rods or incorporating them into small mechanized sculptures. His work is a wry, anarchic, and often unsettling reflection of a society with a self-destructive gene.

Overall, Ceruti has observed a move away from the Minimalists’ rigid formalism to a more fragile or ephemeral conceptualism. “The younger generation is definitely looking more toward Richard Tuttle than Donald Judd,” she notes.

“Perfectionism makes my hair stand on end,” says Nancy Shaver, who has a predilection for the small, the cheap, and the accessible. Working out of her antiques shop in Hudson, New York, she refashions decrepit wooden boxes into wall reliefs that measure less than 6 by 12 inches and enlivens them with roughly geometric, abstract paintings. For Shaver, this small, unassuming form has proved limitless. “I like the idea that these pieces exist somewhere between sculpture, painting, and drawing,” she says. “They also command space disproportionate to their size, with room enough for all the things I’m interested in.”

For Kiki Smith, who is known for sculpture that evokes the conditions of the human body (particularly the female body), “small things are what last. Big things tend to be taken apart or recycled, as in war, when bronze and metal is melted down.” She points out that we relate to the world more readily through small objects we handle than large ones we can’t pick up. Smith, whose work is the subject of a traveling retrospective now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through January, does not limit herself to any particular material, scale, or even medium. “Most of nature exists in things we don’t see,” she says, “and I make decisions based on the real world. Essentially, I work at my kitchen table.”

John Newman, too, prefers to work at a table. Until the late 1980s, when he started traveling in Africa, India, and Asia and meeting local craftsmen, Newman made large metal sculpture and masklike wall reliefs. “I realized that intimacy was something we hadn’t seen in New York in a long time,” he says. “So I started working at my desk. I wanted to make things without trucks and cranes—that were lightweight and not toxic. That was the practical side of things.”

Newman defines a small-scale object as “an imaginative idea about space.” He mixes materials like glass and string or paper and stone, achieving a balance of volume, weight, and form that allows his lyrical abstractions to stand alone, but would be impossible to achieve at any larger scale.

For other artists, the table is both workbench and pedestal. Vincent Fecteau, based in San Francisco, exhibits his foamcore-and-papier-mâché collage works on the same kind of tables he keeps in his studio. “That way they can interact with each other,” he says. “I’m not that interested in installation, but you have to show them somehow, and people have a real resistance to pedestal sculpture.” He adds, “I’m almost envious of painters who can just hang their work. A discrete object somehow has to have a relationship to space to have any content.”

Using model trees, wire, and flocking, de Mar creates entire ecosystems on lily pad–like platforms. He suspends them well above the heads of most viewers, essentially affording them the panorama of a distant landscape. “It’s an imaginary journey,” he says, “a mental leap.” Growing up in Maine, de Mar, who is 6 feet tall, says, “I was always looking out across a valley, fascinated that I could store this huge environment in my brain. I can’t work at the scale of nature, so I make it human scale.”

The living space as repository of family history is what interests Adia Millett, a New York artist still in her 20s. Her tabletop dollhouses, just large enough to allow viewers to peer inside, are melancholy interiors in which the class and religious beliefs of the imaginary occupants are evident. Her rooms feature working lights, furniture, and much decorative detail, but they’re missing certain functional items, like doors. “I want people to remember they’re just miniatures,” Millett says, “so they can never really get inside, except in imagination.”

One danger of small-scale sculpture is its appeal to sentiment. Its often lonesome or neglected appearance can induce a powerful sense of longing for things lost or never realized. It is the sort of nostalgia that most artists take pains to avoid, but Jeanne Silverthorne welcomes it with open arms. “I’m interested in nostalgia as a subject,” she says, “partly because it’s a forbidden area. Anything that everyone else is dead set against seems to me a good place to investigate.”

In the past, Silverthorne has replicated full-scale items in her studio in sculptures of miniature proportion and enlarged the most transitory matter of all—sweat, tears, and ulcerous bacteria—into cast-rubber pieces. For a recent show at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, Silverthorne made phosphorescent, cast-rubber portraits three or four inches high of elderly people—real people from whom she took DNA samples and hair. “They have this up-to-the-minute scientific reference,” she says of these works. “But they are also like voodoo figures that seem magical.”

