Small Museums

by Orhan Pamuk via “New York Times“

“In the age of mega-institutions and competitive building, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk pays homage to the more personal places, like his own Museum of Innocence, whose character and content evoke a deeper experience.

My favorite museums tend to be small, the kind that showcase the inventiveness and the life stories of private individuals. Though I admire national museums like the Louvre or the British Museum, when I’m traveling and whenever I set foot in a new city, the first places I rush to see are not these institutions that fill me with a sense of the power of the state and of the history of its people, but those that will allow me to experience the private world and the vision of a passionate individual. I have so much respect for the efforts of those creative people who devoted the final decades of their lives to the task of turning their homes and their studios into museums for the public to visit after their deaths. These small museums are usually hidden on side streets just outside the center of large Western cities. They have the power to make us rediscover a feeling that the big national museums, looking more and more like fun-filled shopping malls with each passing day, can no longer make us feel, and that we have begun to forget. Museums must not confine themselves to showing us pictures and objects from the past; they must also convey the ambiance of the lost time from which those objects have come to us. And this can only happen through personal stories.

The newly reopened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, for example, is a dazzling demonstration of

“Through Art, Coping With Depression and a Death”

by John Otis via “NY Times“

“Last May, Ms. Christian, 64, lost her partner of 37 years, Linda Brown.Even before Ms. Brown died, Ms. Christian had a tenuous grip on happiness.

“I’ve been depressed for most of my life,” she said. “Even as a kid, I never really felt attuned to what was going on around me.”

Dejection took further root in Ms. Christian this year when Ms. Brown, who had severe rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes, began to deteriorate. Her mind started shutting down as rapidly as her body, said Ms. Christian, who was alarmed to see one day that Ms. Brown had cut off her beloved dreadlocks. When asked for a reason, Ms. Brown replied, with a vacant stare, “because I wanted to.” . . . .”

 

 

 

“The Confidence, and the Art, Looked Real”

by Patricia Cohen via “New York Times”

“To many people, the art dealer Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz seemed like an enviable man.  He came to the United States from Spain with his Mexican inamorata, Glafira Rosales, some 30 years ago, barely a dollar in his pocket, and only a few words of English at his command. Soon, he was living life on a grand stage. He bought a fine house in a wealthy New York suburb, opened an art gallery with Ms. Rosales and maintained auction accounts at Christie’s and Sotheby’s.He boasted of a friendship with Andy Warhol, an audience with the pope and his daughter’s violin performance at the Clinton White House. He created a charity that helped the poor and the sick in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and won awards for his humanitarianism.

Behind the curtain, though, federal prosecutors say, Mr. Bergantiños was engaged in a very different sort of enterprise, a daring forgery swindle that fooled the art world and led collectors to spend more than $80 million on dozens of phony masterworks. The marketing of these forgeries, many of them sold through the offices of what was once New York’s oldest gallery, Knoedler & Company, has been among the most stunning art market scandals of the last decade. . . .”

I’ll just bet he’s out of the country; I can’t imagine having the cahoney’s to pull something like this off. And it begs the question of how well Knoedler & Co. were investigating the works they processed. Where are the provenance records, the testing process results, etc.? Were those forged as well, or were they not included in the sale? In this day and age, how were so many forged items passed of?

Forging an Art Market in China

by David Barboza, Graham Bowley and Amanda Cox via “The New York Times”

“When the hammer came down at an evening auction during China Guardian’s spring sale in May 2011, “Eagle Standing on a Pine Tree,” a 1946 ink painting by Qi Baishi, one of China’s 20th-century masters, had drawn a startling price: $65.4 million. No Chinese painting had ever fetched so much at auction, and, by the end of the year, the sale appeared to have global implications, helping China surpass the United States as the world’s biggest art and auction market.

But two years after the auction,  . . . “