If this appears ghoulish, consider the work of Charles LeDray, who makes exquisite—and very tiny—versions of everyday objects (a chair, a ladder, a shaft of wheat) out of hand-carved human bone. (He doesn’t reveal its source.) It is one way to keep viewers from regarding his work as cute.

LeDray started out in the early 1990s, making tiny men’s suits stuffed with even smaller suits, hand-sewn and strung along a clothesline above the viewer’s head, or stitched together to form a rope that dangled from the ceiling. “I’ve been called a teddy-bear artist, a craft artist, a boy who sews, a man who does women’s work, a clothing artist,” he says. “But I think I’m an artist who makes art, at whatever scale it needs to be.” For LeDray, “Scale is a bouillon cube that can condense and hopefully enrich a concept.”

“Charles does not think he makes small art,” says Claudia Gould, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the organizer of LeDray’s 2002 midcareer retrospective. The show included Oasis (similar to his Untitled, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York), 1996–2003, a large glass case containing six glass shelves supporting no less than 2,000 tiny, glazed ceramic vessels that LeDray had made one by one. “I don’t work in small scale,” LeDray insists. “Everything is the scale it needs to be within my esthetic or conceptual judgment. It’s more about how things find their gravity.” As Gould says, “We think we’re all giants or that we’re all very tiny. Whatever the perception is, it’s not the truth. That’s what Charles calls into question.”

Ultimately, of course, one experiences art in the space of one’s own mind. It can expand to the breadth of the universe or narrow to focus on a single idea, object, or view. Where large pieces can be read at a distance, small ones, like Fabergé eggs, demand slow, close-up examination, and hold the promise of surprise. In this fast-paced world of what Rugoff calls “the drive-by art experience,” that can be a virtue.

Waves of Light

Flashlight: I’m not from here, I’m not from there, 2006, by Iván Navarro.
COURTESY HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, WASHINGTON, D.C.

From bulbs to neon and fluorescent tubing to LEDs and other electronic creations, artists are using light—as material and subject—to comment on everything from advertising to spirituality
by Hilarie M. Sheets

“One of the attractions of light is the immediate physical, optical quality—it’s going to be the thing that gets your attention,” says John Ravenal, a curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “Dan Flavin called it the ‘factuality of light.’ It’s bright, it’s commanding, and metaphorically it’s so rich. It’s just basic—there was darkness, and then there was light.”

Of course, the interplay of dark and light has been a theme running from Greek and Roman sculpture to Renaissance painting to experimental film. But as technology advanced from the glow of the electric lightbulb to the computer monitor, artists have been experimenting with actual light as material and subject. The 1960s saw a high point in activity, with artists such as Flavin, Bruce Nauman, and James Turrell creating sculptures and environments out of diffuse light or radiant fluorescent and neon tubing. Today, younger artists are looking beyond their forerunners and taking light in new directions.

Ravenal gathered together some of these emerging artists, including the team of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Spencer Finch, Ceal Floyer, Iván Navarro, Nathaniel Rackowe, and Douglas Ross, in his show “Artificial Light,” which opened last fall at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Anderson Gallery in Richmond and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. It was shown there at the same time as “Elusive Signs,” the first exhibition devoted to Nauman’s neon word and fluorescent light pieces of the 1960s through the ’80s. (The show, which originated at the Milwaukee Art Museum, is at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle through May 6.)

Bridging the generations is “Refract, Reflect, Project,” on view through April 1 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., for which associate curator Anne Ellegood chose 23 pieces of light art from the museum’s permanent collection. The assortment includes work by Flavin, Turrell, and Joseph Kosuth as well as recent acquisitions by Finch, Navarro, and Olafur Eliasson, one of the most prominent artists working with light. The Danish artist, who will have his first U.S. survey show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in September, has created immersive environments, including an installation at Tate Modern in London that sought to bring the spectacle of the sun to an interior space.

Finch’s first museum survey, “What Time Is It on the Sun?”, opens at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, on May 26. The artist often seeks to re-create the American sublime through abstraction and science. The rows of fluorescent lights in Sunset (South Texas, 6/21/03), 2003, give the same light reading on a colorimeter as the artist recorded that day.

The first big wave of light-art works in the 1920s and ’30s developed from kinetic sculptures by artists such as Thomas Wilfred and László Moholy-Nagy, whose Light Prop for an Electric Stage (1928–30) created a moving design of light and shadow on the walls (a replica was shown recently at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art). In 1919 Wilfred made the first of his organs that projected lights when played. Examples of his performances recorded in the 1960s are included in the Hirshhorn show “Summer of Love,” coming to the Whitney on May 24. “A lot of it was about the promise of new technology and the way that dovetails with modernism and the utopian thinking of the Bauhaus,” says Ravenal. Flavin, with his interest in fluorescent light as a product of mass production, extended this line of thought in hard-edged Minimal sculptures, adding an ironic twist with the long series of works titled “Monument for V. Tatlin.”

For other artists using light in the 1960s, technology was beside the point. Bonnie Clearwater, director of MOCA in North Miami and former director of the Mark Rothko Foundation, sees the influence of painters like Rothko on this type of work. “A good deal of the interest in light occurred after World War II, when the studies in phenomenology and Gestalt psychology were being popularized,” she says. “Rothko was aware of this. He was interested in creating a physical response of the body to light. Artists like Robert Irwin and Nauman and Turrell, who were in L.A. in the 1960s, picked up this aspect of Rothko’s work rather than the Abstract Expressionist gestures and started creating works in which the viewer becomes, in essence, the performer, and is being made to do things according to the space that these artists have created.”

In “Elusive Signs,” for instance, Nauman’s Helman Gallery Parallelogram (1971) saturates a room with green fluorescent light, spatially disorienting viewers and lending a pink cast to their visual field after they leave. Nauman’s neon pieces, while co-opting the seductive, eye-catching light of street advertising, deal with the same fundamental human emotions embedded in Rothko’s luminous color arrangements, but spell them out for the viewer in figures or words, such as his circle of script Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain (1983). Clearwater notes the influence of Nauman’s neon text works on such artists as Jack Pierson and Jason Rhoades. “Yes Bruce Nauman”—the show last year at Zwirner & Wirth in New York that looked at Nauman’s impact on artists today—included neon pieces by Peter Coffin, Glenn Ligon, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

British artist Julian Opie, who also uses the conventions of advertising, creates rectilinear sculptures lit from within or coated with light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Eleven of his outdoor works—including a 16-foot-tall static figure of Canadian rocker Bryan Adams and a four-sided box with lights that turn on and off to illuminate a dancing woman—are on view in the Arts Council of Indianapolis’s “Signs” through September. “It’s using light to throw the image out into the public arena in the way that all advertising tends to do,” says Opie. “Moths fly towards light, and people’s eyes do as well. I admit that it is a bit of a cheap trick, but I like the irony of promoting something where there’s nothing really to promote.”

The spread of digital technology has dramatically expanded the way artists use and think about light. Erwin Redl, who started out making computer art, became frustrated. “Literally, I was sick of hitting my nose against the screen because I wanted to be in that abstract space,” says Redl. After seeing Fred Sandback’s yarn installations in 1997 at Dia in New York, Redl began stringing wires from the floor to the ceiling with countless LED lights that translated the screen’s pixels into a three-dimensional space. He created the widely acclaimed Matrix II, a cosmic grid of seemingly infinite green points of light hovering in darkness, for the 2005 “Ecstasy” show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which also included light-based works by Eliasson, Pierre Huyghe, and Ann Veronica Janssens.

Strongly influenced by the visceral quality of Turrell’s light environments, Redl intends for his work to be overwhelming. An elliptical curtain of 50,000 slowly fading red LEDs encircled viewers recently at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. “It produced anxiety when you suddenly realized everything was slowly moving,” says Redl. “But once you went over that threshold, it was a very enjoyable environment.”

Another artist who credits Turrell’s influence is Kira Lynn Harris, but her apparatus is decidedly low-tech. By bouncing track lighting off silver Mylar laid down in marginal architectural areas, such as a decrepit stairwell at New York’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, she creates mercurial reflections that call attention to forgotten spaces. “Light is completely transformative,” says Harris, who also looks to Rothko and the painters of the Hudson River School. “I don’t try to hide what I’m doing, but the result is still kind of magical. A lot of my interest in light came from being from Los Angeles, where the light is just everywhere. You have these huge expanses of sky.”

Harris is one of several artists, including Sanford Biggers and Nadine Robinson, who will be in “Black Light/White Noise,” a show of sound and light art by African American artists curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver and opening at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston on May 19.

Large installations by such leading artists as Eliasson, who shows at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, and Opie, who is represented in the United States by the Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston, are generally commissioned works that are carefully placed in public collections, but smaller pieces have come up at auction. Opie’s LCD animation Sara Walking in Bra, Pants and Boots (2003) sold for $32,400 at Phillips de Pury and Company in 2005. The prices for smaller works by established artists can vary widely. Rackowe’s installations of animated geometric forms made from electroluminescent wire currently at Galerie Almine Rech in Paris, range from $13,000 to $40,000, while Navarro’s winter 2006 show at Roebling Hall in New York had editioned sculptures priced from $10,000 to $35,000.

While the influence of the highly perceptual work of the 1960s and ’70s on artists today is one of Ravenal’s interests, his “Artificial Light” also explored the avenues that have opened since then. “These artists are taking it beyond just the power and beauty of light and are trying to bring it back into referencing the world in different ways,” he says. Allora and Calzadilla, for instance, borrowed a piece from Jenny Holzer for their Growth (Survival), created for the show. In a darkened room, Holzer’s aphorisms, broadcast on six vertical LED strips, provided the light needed to sustain a monstrous plant cobbled together from different species. Allora and Calzadilla took as a starting point NASA’s use of artificial light to grow plants in space and used Holzer’s texts as life support.

In another gallery, Rackowe built a long hallway in which a glaring bulb slid back and forth. Viewers could walk down the harshly lit hall or move around the room, which was awash in film-noirish beams of light passing through slits in the hall. “Much of my work is inspired by cities and moving about built spaces,” says Rackowe. “I’m using light as a means of filling a volume and scanning or mapping the space that contains the work. This beam travels up and down the viewers and seems to be reading them. You’re not sure whether there’s a threat or whether it’s more about contemplation.”

The element of threat also hovers around the work Navarro created for “Artificial Light.” The artist bent tubing filled with purple neon in the shape of two of Marcel Breuer’s sleek, modernist Wassily chairs and installed them in an entirely black room. The work conflated the trippy appeal of a teenager’s bedroom and the menace of electric chairs. In another installation, Die Again (Monument for Tony Smith), 2006, which he showed last year at the Whitney at Altria, Navarro built a huge black cube with lights and mirrors embedded in a floor that seemed to descend infinitely. “It was like standing on a bottomless pit,” says Shamim Momin, who organized the show. “It’s so beautiful and evocative, but at the same time it’s terrifying because you’re kind of in your tomb. You have that great thrill of the unknown.”

The Whitney has an installation, on view through May, by Terence Koh, who has used candlelight and neon chandeliers in performances and installations. In the current work Koh uses a brilliant 4,000-watt bulb that makes the perimeter of the room vanish in a void of white light. A dark lead sphere on the floor, barely visible, suggests the aftermath of a cosmic event. The artist intends the light to generate what he calls “romantic pain.”

Momin says she recently noticed the number of younger artists who cite Turrell and Flavin even if their work doesn’t appear to riff directly on them. They use fluorescent tubes for the psychological states their light can evoke. “Minimalism is one of the most readdressed movements right now, so it’s logical that the light element is being unpacked or reinvested with different types of meaning,” says Momin. “I hesitate to use the word ‘spirituality,’ because that makes it sound too religious. But I think using light now is linked to the desire for transformation. It’s a kind of sorcerer’s craft.”